Franklin D Roosevelt Isolationism Essay

There is no doubt that when President Franklin D. Roosevelt took office in 1933, the issues of international trade, the establishment of the Good Neighbor policy regarding Latin America, and the escalating threats from Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan governed his foreign policy agenda. However, he faced America’s long-standing belief in isolationism that also grew in response to the international crises that prevailed throughout the 1930s. Many Americans stood steadfast to neutrality and noninterventionism because of traditional policies like the Monroe Doctrine, the belief that trade and freedom of the seas were the chief concerns of American foreign policy, the disillusionment of the previous Great War, the failure of the Treaty of Versailles,

and of course, their own economic woes that culminated in the Great Depression. So to say that Roosevelt could and should have done more to stop the spread of totalitarianism and aggression in Europe and Asia during his first two terms in office is almost impossible to have done. Not only was he constrained by this isolationist streak in the United States, but also the lack of political strength from his potential allies and his own uncertainty on how and what means to employ abroad deterred him from acting out.
Roosevelt believed the United States had a leadership role in the international arena to promote peace, prosperity, and democratic values, an unsurprising position for someone who looked at Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson as political mentors.

However, he was fully aware of the political limitations on his ability to act, and did not want to risk raising controversial foreign policy issues because that would have incurred the isolationists’ wrath at the same time he pursued his New Deal initiatives. Therefore, Roosevelt’s initial response to the events happening in Europe and Asia was to continue using trade and economic means to influence events. He adopted a policy of economic appeasement toward Germany, while seeking ways to support China and deter further Japanese belligerence in East

Asia.
Sure enough, leaders of Japan and Germany noticed this lack of action and response from Western democracies. In Japan, a militarist and expansionist government, still believing it had been slighted in the aftermath of the Great War, eyed regional domination. Japan's strategy involved gaining access to oil and other raw materials of East Asia and establishing a colonial empire, or what Japanese leaders in 1938 called a "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere." In Germany, Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler blamed old enemies and Jews for the misfortunes that had befallen. Hitler spoke flagrantly of the German people's need for more living spaces ("Lebensraum") and his belief in the superiority of the Aryan race. He also announced that Germany would begin to re-arm itself, renouncing disarmament agreements it had signed in the 1920s.
Nonetheless, as these events unraveled especially in Europe, Congress passed five different Neutrality Acts that forbade American involvement in foreign conflicts between 1935 and 1939. However, it is necessary to see these international crises not just as power conflicts but also as battles among competing ideologies and political systems - liberalism, fascism, and communism, where the Roosevelt administration tried to determine which of these could pose the greatest threat to the West and could possibly come to dominate Europe. Or in other words, how the United States and the Western democracies could confront the challenge posed by Germany and fascism without the support of the Soviet Union. Roosevelt understood that a French-British alliance without either the United States, which was politically impossible at the time due to the rejection of the Treaty of Versailles, or the Soviet Union would be too weak to suppress Germany on the. So by antagonizing Hitler’s government in the mid-1930s would have, therefore, meant accepting a popular front and collaborating with both the Soviets and the political left in Europe. For this reason, Roosevelt developed his policy of economic appeasement in the hope that it would curb German demands and offset the Third Reich’s expansion without forming political commitments or collaborating with Moscow.
By 1937, Roosevelt had begun to turn more of his attention toward foreign policy and the growing threats to world peace. The Japanese invasion of China threatened long held American interests and policy in East Asia and brought forth efforts short of war by Roosevelt to moderate Japan’s aggression. After Japan’s attack on China in 1937 Roosevelt took on the enormous task of shifting public opinion towards his vision of interventionism and U.S world Leadership. Although the president had earlier recognized Japan as an ideological and strategic rival and protested Japan’s aggressive behavior in Manchuria, the U.S response until 1937 had never been anything but a blind eye. Responding to full-scale war in China, Roosevelt claimed that he saw Japan’s actions as a threat to American interests and that he would oppose a Japanese empire in East Asia. His “Quarantine Speech” demonstrated this change. In this speech, he vied for increased American involvement abroad and established the doctrine of just war as the basis for national security.
Simultaneously, the Germany’s own revisions of the Versailles Treaty and increasing aggression revealed the faults of both maintaining isolationist mood and economic appeasement leading Roosevelt to increase American aid to Great Britain and to redefine American foreign policy to a more expanded internationalist definition of national security and readiness for war.

The president’s proclamation of the United States as the “great arsenal of democracy” on December 29, 1940, and as the upholder of the four freedoms - freedom from want, freedom from fear, freedom of speech, freedom of religion – on January 6, 1941, marked the conclusion of this process. By this time, however, Germany had control of almost all of Europe. With Great Britain the only force standing between the United States and Nazi-dominated Europe and England’s survival uncertain, all qualms of cooperation with the Soviet Union were swept aside when Hitler ordered the invasion of Russia in June1941. Around the same time, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and Americans were prepared to take up the burden and sacrifices of World War II. Thus, Roosevelt was finally able to move the nation beyond a view of hemispheric defense, increased trade, and neutrality to an internationalism that accepted the risks of global intervention, global alliances, and the necessity of the use of American power abroad as the only means o provide both prosperity and

peace.
The 1930s were about more than whether or not the United States would again become a direct and partisan participant in solving Europe’s or rather the World’s problems. The debate that developed between the noninterventionists and President Roosevelt was over the fundamental nature of American foreign policy, a battle between neutrality outside of the Western hemisphere and an internationalism that accepted a global role for the united states. In his efforts to move the nation away from a reliance on hemispheric defense and neutrality to a definition of national security based on alliances, just war, and global leadership, Roosevelt made the case that Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, in their efforts to control Europe and Asia, were direct threats to the United States. But, he argued, it would take more than just force to keep the nation safe. Only the spreading of American values and institutions would bring real security to the nation, and thus ideology was as important a component of policy as geopolitical concerns.
Examining the whole period, the context and continuity for the crucial decisions of 1933-1941 demonstrate that Roosevelt was consistent in his outlook on international affairs and acting quickly as he thought politically possible. As a result, Roosevelt’s decisions and actions leading up to World War II were crucial in America’s relations with the world, as important as those made at any other time in twentieth-century U.S foreign policy. Moreover, they not only brought the nation into the war, they shaped the thinking of the next generation of American leaders and Cold War policy after the war.