British Fleet seemed doomed to disaster. President Roosevelt, who for some
time had been warning of the dangers inherent in the European situation,
had at once (June 10) proclaimed the Charlottesville program, committing
the material resources of the nation to the opponents of aggression. Since,
however, these resources had not yet been harnessed for war, the amount of
assistance afforded Britain during the summer of 1940 was extremely lim-
ited. Not until Hitler seemed on the verge of invading England did the
President finally consent to trade fifty over-age American destroyers for base
rights in Britain's American possessions. Therewith the British secured sub-
stantial reinforcement for defense and, what was perhaps more important
though less tangible, added assurance that the United States would throw
ever greater weight behind resistance to the Nazis. After the Destroyer Deal
American neutrality was hardly more than a technicality; the United States
had clearly aligned itself with resistance to Nazi aggression.

But many months were still to pass before American support could be-
come fully effective. War production was only getting under way and as yet
no conclusive measures had been taken to raise an army even for national
and hemisphere defense. In these circumstances it was but natural that the
chief concern of the Administration should have been the protection of its
own and neighboring shores, and that it should have staked its hopes on
Britain's capability to withstand unaided the shock of invasion, should that
come. Furthermore, Washington could not overlook the fact that the crisis
confronting the nation was not a European, but a world crisis. Asia, like
Europe, was in turmoil, for since 1937 Japan had been engaged in unde-
clared war against Nationalist China and had, with increasing effrontery,
been challenging the Far Eastern position and interests of the United States
as well as those of the European powers. The British, the French and the
Dutch were none of them capable of withstanding Japanese pressure. The
first two powers had been obliged to close the supply routes into China
through Burma and Tonkin, while the latter was confronted with Japanese
demands on the Netherlands Indies which seemed to presage an early ad-
vance into the southwest Pacific. In China itself European nationals were
exposed to obloquy and abuse; foreign interests -- American as well as Euro-
pean -- were blandly disregarded or flagrantly violated by the Japanese mili-
tary.

In the summer of 1940 the only hope of restraining or obstructing the
Japanese seemed to lie in a strong American policy, for which, in fact, there
was much clamor throughout the land. But the Administration, while will-
ing to resort to half measures in the hope of deterring the Tokyo extremists,
refused to take decisive steps. The President and his advisers were quite
aware that the problem of the Pacific could not be considered apart from
that of the Atlantic, but they had decided that the more formidable and
menacing of the two great expansionist powers was Germany, not Japan.

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