1930s America's Foreign Policy

736 Words3 Pages
In 1932, President Herbert Clark Hoover addressed his views on American foreign policies at the time, “I have made but one reservation, and that is, we will join no movement that proposes to use military or economic force in its attempts to prevent war. For that is a contradiction in method”. President Hoover’s views were extremely isolationist, refusing to spend troops or money to prevent the second coming of the Great War. Yet, if one were to look at the United States’ role in the world today, they would see billions of dollars funding foreign aid and troops in countries we need not interfere in. In the 1930’s, the United States was a generally isolationist country, however, due to the effects of World War II, the foreign policies of the…show more content…
citizens at the time and the largest economic crash in American history had just hit, the Great Depression. It was for these reasons that Americans decided to focus on domestic problems rather than international ones. The United States would end up spending $22,625,253,000 on a war that was not even centered around their continent. This gigantic overspending of military funding would eventually lead to the infamous Great Depression. Come time for World War II, very similar to World War I with respect to being centered around Europe, it’s easy to see how most Americans would favor a fairly isolationist approach. One of first major signs of isolationism was the sudden influx of American peace societies, whose main focus was large-scale disarmament and an international treaty to abolish war. The efforts of these peace-seeking groups were fairly advantageous, leading to a major agreement between some of the largest countries to reduce their numbers of battleships. Six years later, most of the world's nations signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact, in which they pledged never again to go to war with one another. In 1935, Congress passed three separate neutrality laws that created an embargo on arms sales to countries in war, disallowed American ships from entering…show more content…
Clearly, Congress was determined not to repeat the mistakes they made that had led the United States into World War I. America refused to use war as an instrument of national policy, isolating themselves from many other countries in hopes that they would not get sucked back into another economy shattering war. Another step towards American isolationism was the refusal to join the League of Nations. The League of Nations was an organization founded as a result of World War I, whose primary goal was the maintenance of world peace. Although the United States’ refusal to join the League of Nations might seem counter-intuitive, there were many aspects of joining that would further hinder America’s ability to rebuild. First of all, it would limit the power of the American government’s decisions. The U.S. needed to make decisions that would benefit the themselves, not the world, as they were in a state of economic panic. Second of all, multiple ethnic groups disagreed on the some of the choices that the League of Nations were making. For example, German Americans felt their homeland was being treated too harshly, Italian Americans felt more territory should have been awarded to Italy, and

More about 1930s America's Foreign Policy

Open Document