By Paul D. Miller
Friday, March 13, 2026
One of the more head-scratching facts about World War II
is this: The United States responded to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor by
sending more than 5 million troops to Europe. It is
counterintuitive, at least, that the U.S. would send half its military to the
opposite side of the globe from the enemy who attacked it.
Even after Nazi Germany declared war on the United
States—on December 11, 1941, days after Pearl Harbor—the U.S. could have
prioritized Japan and left Europe to Britain and the Soviet Union. Many
Americans, including Adm. Ernest King, the commander in chief of the United
States Fleet, argued for a “Japan First” strategy. The U.S. did the opposite.
Why?
The answer reveals something important about the role the
United States chose to play on the world stage. American power was supposed to
be different from the great powers of the Old World. It would not be cynical,
narrow, used exclusively for its own preservation to the detriment of others.
American power would be linked to American ideals.
It would be tough-minded, yes, and prudently
self-interested. But American statesmen took a longer view and understood that
a truly self-interested strategy was not the short-term, cynically
transactional, calculating self-interest in dollars and cents, but relational
and ideological, measured in the growth of American ideals and the networks
among like-minded nations.
These ideals found expression in President Franklin
Roosevelt’s idea of the neighborhood of nations, in his Four Freedoms, and in
the Atlantic Charter, the clearest and most consequential expressions of the
American experiment on the world stage.
The neighborhood of nations.
Earlier in 1941, months before Pearl Harbor, the American
and British militaries had already war-gamed a possible global conflict against
the Axis powers. They rejected the “Japan First” strategy and agreed, at least
for planning purposes, on “Germany First.”
The logic was straightforward and starkly realist.
Germany was the center of gravity of the Axis powers: It was the largest,
richest, most technologically advanced industrial power. If it conquered
Britain, it imperiled the Atlantic Ocean. If it conquered the Soviet Union, it
would amass untold resources. Japan, by contrast, could be contained.
Yet when it came time to sell the war to the American
public, Roosevelt made a different argument. He did not argue to the American
people about Germany’s GDP, how many metric tons of steel its factories
produced, or the advanced state of its armaments factories. He linked American
security to the moral meaning of the war.
“The Nazi masters of Germany have made it clear that they
intend not only to dominate all life and thought in their own country, but also
to enslave the whole of Europe, and then to use the resources of Europe to
dominate the rest of the world,” he said in his December
1940 fireside chat.
The Nazis “openly seek the destruction of all elective
systems of government on every continent—including our own,” Roosevelt told the
White House Correspondents Dinner in March 1941. “They seek
to establish systems of government based on the regimentation of all human
beings by a handful of individual rulers who have seized power by force.”
That is why the United States could not be aloof from
events in Europe. In December 1940, explaining his proposed lend-lease program,
Roosevelt argued that if a neighbor’s house caught fire, any decent person
would immediately lend their garden hose to help put out the fire. The analogy
played to Americans’ sense of altruism but also their self-interest: Fires
spread, including in the neighborhood of nations.
The neighborhood of nations: That image is key to
Roosevelt’s—and America’s—vision of what the war was about. If America was
intent on defending its house alone, it would have adopted a “Japan First”
strategy, possibly leaving the fighting in the European theater to the British
and Soviets armed with American weapons. Adopting a “Germany First” strategy
was not just a calculation about the relative strength of the Axis powers. It
was also a statement about America’s vision of the world and its role in it.
Fires spread, and America would be the fire warden.
The ‘Four Freedoms.’
The fire warden had a firm idea of how the neighborhood
should be organized. In January 1941 Roosevelt reiterated the injustice of the
Nazis’ vision of the world and contrasted it with the principles of American
freedom.
“No realistic American can expect from a dictator’s peace
international generosity, or return of true independence, or world disarmament,
or freedom of expression, or freedom of religion,” Roosevelt told Congress. He argued that the “principles of morality”
prevented him from “acquiesc[ing] in a peace dictated by aggressors and
sponsored by appeasers,” because “enduring peace cannot be bought at the cost
of other people's freedom.” The Nazis, he said, wanted to build a new “one-way
international law, which lacks mutuality in its observance, and, therefore,
becomes an instrument of oppression.”
