No Clear and Present Danger: A Skeptical View of the United States Entry into World War II

Rating:
Summary: Accurate in the local sense, inaccurate in the global
Review: There are few more controversial premises for a book than the one that motivated the writing of this one. The author argues that the United States was under no severe threat from either Germany or Japan in the period of the late 1930's until the attack at Pearl Harbor. His first premise is that Germany had not been able to subdue Britain and was stalemated on the Soviet front in 1941, which would have eventually led to some form of negotiated truce. Germany then and in the near future would have possessed no capability to directly attack the United States. Japan was also bogged down in China and overextended in other areas, such as Southeast Asia. While an initial attack would be damaging, there was little chance that Japan could defeat the U.S. With these "facts" as a basis, Russett argues that Roosevelt's tactics of engaging in a naval shooting war with Germany in the Atlantic and embargoing goods essential to Japan, unnecessarily goaded them into a war that could have been avoided. He considers the goading unnecessary because neither nation presented any clear and present danger to the United States.
This is a case where the author is correct in the technical sense but wrong in the practical, and the degree to which he is correct is dependent on your definition of the phrase, 'clear and present danger." It is true that neither nation had the capability to do significant material damage to the territory of the United States. However, the invasion and/or wholesale killing of a nation's citizens is not the only danger that can exist.
Russett has the benefit of hindsight in knowing a great deal about the resources that Germany possessed in the period where Roosevelt was inching the nation toward war. At that time, Germany was still a very real threat to invade and conquer the British Isles, an event far more serious than the fall of the rest of Europe. No one in America at that time knew that Germany simply could not launch an invasion. One point he used as justification was that it took the US and Britain many years to complete the build up so that the cross channel invasion could be launched. While true it also misses the point. When the allies carried out the D-Day invasion, it was against a well-equipped enemy with years to prepare set defenses. After Dunkirk, there were many soldiers in Britain but they had almost no equipment or set defenses. Had the Germans been able to establish a solid beachhead, there really was very little to stop them.
Russett also seems to ignore the long-term dangers. If Japan had been able to execute their real plan, which was to control the resources of Indochina and the Dutch West Indies, the long-term consequences to the U.S. would have been severe. Japan would have controlled a strategic set of resources that would have made them a superpower, and given their militaristic nature at that time, a continuing threat to expand. The fall of the Phillipines into that set would have also been inevitable as they simply could not have been defended.
The same neglect also applies to the threat of Germany. Even if you ignore the appalling nature of the regime, a Europe controlled by Germany from Gibralter to the Soviet border would have been the most powerful "nation" in the world. At the time of Roosevelt's moves no one understood the power of resistance movements and he could only see a powerful empire that would be expansionist and ideologically incompatible with the United States. One only has to look at how the Soviet Union ruthlessly exploited the nations of Eastern Europe after the war to understand how valuable an asset they were.
Finally, Russett argues that the global power of the United States was not significantly altered by participation in the war. Which is nonsense. Before the war, Britain was the only global superpower and after it ended, the United States filled that role. Granted, it thrust the U.S. into situations where military force was inappropriately applied, but that is different in that is the application of power rather than the existence.
The premise of this book is one that must be presented for the sake of historical completeness. While true if you suffer from a lack of extended thought, it simply does not hold up if you consider the situation as it appeared to Roosevelt in 1940 when he faced two mighty empires allied with each other.

Rating:
Summary: Good revisionist account of pre-ww2 events
Review: This is a very moderate book in regard to conjectures made by the author; Russett is not even an isolationist. He still points out very compelling reasons why US entry was forced by bad choices made by American leaders.