In this episode of The More Freedom Foundation Podcast, Rob Morris challenges the familiar story of an isolationist America standing on the sidelines between the First and Second World Wars. His argument is that the United States had enormous economic and political influence over Europe after 1918 — and that a series of American decisions helped create the conditions in which Adolf Hitler rose to power.
From the Treaty of Versailles and Germany’s crushing reparations to the debts Britain and France owed America, Rob explores how the financial arrangements following the First World War contributed to economic instability across Europe. He examines the French occupation of Germany’s industrial heartland, the hyperinflation that followed, and the cycle of American loans and European repayments that left Germany’s economy vulnerable.
But could Washington have made different choices? Rob looks at the presidencies of Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, asking whether greater debt relief and earlier action could have eased Europe’s economic turmoil. He also considers Franklin D. Roosevelt’s struggle with American neutrality laws in the run-up to war, and whether those policies hindered efforts to counter Hitler before the conflict engulfed Europe.
Was American isolationism really a withdrawal from world affairs — or did the United States exercise its power in ways that helped pave the road to another world war?
Join Rob and Ruairí for a provocative discussion about war debts, economic power, political choices and the uncomfortable question of how much responsibility America bears for the catastrophe that followed.
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