Japan never had any plans to invade Australia--the idea was rejected early in 1942, even before the Battle of the Coral Sea [1]. Japan instead focused on extend

Japan never had any plans to invade Australia--the idea was rejected early in 1942, even before the Battle of the Coral Sea [1]. Japan instead focused on extending its strategic perimeter and potentially cutting off Australian-US supply routes in the Pacific via Fiji. > All in all, both the US and Japan had all the reasons to sign an armistice. The US doesn't have any good reasons. The US isn't in an unwinnable position; if it just waits a year, it can go on the strategic offensive no matter what. Politically, it would be devastating: the US joins WW2 in part to enact revenge for Pearl Harbor; why should it accept the loss of all influence it had in the Pacific to bow out of the war? Politically, too, it would have been disastrous for US-British relations, especially since the US hadn't had any meaningful contribution to the war with Europe yet. > The US would have been able to redirect its industrial might into its other megaprojects at the time, the Manhattan and the B-29 projects, and obviously into everything that was needed for the European campaign. This ignores the historical fact that the US was already able to simultaneously pursue fighting two large wars, topping up the supplies of everybody else fighting those wars, and pursuing long-shot wonder weapons. The victory at the Battle of Midway happened in spite of focus already being placed on Europe at the time; it's unlikely that you could have meaningfully committed more resources to Europe simply for the lack of capacity to have more resources be committed. [1] It's not implausible that Japan would have reconsidered this, but opposition to the invasion of Australia came largely from the army, not the navy, as the army didn't think it had the troops to take and hold Australia, which would have been a distraction from Japan's primary goal, conquering China. Which wasn't going great.