Could the Axis have won?

[Sarmatian]

But it was, very much so. A few lines from a novel by Vassily Grossman called Forever Flowing. He lived in a small village in the Ukraine during the forced farm collectivization of the late 20's and the great famine of 1933 when Stalin demanded even more grain shipments from the Ukraine leaving the local peasants to starve (nearly 20 million died):

"Then I came to understand the main thing for the Soviet power is the Plan. Fulfill the Plan...Fathers and mothers tried to save their children, to save a little bread, and they were told: You hate our socialist country, you want to ruin the Plan, you are parasites, kulaks, fiends, reptiles...But these are words, and that was life, suffering, hunger. When they took the grain, they told kolkhoz members they would be fed out of the reserve fund. They lied. They would not give grain to the hungry."

Novels don't prove general sentiment, just the sentiment of the author.

20 million is a hugely inflated figure, as Brenus, said. The real number is much, much smaller. It would mean that more than 2/3 of Ukranians died and at the time, Ukranians actually had a growth in population.

Do you feel that the American public would have stood for the long casualty lists of Tarawa, the Solomons, Peleliu, etc. without the cry of "Remember Pearl Harbor" ringing in their ears?

In WW1 Americans lost about 300,000 in one year and cca. a million in 4 years in WW2. War would not have been the same had the Japanese attacked DEI or the Phillipines. American fleet would have had ample opportunity to attack Japanese troops in transit, reinforce local garrisons and in general harass them at every turn. Having lost the element of surprise, Japanese fleet would have at the mercy of the American fleet. After an attack on a protectorate and a few ships sunk, filled with brave American sailors who were just trying to protect defenseless allies against relentless Japanese expansionism and unimaginable cruelty, American president could make a speech about never giving up until the world is once again safe for democracy, for the sake of American allies and brave, freckled-face boys who died protecting that ideal.

Also, WW2 was an opportunity for America to assert its position as the world's premier power and cement it. I'm not saying they were asking for it or even hoping for it, but once it was there, it was hard to pass up. I'm pretty certain that in the end any additional Japanese expansion would have brought America into the war and that war would have ended with Japanese either abandoning their empire in a peace treaty or total defeat of Japan. Maybe it would have lasted longer, maybe shorter, maybe American High Command would be more careful with casualties, but it would have had happened.

If Japan attacks the Philippines only, or as in some what if's bandied about, bypass it without attacking and go straight to the DEI, the USN is relatively powerless (except for the subs based in Manila) to do much of anything about it for a very long time. What does the US do in either of those cases? Execute Plan Orange? Not likely.....

Plan Orange was more of a guideline than a concrete plan to be executed the moment the war starts. Americans had the luxury of time, they didn't have to go straight for the jugular. Their ability to harass the merchant fleet and troop transport would have created unsolvable problems for Japanese. They were aware of that, and that's why they sought decisive battle to begin with.

“Stalin and his cronies were very much hated by the Ukrainians, and the Germans would have found a lot of support had they not treated the populace as bad or worse.” Agree. The German did find enough support to be able to raise SS Divisions, and Vlasov Army. But the fundamental stupidity of Nazism discouraged even the most anti-Semitic of them (not all of them).
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Vlassov was Russian, not Ukranian, iirc. and his "army" was mainly composed of Russians, and existed only on paper. In the end, the only population of Ukraine they managed to win over somewhat was Catholic population, proving that it had much less to do with Stalin and his rule than with old issues.