Contrasting with the Nazis’ vision of the world,
Roosevelt famously outlined his Four Freedoms: freedoms of speech and religion,
freedom from want, and freedom from fear. Freedom from want referred to
conditions that enabled a nation to provide a “healthy peacetime life for its
inhabitants,” and freedom from fear meant disarmament to the point that
aggressive warfare became impossible.
Roosevelt saw a cohesive moral order underlining American
democracy at home and the Four Freedoms abroad. “Just as our national policy in
internal affairs has been based upon a decent respect for the rights and the
dignity of all our fellow men within our gates,” he said, “so our national
policy in foreign affairs has been based on a decent respect for the rights and
dignity of all nations, large and small. And the justice of morality must and
will win in the end.” American strategy in World War II was an outworking of
American ideals on the world stage.
“By winning now, we strengthen the meaning of those
freedoms, we increase the stature of mankind, we establish the dignity of human
life,” he later said. He called for the nations of the world to
“serve themselves and serve the world” by respecting the Four Freedoms and
“abandon man’s inhumanity to man.” The Four Freedoms are the best summation of
Roosevelt’s understanding of the just cause for which the war would be fought.
The Atlantic Charter.
Roosevelt’s moral vision of the war received its formal
expression in the Atlantic Charter, a joint declaration with British Prime
Minister Winston Churchill in August 1941. The Charter became a declaration of
war aims, a touchstone outlining the sort of world the allies were fighting
for, and became a foundation of the postwar order.
The allies foreswore territorial conquest, affirmed the
consent of the governed, affirmed free trade and economic cooperation and the
freedom of the seas, called for general disarmament to a level that would make
aggressive warfare impossible, and looked forward to a durable and lasting
peace “which will afford assurance that all the men in all the lands may live
out their lives in freedom from fear and want.”
The charter is the founding document and constitution of
what is clunkily called the “liberal international order,” but is more
accurately called the free world. It was later incorporated into the Charter of
the United Nations—but the real animating spirit of the charter found life in
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), an alliance of free democracies
that has anchored world order for eight decades.
Most Americans today have only the dimmest understanding
that for most of human history, most people were poor, unfree, and miserable.
The emergence of a free world order—with democracy and rights, capitalism and
free trade, international cooperation and collective security—is the greatest
thing that has ever happened in (secular) history.
It happened because of the convergence of American power
with American ideals. We did not beat the fascists with the power of American
ideals; we beat the fascists because we had bigger guns. But so did the
Soviets, and the Soviets did not write the Atlantic Charter, did not talk about
Four Freedoms, and did not create a free world order in the aftermath.
Global ambitions and national identity.
Armed idealism is usually a straight road to zealotry,
crusading, and tyranny. But consider: The same ideals that led America to
assemble the mightiest army in world history, to build and use nuclear weapons,
are the same ideals that led America to annex no territory, to voluntarily
demobilize its military, and to go home. As Colin Powell often said decades
later, “The only land we ever asked for was enough land to bury our dead.”
Of course, there was a measure of hypocrisy in preaching
a gospel of liberty while overseeing Jim Crow at home. But rather than letting
our imperfections hobble our aspirations for the world, the causal arrow went
the other way: We let our global ambitions reshape our national identity. Black
veterans came home and demanded rights, white veterans came home readier to
grant them, and Americans stung by the horror of white supremacy’s atrocities
abroad were more prepared to acknowledge them at home. Sometimes foreign policy
leads, rather than follows, our national mission.
If there was ever a moment when one nation had the means
to conquer the world, it was the United States of America in 1945. That we did
not is an underrated tribute to American virtue, a national reenactment of
George Washington’s resignation at the height of his power. And it happened
because of American beliefs in limited government and republican liberty; in a
neighborhood of nations that look out for each other; in freedom of speech and
religion, freedom from want and fear; in consent of the governed, free trade,
freedom of the seas, and international comity. These are America’s greatest
legacy and, through the Second World War, our greatest bequest to the world.
