On From Munich to Pearl Harbor

This is a short little book on the transformation of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s foreign policy between 1938 and 1941. In 1938, when the Munich Accords were signed, the United States was facing a second recession within the Great Depression and had broadly followed an isolationist line throughout the 1930s. In 1937, however, political skies in Europe began to darken and the Second Sino-Japanese War broke out (although some will argue that this began as early as 1931). Nevertheless, Roosevelt began to encourage a policy of “hemispheric defense” to keep the Americas out of entanglements, especially European entanglements.

Reynolds argues that two critical events transformed Roosevelt’s foreign policy: the first was the signing of the Munich Accords, which weakened the image of a “powerful Europe,” in his view; the second was the 1940 Fall of France, which fully shattered American views of Europe as a powerful region. The transition can best be seen through the American government’s relationship with Britain. Following the Munich Accords, Roosevelt’s administration instituted a “Cash and Carry” policy, where the British could purchase American military hardware, but they would be wholly responsible for transporting it across the Atlantic. However, a series of neutrality acts from the mid-1930s limited Roosevelt’s ability to carry out the Cash and Carry policy after September 1939. In response, Roosevelt advocated for the passage of the Lend Least Act, which permitted his administration to sell—without reservation—as much military hardware to the British as they wanted (without technically violating American neutrality). To ensure that this equipment arrived in Britain, Roosevelt used executive power to protect shipments from German submarines using the US military, effectively initiating an undeclared war in the Atlantic.

While these policies, at first glance, don’t seem to represent a major transformation, Reynolds argues that they represent a transition in Roosevelt’s mind from hemispheric thinking—something Americans were generally accustomed to—to globalism. Only by thinking globally would Americans be able to make sense of the United States’ place in the Second World War. This is not to say that there was no debate about the choice to go to war, but Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor and the Philippines put a quick end to those debates. Additionally, unlike World War I, about which Americans had come to regret their intervention, Auschwitz came to act as moral justification to the war. By 1945, almost nobody was opposed to American involvement in the Second World War—all the debate was with regard to how the war should be conducted.

This is an illuminating book on an important topic, but I don’t know that Reynolds adds a significant amount to the historical scholarship. I’ve seen many of the arguments that he makes here also made elsewhere. Reynolds is, in large part, right, of course, but any other book on American involvement in World War II would have covered the same ground.