After they bombed a military outpost in the middle of the Pacific, which only existed to project force towards them and their neighbors? Was the US response not insanely disproportionate to that?
For some reason the critical lens of “anti police action” has not been applied to the Japan conflict, in the same way it has been to, say, Vietnam. This inconsistency is what I’m interested in.
I speculate that if the pacific conflict was a standalone war that this lens would be more likely to have been applied by now.
WW2 is not this situation, and it's an anachronism to analyze it as such. Pearl Harbor was followed by a string of other US defeats. For a while, it looked like Japan would set up an empire from Alaska to Australia. You don't have the luxury of deciding to hold back in a situation where all your efforts might not be enough.
Regarding Asia, I think "to acquire territory" is not the real question. Most Americans today would say that we should assist staunch allies such as South Korea if they were invaded, without any desire to acquire their territory. That goes more for the Philippines in 1941, since the US had given them a 10-year security guarantee under the 1934 Philippine Independence Act.