Opinion by Robert Kagan: In the 1930s, Germany and Japan bet against the United States going to war. They miscalculated.
Adolf Hitler, too, proceeded with caution as he ascended to power in the early ’30s. Impressed by the United States as “a giant state with unimaginable productive capacities” and by Anglo-American domination of the global economy, and well aware of the role it had played in selecting Germany’s past governments, he worked at first to soften Washington’s opposition to his rise. He reached out to the U.S.
Fascism was not an ideology of peace. To revise or overthrow this unjust order would require military power and the will to use it. “Words are beautiful things,”, “but rifles, machine guns, ships, aircraft, and cannon are still more beautiful.” Society had to be purged of flabby liberalism, quarreling political parties and alien elements and forged into one unified collective fit for war.
Roosevelt did. He began allowing British ships to be repaired in American ports. He transferred coast guard cutters to the Royal Navy. He gained the Danish government’s permission to place Greenland under American control and authorized the establishment of bases there to help defend transatlantic shipping. In April, he authorized the Navy to begin working with the British on plans for escorting convoys.
Roosevelt would later be accused of misleading Americans about the risks he was taking. In this case, however, he said he had “no illusions about the gravity of this step. I have not taken it hurriedly or lightly. It is the result of months and months of constant thought and anxiety and prayer. In the protection of your Nation and mine it cannot be avoided.”
Japan’s hostility toward and fear of the United States had certainly grown in recent years. The first critical turning point had come in 1931 with the Japanese conquest of Manchuria. The attack badly damaged relations between Japan and the United States. It also both revealed and strengthened some new trends in Japanese society, particularly the growing influence of the military, and within the military, the growing influence of younger, more aggressive army officers.
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