Chapter 34

Early in his presidency, Franklin Roosevelt sought friendlier relations with Latin America through his "Good Neighbor Policy," formally renouncing the right of unilateral U.S. military intervention in the hemisphere that had defined decades of American diplomacy under the Roosevelt Corollary and "Big Stick" interventions.

Washington withdrew the last Marines from Haiti in 1934 and, that same year, agreed to abrogate the hated Platt Amendment, which had subordinated Cuban sovereignty to American oversight since 1901. The policy fostered genuine goodwill, though it could not prevent later friction, as when Mexico nationalized foreign-owned oil properties in 1938 and Roosevelt chose negotiation over intervention.

At home, Roosevelt also extended formal diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union in 1933, hoping to expand trade and offset the rising threat of Japanese expansion in Asia — a pragmatic move that nonetheless left many anti-Communist Americans uneasy.

Across the globe, aggressive dictatorships rose from the economic wreckage of the Depression. In Italy, Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime invaded Ethiopia in 1935, crushing one of Africa's few independent nations with poison gas and modern weapons against a poorly equipped defender. In Germany, Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party seized power in 1933, rapidly rearming in open defiance of the Treaty of Versailles and persecuting Jews and other minorities with escalating brutality.

In Asia, militarist Japan had already seized Manchuria in 1931 and launched a full-scale invasion of China in 1937, complete with atrocities such as the Rape of Nanjing. Germany, Italy, and Japan formalized their partnership through the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis, while Western democracies, still reeling from the Depression and haunted by memories of World War I, largely stood by.

Disillusioned by the failed idealism of World War I and swayed by the Senate's Nye Committee, which alleged that arms manufacturers and bankers had dragged America into that war for profit, Congress passed a series of Neutrality Acts between 1935 and 1937. These laws banned arms sales and loans to nations at war, regardless of aggressor or victim, in hopes of insulating the United States from a repeat of 1917.

The rigid, evenhanded neutrality proved ill-suited to a world of clear aggressors and victims, effectively penalizing countries like Ethiopia and China that were attacked by better-armed fascist powers. Roosevelt, more internationalist than the isolationist public, chafed at the restrictions but signed the acts rather than risk a damaging political fight.

Hoping to avoid another catastrophic war, British and French leaders pursued a policy of appeasement, culminating in the 1938 Munich Conference, where they allowed Hitler to annex the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia in exchange for empty promises of "peace in our time." The gambit only emboldened Hitler, who seized the rest of Czechoslovakia within months.

After signing a shocking non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union, Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, prompting Britain and France to declare war and formally beginning World War II in Europe. Poland fell within weeks, and a period of relative inaction on the western front, nicknamed the "Phony War," followed before Germany's blitzkrieg tore through Scandinavia and Western Europe in the spring of 1940.

With war raging in Europe, Roosevelt persuaded Congress to revise the Neutrality Acts in late 1939 to allow "cash-and-carry" arms sales — belligerents could buy American weapons if they paid cash and transported the goods themselves — a policy that in practice favored Britain and France, who controlled the Atlantic sea lanes, over landlocked Germany.

The gamble toward greater involvement looked prescient and urgent when Germany's shockingly swift blitzkrieg overran the Netherlands, Belgium, and France itself by June 1940, leaving Britain to stand alone against Hitler under the defiant new leadership of Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

Breaking the two-term tradition set by Washington, Roosevelt won an unprecedented third term in 1940, defeating Republican Wendell Willkie in an election shadowed by the deepening crisis abroad. Even as he campaigned, Roosevelt found ways to aid the beleaguered British without formally entering the war.

In the destroyers-for-bases deal of September 1940, Roosevelt traded fifty aging American destroyers for the right to build U.S. military bases on British possessions in the Western Hemisphere — a significant step away from strict neutrality accomplished through executive agreement rather than Senate treaty. That same month, Congress passed the Selective Training and Service Act, the nation's first peacetime military draft.

With Britain nearly bankrupt and unable to keep paying cash for arms, Roosevelt proposed the ingenious Lend-Lease Act, passed by Congress in March 1941, which authorized the president to "lend" or "lease" war materiel to any nation whose defense he deemed vital to American security — bypassing the cash-and-carry requirement entirely. Roosevelt likened it to lending a neighbor a garden hose to fight a house fire.

Lend-Lease transformed the United States into what Roosevelt called the "arsenal of democracy," funneling enormous quantities of tanks, planes, and ships to Britain and, after Hitler's surprise invasion of the USSR in June 1941, to the Soviet Union as well. American naval vessels soon began escorting convoys partway across the Atlantic, leading to armed clashes with German U-boats even though the U.S. remained formally at peace.

In August 1941, Roosevelt and Churchill met secretly aboard warships off the coast of Newfoundland and issued the Atlantic Charter, a joint statement of principles — self-determination, free trade, and a postwar system of collective security — that echoed Wilson's Fourteen Points and signaled America's growing alignment with the Allied cause.

Meanwhile, as Japan pushed further into Southeast Asia, Roosevelt froze Japanese assets and imposed a crippling oil embargo, starving Japan's war machine of the fuel it desperately needed. Tense negotiations in Washington failed to resolve the impasse, and Japanese military leaders concluded that only a knockout blow against American power in the Pacific could secure their empire.