Question

Evaluate Franklin Roosevelt's leadership in World War II. You must provide three examples to support your essay.

Answer 1

Americans were in favour of isolationism after the Great Depression, claiming that difficulties at home could only be compounded by participation in international affairs. The role of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in international policy was thus minimal, even as the gathering storm of Japanese and German military intervention dimmed world hopes for peace.

A great worldwide struggle between principles, modes between government, and economic structures was raging during the interwar years and in the war itself, pitting western democracy against imperialism, Nazism, and communism. The defence of American ideals and institutions by Roosevelt gave eloquent voice to the values of liberal democracy under which the country struggled, which contained stirring public declarations of the value of the founding principles of democratic government, religious freedom , justice, individual equality, freedom of expression, which capitalism in America.

US neutrality in World War II ended when a surprise assault on Hawai'i's Pearl Harbor was launched by the Japanese (who were allied with Nazi Germany). Rousing the country the next day in a national radio broadcast, President Roosevelt proclaimed the date of the assault, December 7 , 1941, a "day that will live in infamy." For the United States, a fight involving sixteen million American men enlisted into the armed forces, 405,000 of whom were concurrently fighting in two theatres of military action, in Europe and in the Pacific, in the Second World War.