Were the Axis Powers really obligated to attack USSR and USA?

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As you asked, They did not have a treaty that "made" them attack their targets at specific times (they did have treaties of mutual protection though).

But to answer why they did, Germany at that time figured that they had Britain bottled up and blockaded so it could do no harm to them, and they already controlled all of mainland Europe. They attacked the USSR because they knew if the US, Britain and the USSR all started fighting them, they would lose (which they rightly feared seeing the outcome of WWI); So they saw the Russians as the weakest link in the group. Britain was protected by being an island, the US was too far away, but the USSR was poorly equiped, corrupt, and was slow to mobilize. They only lost to the USSR because of the climate and that when the USSR actually mobilized they pushed the Germans back and ended the German blitzkrieg they had been running since 1939.

The Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor for almost the same reasons. They, like the Germans, were out of options. They had been trying to get a treaty with the US for two years, but it always fell through. They weren't surrounded like the Germans, but they didn't have their own oil supplies. So they decided to attack the US fleet in the Pacific and hoped to ruin it, so that they could take over US islands in the Pacific and gain oil and other resources it needed.

Japan prepared for war. On 20 November it presented an interim proposal as its final offer. It called for the end of American aid to China and the supply of oil and other resources to Japan. In exchange they promised not to launch any attacks in Southeast Asia and to withdraw their forces from their threatening positions in southern Indochina. The American counter-proposal of 26 November required that Japan evacuate all of China without conditions and conclude non-aggression pacts with all Pacific powers. That meant Japan was essentially forced to choose between abandoning its ambitions in China, or seizing the natural resources it needed in the Dutch East Indies by force; the Japanese military did not consider the former an option, and many officers considered the oil embargo an unspoken declaration of war.

To Sum it up: Germany thought the USSR would be a push over for them, just like it was in WWI. Japan thought the US would back down and not continue the scene they were causing even before Pearl Harbor.

EDIT: The reason Japan didn't help Germany attack the USSR was because Japan already fought them in the decades leading up to WWII, and had a peace agreement with them. But it sounds like there is a misconception: Germany and Japan weren't allies because they were friends with each other and decided they would mutually defend each other, they were really just allies because they had similar goals and good politics in their respective countries to have an ally in Europe and Asia. They really didn't have much internal agreement at all with each other. You seem to think they had the relationship of Italy and Germany in WWII where they were coordinating efforts, Japan was really an outsider in the Axis powers, just like the USSR in the allied powers

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