The Fascist powers were gathering and threatening the Western powers in 1936 and 1937. The groundwork was being set for the Rome-Berlin Axis, and when Franco finally prevailed in 1939, France, one of the few remaining democracies on the continent, found itself encircled by three Fascist powers—Spain, Italy, and Germany. On November 25, 1936, Germany and Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact, which was designed to monitor and counter Soviet-backed support to international Communist parties.
In 1937 Japan attacked China, an event that signaled the opening round of World War II. The Japanese had been on the move since 1931 when they invaded Manchuria and set up the puppet state of Manchukuo, a move that was condemned by the League of Nations. Japan promptly left the League and proceeded to exploit Manchuria’s resources for the Japanese war economy.
Behind the scenes, Hitler was not idle either in preparing his expansionist agenda. The tone of his public speeches also began to change as he cast off his pretensions for peace in favor of belligerent diatribes. In September 1937 Hitler and Mussolini consolidated their growing friendship, culminating in a spectacular state visit by Il Duce to Germany in late September and Italy’s adherence to the Anti-Comintern Pact. The Nazis dazzled Il Duce with an awesome display of military might. The result was the beginning of the “brutal friendship” between the two dictators.
Across the ocean, Roosevelt was carefully monitoring the aggressive words and actions of the Fascist nations. On October 5, 1937, the president gave a speech in Chicago, subsequently termed the “Quarantine speech,” in which he condemned the creeping “reign of terror and international lawlessness,” evidenced by the bombing of civilian populations, sinking of ships, and wanton acts of violence committed without a declaration of war. He reminded the American people that they were not immune from such international aggression, warning, “Let no one imagine that America will escape, that it may expect mercy, that this Western Hemisphere will not be attacked, and that it will continue tranquilly and peacefully to carry on the ethics and arts of civilization.”34 It has been thought that the president primarily had the Japanese in mind, for he made the speech shortly after the Japanese had attacked China. The German diplomats in Washington, however, wondered whether the president’s message was not also aimed at them. Ambassador Dieckhoff, who had replaced Luther, immediately asked for clarification about the aggressors Roosevelt had in mind. Sumner Welles, the American Under-Secretary of State, told him that the gist of the president’s speech had been the promotion of peace. If any aggressor had been referred to, it was the Japanese rather than the Germans or Italians. Welles then added a most revealing comment, which must have jumped out at Dieckhoff. It was a prophetic warning that “if a world conflict should break out in which Great Britain becomes involved, the United States will be thrown, either at the beginning of the conflict or soon thereafter, on the British side of the scale.”35 Hitler took Roosevelt’s Quarantine speech just as seriously as Dieckhoff did. According to his adjutant Nicolaus von Below, Hitler saw the speech as a turning point in American foreign policy.36 Hitler was offended by Roosevelt’s remark that 90 percent of the world’s population was threatened by 10 percent of aggressive nations and that he seemed to think that Germany was one of these aggressive nations. He attributed FDR’s sudden interest in foreign policy to his failed economic remedies, as evidenced by the increased unemployment in the U.S. workforce. Hitler suspected that Roosevelt was looking to rearmament as a way out of the recent economic downturn in the U.S. economy—the depression within a depression, as some critics of FDR have called it. Hitler said that FDR needed to get congressional approval for large rearmament appropriations and to get it he would incite the American public against so-called aggressor nations, notably headed by Germany.
Roosevelt’s first forceful pronouncement in foreign affairs was prompted by a growing worldwide danger to American interests both in the Pacific and in Europe. He viewed these threats as analogous to an epidemic: “When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread, the community approves and joins in a quarantine of the patients in order to protect the health of the community against the spread of the disease.”37 How he proposed to quarantine the aggression the president did not explain.
Roosevelt, acutely aware of the gathering storm, was groping for a new policy to replace neutrality. As happened several times in his administration on matters relating to foreign affairs, the president took the easy way out by letting things drift, hoping that events abroad would galvanize the American people to the point of demanding more aggressive measures against the Fascist powers. In his Quarantine speech, the president did not name the international lawbreakers, though it was obvious to his listeners that he had Japan, Germany, and Italy in mind. The Quarantine speech was not Roosevelt’s signal to abandon neutrality, as Charles Beard and other revisionists seemed to think, but a shift in his thinking about international aggression. At this point he was starting to realize that the American people needed to be educated about the threat from abroad, a reeducation that would not be easy because isolationist feelings were still very strong. On October 16, 1937, he sent his old headmaster at Groton, Endicott Peabody, a telegram thanking him for his support of the Quarantine speech and confessing, “As you know, I am fighting against a public psychology of long-standing—a psychology which comes very close to saying, ‘Peace at any price.’”38
This is what Roosevelt wanted to change, but he lacked an active policy to do it. Off the record, Roosevelt called Hitler an international gangster who would have to be stopped sooner or later. But who would stop him? Here Roosevelt’s intentions became murky. He was simply not the sort of man who wanted to rush into action without painstaking thought about the risks involved for the American people. Those who argue that he could hardly wait to horn in on the conflicts brewing in Europe or Asia, or perhaps that he even conspired to create incidents to justify intervention, do not understand the president’s essential style. The notion of giving aid and comfort short of war to the victims of totalitarianism became Roosevelt’s guiding policy until the fall of France. Roosevelt’s conception of national self-interest could be measured in geopolitical lines of defensive zones. In the Pacific it was the Philippines, Australia, India, and the oil-rich Dutch Indies. Next came French Indochina and Chiang Kai-shek’s China, both of which Roosevelt saw as bulwarks against Japanese expansion.
In Europe, Roosevelt’s first line of defense was Britain and France, the democratic allies of World War I. In the back of his mind there was the Soviet Union, an international pariah but an important potential ally against the mounting threat of Nazi Germany. In 1933 the Roosevelt administration formally recognized the Soviet Union and established full diplomatic relations with that Communist country. From the beginning of his presidency to the very end, Roosevelt took a somewhat benign view of the Soviet Union, did not seem overly perturbed by Soviet espionage in America, and courted and propped up the Soviet Union when it seemed on the verge of collapse in 1941.39 He made no intellectual connection about the equivalence of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union despite repeated warnings by his diplomats.
In 1937 Roosevelt recognized that events in Europe and Asia were beginning to be dangerous, and that ways and means had to be found to support the democracies, even if that meant chipping away—deceitfully, if necessary—at the wall of neutrality Congress had built since the early 1930s. While the American president talked of peace, the German dictator talked of aggression and war. Hitler’s timing was very good. By 1938 Germany had rearmed and was both militarily and psychologically at least as strong as the Western democracies. World War I had changed the traditional great power constellation, leaving a vacuum that Hitler was quick to exploit. Of the five major European powers before the war—Italy, Germany, Austria-Hungary, France, and Britain—only France and Britain had remained great powers. Weakened by revolution and civil war, Russia had fallen into the hands of the Bolsheviks, who were as suspicious of the democracies as they were of the Fascist states. The multiethnic Austro-Hungarian Empire had collapsed, and out of its scattered pieces