ABSTRACT
The United States’ embrace of a new internationalism did not proceed uninterrupted after the First World War. In the 1920s and 1930s, after Wilson’s departure from public life, the nation eschewed the level of entanglement he had envisioned. Though the US did play a significant role in European affairs through the provision of credit and economic advice, it refrained from firm military-political alliance commitments. Ideologically, there was an effort to recapture the spirit of well-intentioned but ultimately detached relations with Europe that had been the core of the Founders’ Era consensus. The KelloggBriand Pact of 1928, a treaty that sought to prohibit the use of force as a tool of statecraft, was the most visible American commitment to European diplomatic affairs. It had more in common, however, with the pre-First World War tradition of arbitration treaties than with the firmer commitments to mutual defence represented by the League of Nations and, later, by the North Atlantic Treaty. In fact, the direction of intellectual travel on America’s part in the inter-war
years was away from entanglement rather than towards it. In the 1930s, the Great Depression instilled pessimism and inward focus, while the rise of fascism and the worsening of diplomatic relations between the major European nations bred anxiety regarding the possibility of another major war. Rather than pre-emptive efforts to avert war through American commitment, the United States’ chief response was Congress’s passage of a series of Neutrality Acts in 1936, 1937 and 1939, prospectively limiting trade with belligerents in wartime so as to avoid a recurrence of 1917’s casus belli. Ultimately, however, America did not stay out of the Second World War. This was due partly to the efforts of President Franklin Roosevelt to aid the Allied side, and partly to the decision of Japan to attack the United States at Pearl Harbor in December 1941, and that of Hitler’s Germany to declare war immediately thereafter.2
