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I've followed this thread with great interest and certainly have learned from it. I am rather puzzled, however, that no one has spoken directly to what has always seemed to me the most serious weakness of the "back door to war" argument. Granted that FDR actively sought all-out war with Germany, which he clearly saw as the major threat to American interests and indeed to Western Civilization, should he have expected that war with Japan in the Pacific would have inevitably led to war with Germany in the Atlantic and Western Europe? That seems speculative at best to me. Hitler, of course, resolved that issue by issuing his own declaration of war against the United States almost immediately. An American declaration of war then followed inevitably without discernible dissent. But what if Hitler had simply kept his mouth shut? Or, even worse, declared a policy of neutrality in the US-Japan conflict? Surely, in such cases, the Rooseveltian push to fight Germany would have been greatly hindered by the "back door strategy." Aid to Britain and the USSR would have had to compete with the imperatives of the Pacific war. "Back door to war," if Roosevelt ever thought in such terms, would have been a very risky course--and FDR was a sound enough grand strategist to know it. Lon Hamby Ohio University
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