America's foreign policy regarding Europe four decades later, during and after the Second World War, is also most consistently explicable by appeal to the principle of economic interest. To be sure, this explanation is absent from the war's dominant historical narrative. Popular explanations for America's involvement in the European conflict, then and now, invoke notions of ideological struggle and human rights. John Bodnar points out that the Office of War Information told Hollywood producers to make films that “reminded audiences that it was "a people"s war,' which would bring about a future with more social justice and individual freedom.”11 President Franklin Roosevelt, Bodnar notes, “took pains to make democratic promises” to his people in return for their sacrifices.12 There is no doubt that the demise of Nazi Germany represented a victory for democracy and human rights over fascism and racial extermination. For this reason, Unger refers to the Second World War as “the good war,” imploring us to be “grateful” for America's role in quelling an “evil” regime that had “utter contempt for humanity.”13 Zinn agrees, calling America's struggle “a war against an enemy of unspeakable evil.”14
However, behind these statements there is an important disconnect: though the war was in many ways a democratic triumph for human rights, it is equally evident that America's principal motives for involvement had little to do with human rights or political ideology. Zinn argues that America's devastating aerial bombardments of German cities “destroy” the notion that the Second World War was “fought for humane reasons.”15 If Roosevelt's description of Germany's bombing in Holland and England as “inhuman barbarism that has profoundly shocked the conscience of humanity” carries any weight, then we are left speechless to describe the massive American bombing that dwarfed the German attacks by comparison.16 Defenders of America's bombing campaigns often argue that they were necessary sacrifices to combat a greater evil: the Nazis' twisted extermination policies. But, as Zinn points out, the Holocaust was not a priority for the Roosevelt administration. Aware of the purpose of Nazi concentration camps, Roosevelt “failed to take steps that might have saved thousands of lives [because] he did not see it as a high priority.”17 Henry Feingold agrees, noting that the U.S. government had at hand “confirmed news of the actual implementation of the Final Solution” but was “not overly enthusiastic about making the war into a war to save the Jews.”18 Feingold also points out that America, which was in a superior position to any European nation for absorbing Jewish refugees, nonetheless failed to admit more than a token number.19 Evidently, the Roosevelt administration's involvement in Europe during the Second World War was not primarilymotivated by human rights concerns.
U.S. involvement in Europe at this time was not motivated by any consistent ideology, either. American policies towards the communist east were hostile at first, then friendly after Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, and tense yet again soon after the war ended.20 We may attempt to explain these right-angled ideological turns by appealing to America's need to befriend the Soviet Union in order to fight a common fascist foe. However, this explanation - though popular - is lacking. Unger points out that “[n]ot all Americans saw fascism-nazism as a serious danger,” referring to many Catholics, conservatives, Italian and German Americans, and some intellectuals who spoke out for the Third Reich.
21 This group even included prominent politicians. For example, on June 22nd, 1941 - the day that Germany invaded Russia - future president Harry Truman stated: “If we see that Germany is winning, we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany.”22 Based entirely on practical concerns, this statement completely ignores any notion that the destruction of fascism should be a primary goal. America's policies in postwar Germany further betray its lack of concern for eradicating fascism. In his 1948 article, “The Fiasco of Denazification in Germany,” John Hertz observes that “the effect of denazification appears to have been to bar certain persons temporarily from positions of influence rather than to provide for their definitive or long-term elimination.”23 To Hertz, America's “moral superiority” was not a core element of its policies but, instead, merely an “expendable” asset.24 America's wartime and postwar policies were not motivated by any consistent ideological goal.
America's involvement can be most clearly understood by examining its economic concerns. Zinn's argument that the Roosevelt administration's “main interest was not stopping Fascism but advancing the imperial interests of the United States” is compelling.25 He points to the crumbling British Empire, suggesting that America “intended to push England aside and move in.”26 Germany was a rival contender for this position, and had to be defeated.27 Contemporary sources from the U.S. State Department, Zinn notes, show a conscious American interest in the oil-rich Middle East, previously dominated by Britain and under threat from Germany.28 Indeed, as cynical as it seems today, this view was common in wartime Britain. Feingold's account outlines a strong British perception that Washington hoped “to pick up the pieces of the British empire.”29
