isolationism, U.S isolationism, U.S Isolationism played a dominant role in U.S foreign policy in the first half of the 20th century Particularly during the 1930s, the United States sought to retreat behind its ocean borders and decrease if not eliminate its international responsibilities After World War II, isolationism became increasingly discredited and was replaced by cold war internationalism as the dominant U.S foreign policy belief Despite increasing reliance on foreign trade as a pillar of the U.S economy, the United States sought to limit its global responsibilities in the aftermath of World War I The Senate’s rejection of the Versailles Treaty meant that the United States would not join the League of Nations despite the fact that it was primarily the creation of President Woodrow Wilson Instead, the United States pursued a policy of independent internationalism during the 1920s, promoting naval disarmament at the Washington Conference in 1921–22; establishing a “reparations triangle,” which established a relationship between German reparations payments to the Allies and Allied war debt payments to the United States through the Dawes and Young Plans (1924 and 1929, respectively); and intervening in Central America and the Caribbean throughout the decade The onset of the Great Depression began to reverse this internationalism During the latter stages of the Hoover administration and the most of the first two terms of the Franklin D Roosevelt administration, isolationist sentiment grew in Congress and in the country This desire to limit involvement in the growing conflicts found in Europe and Asia in the mid-1930s became public policy through the creation of the Neutrality Acts of 1935, 1936, and 1937 The Neutrality Act of 1935 forbade arms sales to belligerents during a recognized state of war The Neutrality Act of 1936 renewed the 1935 provision and added a commitment to stay out of the ongoing Spanish civil war while also forbidding loans by banks to belligerents The Neutrality Act of 1937 added to the first two provisions that forbade citizens from traveling on belligerents’ vessels and limited trade in nonmilitary goods with belligerents to a “cash-and-carry” basis, meaning that belligerents could purchase nonmilitary items from the United States with cash only and would have to pick up the goods from the United States in their own ships These three acts limited presidential control of foreign policy by eliminating any distinction between aggressors and victims in a conflict, eliminating a key moral component 175 from U.S policy That these acts had very little relationship to the actual events in Europe and Asia troubled the isolationists not at all Their goal was to keep the United States out of the growing conflicts in the rest of the world The Roosevelt administration’s acquiescence in the creation of these acts reflected the president’s emphasis on dealing with the Great Depression The primary movers behind the Neutrality Acts tended to support the New Deal As events in Europe and Asia pushed the world once again toward war, Roosevelt began to take tentative steps toward challenging isolationist dominance On October 5, 1937, he spoke to a nationwide audience from the isolationist stronghold of Chicago In the speech he called for the quarantine of aggressor nations by the world’s peace-loving peoples However, when the British sought clarification on what Roosevelt intended to to carry out this quarantine, the president responded that both U.S public opinion and the Neutrality Acts precluded any actual preemptive actions by the president Roosevelt all but repudiated the speech over the next several weeks One of the primary consequences of U.S isolationism was the enhanced commitment of Britain and France to a policy of appeasement If they could not count on the United States for loans, guns, or assistance, the British and French did not believe they could credibly resist Germany militarily Hence, they were willing to trade land for peace, acquiescing in the Anschluss (unification) of Germany and Austria in March 1938 After a summer of crisis created by Adolf Hitler’s demand for autonomy for ethnic Germans living in the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, the British and French pressured the Czech government to meet the demand When Hitler responded by changing the demand to German annexation of the territory, the British and French at first reluctantly mobilized their militaries but then agreed to meet with Hitler and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini at Munich, where the Czechs were forced to cede the territory to Germany During the intervening year, Roosevelt slowly and tentatively began to challenge isolationist dominance, specifically requesting a liberalization of the Neutrality Acts’ limitation on arms sales in his State of the Union message on January 4, 1939 Building on the antiGerman outcry over the Kristallnacht attacks on German Jews on November 10, 1938, Roosevelt began to salt his discussions with congressional leaders and the press with references to the growing danger of Germany, a danger confirmed by its seizure of the remainder of Czechoslovakia on March 15, 1939 This aggression