What policy did Great Britain, France, and the United States pursue against the new regimes in Germany, Italy, and Japan in the 1930s?
1 Answer
There were two policies, isolationism and appeasement.
Explanation:
If we take appeasement first, this was the policy pursued by the British and French in Europe particularly towards Germany and Hitler's territorial claims to redress the Treaty of Versailles.
Therefore when Hitler re-entered the Rhineland, absorbed Austria into a greater German Reich and occupied the Sudetenland as agreed at Munich and finally occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia they did nothing. Only when he invaded Poland on September 1st did they declare war two days later.
When Mussolini invaded Abyssinia and the Japanese invaded Manchuria attempts were made through the League of Nations to take effective action, but all this did was show how ineffective the League was, This was because it couldn't take military action and the USA was never a member.
In South East Asia there were concerns amongst the British and French that their empires in places such as Indo-China, SIngapore and Burma faced threats from Japanese imperial expansion.
However at the same time the racism inherent in European imperialism allayed these fears as they were confident the Japanese could not wage a successful war against their defences. World War 2 would prove how wrong this assumption was.
In the USA there was a division between interventionism and isolationism. Many Americans were wary of getting involved in conflicts in far away Europe. It was isolationism which prevailed and made it difficult to give support to Western Europe after World War 2 broke out.
The Americans were concerned at Japanese expansion in the Pacific, specifically against American interests in the Philippines. However it took the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour to bring the USA into the war. Even then there was no guarantee that they would have become involved in Europe, but Hitler then declared war on the USA in support of his Axis ally Japan.
It is also the case that there was considerable sympathy for fascist states amongst Western capitalists. Henry Ford was anti-semitic and gave his profits in Germany to the Nazis. There was also a strong German lobby in the USA. In the 1930's Hitler was man of the year in Time magazine. There was also plenty of support for Hitler amongst the British political elite as a bulwark against Bolshevism.
