Should America Still Police the World?

By Daniel Immerwahr

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In 1939, shortly before the German invasion of Poland, a British emissary, Lord Lothian, visited the White House with an unusual request. The United Kingdom was unable to protect the world from the Nazis, Lothian told President 

But F.D.R. was not interested. Indeed, he was offended. “I got mad clear through,” he wrote. Who were the British to dump their burdens onto his lap? Saving civilization was their job. The United States’ army at the time was only slightly larger than Bulgaria’s, with little ability to hold back illiberal forces in Central Europe. “What the British need,” F.D.R. concluded, was to buck up with “a good stiff grog.”