The conventional wisdom about the United States’ entry into the Pacific theater of World War II used to be what President Franklin Delano Roosevelt told a joint session of Congress on December 8, 1941: “The United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan. The United States was at peace with that nation, and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with its government and its Emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific.” The implication of the president's statement was that, as late as December 1941, the Roosevelt administration desperately wanted to avoid war in the Pacific and remained committed to reaching a negotiated settlement with Tokyo over cessation of Japan's four-year-old undeclared war against Nationalist China and a resumption of U.S.-Japan bilateral trade. Instead, the government of Prime Minister Tōjō Hideki and the chiefs of staff of the Japanese Imperial Army and Imperial Navy decided to wage war on the United States by launching a preventive attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet in Hawaii, while negotiations between the State Department and Japanese envoys in Washington were ongoing. More recently, the conventional wisdom about the United States’ entry into the Pacific theater of World War II has evolved to downplay (alleged) Japanese treachery and instead emphasized the tragic aspects of the U.S.-Japan crisis: neither the Roosevelt administration in Washington nor the Japanese cabinet and military leadership in Tokyo necessarily wanted to go to war with the other in 1941. However, systemic and/or unit-level forces pushed the United States and Japan to undertake strategies that increased the risk of a Pacific war through inadvertent escalation. In particular, the Roosevelt administration's July 25, 1941 freeze of Japanese assets, which amounted to an oil embargo, set the two countries on a collision course, contrary to the desires and expectations of President Roosevelt and his senior advisers. “From the fall of 1940 to the summer of 1941,” historian Robert Dallek writes, the president wanted to “keep things as quiet as possible in the Pacific but, pressures beyond his control pushed Roosevelt toward confrontation with Japan.”