‘Leaving Us in the Lurch’

Abstract

The failure of the United States to play a more active role during the 1930s in the containment of international aggression remains an important issue for historians interested in whether World War II could have been prevented; and is intimately connected with the debate concerning Britain’s ill-fated policy of appeasement — whether misguided capitulation to German, Italian and Japanese expansion, or pragmatic response to insuperable burdens contingent upon British decline. Could more have been done by the British government to establish a closer association with America, and thereby deter war? Did London miss the chance to follow leads from Washington, confounding Franklin D. Roosevelt’s attempts to wean Congress away from isolationism? Or was Britain’s desperate, febrile policy towards potential enemies — consequence of ineluctable constraints — further weakened by America’s persistently ambiguous posture: one that, if aligned with, risked antagonising hostile powers without providing the practical support necessary to justify such risk? Did British policy, thus, merely help entrench isolationism, or was the latter itself one of the determinants of appeasement?