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No Clear And Present Danger: A Skeptical View Of The UNited States Entry Into World War II

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This is a very moderate book in regard to conjectures made by the author; Russett is not even an isolationist. He still points out very compelling reasons why US entry was forced by bad choices made by American leaders.

Yale University Political Scientist Bruce Russett's thesis can be summarised with the following quote from his book.

"American participation in World War II had very little effect on the essential structure of international politics thereafter, and probablt did little either to advance the material welfare of most Americans or to make the nation secure from foreign military threats (the presumed goals of advocates of a "realist" foreign policy). (By structure I mean the basic balance of forces in the world, regardless of which particular nations are powerful vis-a-vis the United States.) In fact, most Americans probably would have been no worse off, and probably a little better, if the United States had never become a belligerent. Russia replaced Germany as the great threat to European security, and Japan, despite it's territorial losses, is once more a great power."

It's natural when paradigms are failing for investigators to return to their origins and seek out the views of their critics. Ronald Radosh did this when he was a member of the New Left and America's then quagmire was in rice paddies not quick sand. Radosh interrogated the writings of five isolationist critics of America's path to WWII and the Cold War. Other investigators sift through the fine detail, revisit the archives and engage in revisionist history. With the new quagmire we are seeing this deju vu all over again.

But Russett eschews both those paths. He neither unburies forgotten prophets or trawls for lost telegrams, instead he turns the fine focus to blurr and looks for the big picture. In his final chapters we get a taste of his 'macroscopic" methodology. Russett's macroscope sees Japan as being pushed into war, not so much by any Rooseveltian chicanery or home grown militaristic mania, but by the disappearance of options making either withdrawl from China or negotiation with the Anglo-Americans impossible. The Pearl Harbor attack was in a sense a desperate gamble by a power with a GDP perhaps a tenth of America's. In Europe Russett saw a stalemate emerging as Hitler fails to defeat the RAF and the war with Stalin erupts.

Russett warns us that the usual portraits of Nazi evil are true but as the true depths of their depravity were not really appreciated until after WWII so these arguments are not available for retrospective justification. This is not a rule Russett applies consistently. He relies on much data gathered post WWII that shows that Axis war preparations and production capabilities were consistently exaggerated by Allied leaders.

Russett argues the hypothetical case for a middle path between isolationism and interventionism, essentially it's the path of 'limited war', a phrase that only became common in the cold war era. Russett correctly points out that in fact the division between "isolationists" and "interventionists" was more of a shifting and over-lapping spectrum, rival strategies rather than a Berlin Wall ideological split. Many "isolationists" urged America to be armed to the teeth and FDR's pre-Pearl Harbor strategy of "all aid short of war" had numerous "isolationist" supporters, not all of whom were pacifists or even neutralists. There were interventionists in FDR's administration, but it is, at least, possible that their number did not include FDR himself until virtually the dawn of Pearl Harbor. Russett believes a continuation of the "all aid short of war" strategy pioneered in Lend Lease, convoy protection etc would have been sufficient to keep Britain afloat as a viable western counter to any German european hegemony. Such an 'isolationist' strategy would also be 'realist', providing America with a potential base and ally as an insurance policy in the unlikely event that the new Nazi empire, would grow into a true global power with trans-Atlantic reach.

The actual "All aid short of war" phase of FDR's actual strategy was as Russett informs us itself really the first, if unheralded, chapter of American 'limited war'. Russett takes FDR to task, as do most of the revisionists, for the secrecy that cloaked this limited war. These were the first steps to the Imperial Presidency. Russett's defence of this limited war is of course somewhat ironic, considering his status as a critic of the Vietnam adventure.

Russett's book is in a sense the book Andrew Bacevich should read .Bacevich is a modern critic of "The New American Militarism" and America's latest quicksand quagmire. Bacevich's analysis has it's roots in the work of revisionist historian and liberal isolationist Charles Beard. Yet Bacevich has argued that modern opponents of the new militarism are wasting their breath by taking a revisionist line on WWII and questioning FDR. Maybe he was thinking too much about Beard, perhaps Russett's approach would give Bacevich the middle path he was after.

