The United States and World War II 1. (töredék) [antikvár]

Editors' Introduction WORLD WAR II, like the Civil War, cut a gash across the surface of American history. During the decades of the twenties and the thirties the United States had reverted—or tried to revert— to isolation. President Harding had cut loose from the League, Congress had refused to adhere to the World Court, President Hoover had retreated from commitments in the Far East and thrown up tariff barriers against Europe ; even Franklin Roosevelt accepted without protest the abandonment of the League and concentrated all of his energies during his first term on the domestic scene. After conceding much to the isolationists, F.D.R. in his second term found himself shackled by the Neutrality Act in his efforts on behalf of collective security. The Nazi Blitzkrieg and Pearl Harbor together destroyed the myth that America could be insulated from European catastrophe. The course of World War II created a new climate committing the country toward intervention in world affairs. A postwar isolationist reaction never made serious headway. President Truman, who came from what had once been the heart of isolationist country, sponsored the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Pla n and NATO. In 1952 the Republicans, long the party of isolation, picked for their standard bearer the man who had led the Allied armies in Europe. No administration could consider a retreat from existing commitments; each one—enthusiastically or reluctantly—extended those commitments. Franklin Roosevelt, like Wilson, had failed to mention foreign affairs in his First Inaugural Address; after 1945 it was difficult to imagine any major state paper that did not. Though we were not without responsibility for the breakdown of the Western economy, and for the failure to sustain or to enlarge existing international organizations, the war itself was none of our making.