Deterrent Diplomacy: Roosevelt and the Containment of Germany, 1938–1940

Abstract

The Munich conference produced not an era of negotiation but a new period of tension. A European settlement was blocked by Hitler’s attacks on British rearmament and the Kristallnacht pogrom. It was rumoured that extremists were dominant in Berlin and that Hitler planned to solve German problems by force. Nor was Germany the only source of tension. At the end of the year Mussolini provoked a crisis in the Mediterranean with a series of demands on France. In the Far East the Japanese continued to advance into southern China. In November 1939 Tokyo proclaimed a ‘New Order’ in Asia. Washington viewed these developments as part of a single global crisis. In the autumn of 1938 President Franklin D. Roosevelt rapidly abandoned the illusion that Munich would pave the way to a stable world order. He assumed that the totalitarian powers had co-ordinated their plans of aggression and that their ultimate target was the western hemisphere. These suspicions were confirmed by German attempts in 1938 and 1939 to convert the triangular anti-Comintern pact of 1937 into a tripartite military alliance between Berlin, Rome and Tokyo (see Chapter 10). Hitler was no longer regarded as a traditional German statesman concerned only to correct the injustices of Versailles. He was seen instead as an extremist with indefinite ambitions, an image confirmed by the Czech coup in March 1939.