nt by. The decision to reject the
League of Nations certainly gave the appearance that U.S. policy was isolationist, as
well. Yet, recent historians have emphasized
the continued role America played in world affairs.
What best describes the policy of the period, then, is cautious non-entanglement. Policymakers sought not isolation but a free
hand to operate, according to diplomatic historian Walter LaFeber. Two notable foreign policy achievements from the
era tend to bolster this view.
The dangerous 1930s
international economic collapse of the 1930s helped to create an ever more dangerous
world. Beginning in the 1920s, totalitarian
fascist parties rose to power throughout Europe promising both economic resurgence and
protection from the communists. Benito
Mussolini in Italy, Adolf Hitler in Germany and Francisco Franco in Spain each rose to
power by exploiting fears of the left. In the
case of Germany and Italy, a combination of calculation, ideology and megalomaniacal
leadership would drive those nations toward ever more explosive confrontations with nearby
states. Meanwhile, a similarly militaristic
coterie gained power in Japan and set that increasingly powerful nation down the path of
Franklin Roosevelts Struggle to Return to Internationalism, 1937-1941
The American people remained staunchly isolationist although the president tried to rouse
them with the famously cautionary
speech" of 1937. Meantime, facing equally ant-war public sentiment, the
governments of Britain and France charted a diplomatic path of appeasement in order to
keep peace with Hitler. The low point of this policy of appeasement arrived with the
Peace Conference with Hitler, 1938 . Desperately gambling for peace at any price,
the British and French countenanced the take-over of western Czechoslovakia under the
terms of the Munich treaty. The folly of appeasement became undeniably clear the
following year when Hitler's war machine roared into Germany's neighbor to the east,
Poland, starting World War II in Europe.
. Desperately gambling for peace at any price, the British and French countenanced the take-over of western Czechoslovakia under the terms of the Munich treaty. The folly of appeasement became undeniably clear the following year when Hitler's war machine roared into Germany's neighbor to the east, Poland, starting World War II in Europe.
At first Roosevelt proclaimed U.S. neutrality while doing what he could to assist the French and British. In 1939 the president persuaded the Congress to pass the "cash and carry" amendment to the earlier, tougher neutrality laws preventing the U.S. from getting any material to the Allies. Then, as the rest of the world looked on in shock, the Germans (having already disposed of Poland and Belgium) knocked France completely out of the war in June of 1940. Realizing that Britain stood alone against the Nazis in Europe, under Roosevelt's leadership U. S. "neutrality" became "measures short of war." Just after the fall of France, Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill signed an agreement to lease British naval bases in the Caribbean to the U.S. in exchange for fifty older American naval destroyers in the so-called "bases for destroyers deal." Early the following year (1941) FDR managed to get appropriations through the Congress for a "Lend-lease" program to funnel war supplies to the British. In June, 1941, the Germans made the unwise decision to attack the Soviet Union, thus bringing the Red Army into the war against Hitler. Thereafter, both the British and Russian war efforts benefited from America's "Lend-lease" assistance. A few weeks after Germany widened the war to include the Russians, Roosevelt and Churchill met and signed the Atlantic Charter, a most remarkable step for a "neutral" nation. The Charter outlined America's overall attachment to the ideal of self-determination and freedom but more pointedly declared that the "disarmament of [aggressor] nations is essential." The leaders signed the Charter in August, the same month that a poll showed that less than twenty percent of the Am