In any event this compact, well written volume of a mere 108 pages punches above it's weight. For my money the chapters dealing wit the Pacific War were excellent as was his overview of the European theatre pre-Pearl Harbour. The later chapters exploring his analytical methodology are interesting and provide a strong empirical case for focusing on national fundamentals (ie GDP, demography, cultural traditions) rather than the latest scare headlines from some corner of the globe, an approach that guarantees a constant chase of phantoms. These chapters are not as well written as the earlier ones which is a pity, as they suggest a realist alternative to nostrums of which the neocons are merely the latest peddlars.

There are few more controversial premises for a book than the one that motivated the writing of this one. The author argues that the United States was under no severe threat from either Germany or Japan in the period of the late 1930's until the attack at Pearl Harbor. His first premise is that Germany had not been able to subdue Britain and was stalemated on the Soviet front in 1941, which would have eventually led to some form of negotiated truce. Germany then and in the near future would have possessed no capability to directly attack the United States. Japan was also bogged down in China and overextended in other areas, such as Southeast Asia. While an initial attack would be damaging, there was little chance that Japan could defeat the U.S. With these "facts" as a basis, Russett argues that Roosevelt's tactics of engaging in a naval shooting war with Germany in the Atlantic and embargoing goods essential to Japan, unnecessarily goaded them into a war that could have been avoided. He considers the goading unnecessary because neither nation presented any clear and present danger to the United States.
This is a case where the author is correct in the technical sense but wrong in the practical, and the degree to which he is correct is dependent on your definition of the phrase, `clear and present danger." It is true that neither nation had the capability to do significant material damage to the territory of the United States. However, the invasion and/or wholesale killing of a nation's citizens is not the only danger that can exist.
Russett has the benefit of hindsight in knowing a great deal about the resources that Germany possessed in the period where Roosevelt was inching the nation toward war. At that time, Germany was still a very real threat to invade and conquer the British Isles, an event far more serious than the fall of the rest of Europe. No one in America at that time knew that Germany simply could not launch an invasion. One point he used as justification was that it took the US and Britain many years to complete the build up so that the cross channel invasion could be launched. While true it also misses the point. When the allies carried out the D-Day invasion, it was against a well-equipped enemy with years to prepare set defenses. After Dunkirk, there were many soldiers in Britain but they had almost no equipment or set defenses. Had the Germans been able to establish a solid beachhead, there really was very little to stop them.
Russett also seems to ignore the long-term dangers. If Japan had been able to execute their real plan, which was to control the resources of Indochina and the Dutch West Indies, the long-term consequences to the U.S. would have been severe. Japan would have controlled a strategic set of resources that would have made them a superpower, and given their militaristic nature at that time, a continuing threat to expand. The fall of the Phillipines into that set would have also been inevitable as they simply could not have been defended.
The same neglect also applies to the threat of Germany. Even if you ignore the appalling nature of the regime, a Europe controlled by Germany from Gibralter to the Soviet border would have been the most powerful "nation" in the world. At the time of Roosevelt's moves no one understood the power of resistance movements and he could only see a powerful empire that would be expansionist and ideologically incompatible with the United States. One only has to look at how the Soviet Union ruthlessly exploited the nations of Eastern Europe after the war to understand how valuable an asset they were.
Finally, Russett argues that the global power of the United States was not significantly altered by participation in the war. Which is nonsense. Before the war, Britain was the only global superpower and after it ended, the United States filled that role. Granted, it thrust the U.S. into situations where military force was inappropriately applied, but that is different in that is the application of power rather than the existence.
The premise of this book is one that must be presented for the sake of historical completeness. While true if you suffer from a lack of extended thought, it simply does not hold up if you consider the situation as it appeared to Roosevelt in 1940 when he faced two mighty empires allied with each other.