I’m not sure why FDR would want to enter the war at all unless he somehow thought it would forward his agenda. In fact he specifically promised that we’d stay out of war. Of course after the war started FDR was rewarded with even more control of Gov.
Wilson promised we'd stay out of WWI. While Pearl Harbor was the official beginning of hostilities that involved the US, FDR had been supplying the Allies through lend-lease, so the US was hardly neutral.
There's debate on whether FDR knew about Pearl, but there's no debate about whether or not he wanted to be in the war, and which side he wanted to be on. Remember, there was quite a bit of debate about whether to support the Germans or the English. Joseph Kennedy and Charles Lindbergh both supported the Germans until hostilities actually began.
The US had also been engaged in low level naval warfare against the Germans in the north Atlantic, as the Germans had been sinking any ships attempting to dock in Britain. Civilian ships were being used to transport war supplies.
I'm not saying the US was wrong, but FDR definitely engaged in activities designed to provoke a military attack from both Germany and Japan.
“I’m not sure why FDR would want to enter the war at all unless he somehow thought it would forward his agenda. In fact he specifically promised that we’d stay out of war. Of course after the war started FDR was rewarded with even more control of Gov.”
Isn’t this after Hitler invaded Russia ? When Russia was on the side of Germany, no one in the US wanted war
And, consider too the timing of aid going to ... while the US was still a neutral country.
FDR’s agenda was to enter the war in Europe and come to the aid of Britain and France. But Wilsonian crusades were discredited on the left and the right was isolationist. The draft bill in 1940 passed by one vote. The American people weren’t going to go to war without a push. Fort Sumter and the sinking of the Maine might have occurred to FDR as examples of such a push.
There is some evidence that FDR was trying to provoke Japan into a casus belli, with the oil embargo among other things. The idea that he knew of the Pearl Harbor invasion takes the theory to a different level.