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Roosevelt kept open the possibility of retaining a naval base in the Philippines after independence, and in naval treaty negotiations rejected an increase in Japanese strength relative to the British and American navies. 

Quite apart from the difficulty of imagining public support for such a move, it was by no means clear how American power might be brought to bear and how welcome it might be to Europeans in the era of appeasement

Powerful Soviet forces lay to the north, the bulk of the American fleet—including twelve battleships and four aircraft carriers—operated in the Pacific, and while British Commonwealth, French, and Dutch naval forces in East Asia were negligible, the great base at Singapore provided a port of reentry for European naval power. 

between the United States and Germany stood, as always, the British navy. Too many steps would have to succeed, too many questions be answered in a certain way, to envision a physical threat to the United States from Germany.

Italy’s alignment with Germany was by no means definitive, and a German-Soviet pact hard to imagine.

the German army was outstripping any single potential foe, but the French army ensconced in the Maginot Line with its allies and putative allies—Britain, Poland, Czechoslovakia—far outnumbered the Wehrmacht

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, elected on a platform of recovery and reform, spent his energies and influence on enacting the New Deal, raising prices, and putting people back to work. Reformers were often isolationist, recognizing that preparedness and intervention abroad strengthened existing elites and precluded social spending. 

Three attitudes dominated American world policy in the mid-thirties: isolationism, preoccupation with internal affairs, and complacency. American practice had been to stand aloof from Europe’s quarrels. The exception had been the World War and Wilson’s crusade for permanent peace.

The Japanese army anticipated war with the Soviet Union sooner or later, but the navy considered the United States its chief hypothetical enemy. The army looked northward, the navy southward toward the rich resources—particularly oil—of Southeast Asia.

The sources of Japanese expansionism were deep and complex. Of immediate importance was the rise of Chinese nationalism in the 1920s and the threat this posed to Japan’s interests, especially its imperial holdings in Manchuria and its visions for the future of those rich northern provinces of China.

Historians now see the Nazi state as far from monolithic, rather as a congeries of bureaucratic and private empires, but the ultimate and absolute authority in all great questions was the Fuehrer’s and his alone

the United States Senate rejected even a highly conditional membership in the World Court

The dominant values of international relations remained those advanced by President Woodrow Wilson: national self-determination, guarantee of territorial integrity, peaceful settlement of disputes, disarmament, freer trade, and collective security under the aegis of the League of Nations.

A chain of failures and errors occurred in systems already weakened by war: declining commodity prices, exchange difficulties, foreign trade shrinkage, debt default, collapse of investment values, bank closings, factory shutdowns, and devastating unemployment.

A chain of failures and errors occurred in systems already weakened by war: declining commodity prices, exchange difficulties, foreign trade shrinkage

Governments were less concerned with harmonizing relations with other nations than with staying in power. Nations

A chain of failures and errors occurred in systems already weakened by war: declining commodity prices, exchange difficulties, foreign trade shrinkage, debt default, collapse of investment values, bank closings, factory shutdowns, and devastating unemployment.

The world economic crisis of the 1930s shriveled internationalism