If Japan had just destroyed a US base, then it would have been proportionate to destroy a Japanese base in retaliation. In reality, Japan launched total war on all its neighbors, and Pearl Harbor was just the first part of this to touch the US directly. The scale of deaths was in the millions before the US entered the war, and there was no guarantee that it wouldn't get far worse. Calculating a proportionate response as if this were a little diplomatic incident just doesn't make sense in this context.
Yes this aligns with my point. This usual analysis has the US acting as a police force to prevent significant aggression, anywhere in the world. However, I believe the mainstream sentiment today is against the US taking on this role (consider the negative view on Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc).
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.
The point of the police in a society is that they have a near-monopoly on armed force, and therefore criminals can't hope to win by escalation. In a world where the US has by far the biggest military, it can to some extent arrogate to itself the role of a police force, which raises the issues you suggest.
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.
Was any US territory outside of Asia legitimately at risk? I don’t think so? I think most Americans today would agree that the US should not attempt to acquire territory in Asia, and so would not agree with military action to preserve such territory. But this position is for some reason not carried through to the Japan conflict. In what way is this observation inaccurate?
There were some small Alaskan islands that Japan actually seized. The non-military population of Alaska in 1941 was tiny, about 73k, and land links to the lower 48 were weak, so isolating and occupying the territory by sea might have worked. The same goes for at least the smaller Hawaiian islands. The Philippines were successfully occupied despite a much larger population.
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.
