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When Japan invaded China in 1937, the world began to turn its attention to the struggle therein. Chiang Kai Shek's effort to unify China and strengthen its national identity in the wake of a disheartening 19th century was facing a formidable challenge in the far superior Japanese military force. The world bestowed its sympathies upon China, who suffered quick defeat in some areas, while fighting valiantly in other regions. As they retreated inward over the next few years, they were bolstered by international support, coming initially in the form of armament at the hands of the Soviet Union. By 1940, it was the United States who was approving aid to Chinese forces, first in the form of a $25 million package, and by 1941, $125 million in air equipment as well as the commitment of American special forces to the growing altercation. This all took place as Franklin Roosevelt maintained a position as a peace-monger before the American public.

But the aid that both the Soviet Union and the United States supplied to Chinese forces was not strictly out of a conscientious sympathy for the Chinese. Nor was it strictly a matter of anti-Japanese sentiment. Certainly, these elements were present. But perhaps more prevalent was the ideological civil war that afflicted China even as it stood in opposition to Japanese aggression. Chiang Kai Shek's government operated under the pretense of nationalism. China had spent much of its history under the thumb of war, invasion and occupation, splintering its national identity in countless tribal factions of varying cultural backgrounds. And while many proposed to support Chinese nationalism, they attended to it from different perspectives and with different political inclinations. This was problematic as it threatened, always, to undermine a central government that already faced the obstacle of the burgeoning Chinese communist party.

For all intents and purposes, the nationalist and communist parties were opposing forces that plagued the interior of China, but they assumed a mutual policy of unification in the interests of defeating the Japanese. Both the Soviet Union and the United States seized the opportunity, upon the condition of Chinese victory, to achieve their own ends, which, respectively, were the establishment of either a communist or nationalist authority. Likely, it was this American infringement upon Japan's conflict with China, a measure executed most assuredly in the interest of preventing the expansion of the communist influence, that inspired Japanese resentment of America. Likewise, Japanese intrusion, and its potential outcome being subversion of the nationalist power of China, incited American involvement in the Japanese/Chinese War. Fundamentally, Japan's attack on American soil in 1941 was pre-empted by a mutual ethos of ideological imperialism and the inevitable hostility that would rise of this impasse.