Flight of the Eagle: The Grand Strategies That Brought America From Colonial Dependence to World Leadership by Conrad Black

Author:Conrad Black [Black, Conrad]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781594036743
Amazon: B00AUZS12O
Publisher: Encounter Books
Published: 2013-05-28T04:00:00+00:00

5. RISING TENSIONS IN EUROPE

In March 1938, Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy passed an important test when Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas nationalized the American and British oil companies in Mexico. Hull, on Roosevelt’s instruction, made it clear that he had no objection as long as reasonable compensation was paid. This was in marked contrast to the histrionics of the British, who threatened reprisals, although American sensibilities and international realities prevented them from going too far with such threats. Cárdenas expressed great relief and repeatedly praised Roosevelt in public, the first such occurrence in the 115-year history of relations between the two countries. Roosevelt was mindful of the complaint of his warmongering old friend Smedley Butler, ex-commandant of the Marine Corps, that he had been deployed around Latin America by American fruit and mining companies. He would end this system. Roosevelt had also approved a timetable for the independence of the Philippines in 1935, and Manuel Quezon was elected the country’s first president. It was intended that full independence would be achieved on July 4, 1946.

Also in March 1938, Hitler annexed Austria. It was clear from the almost delirious reception given him when he returned to the country of his birth that very many Austrians, and likely a sizeable majority, agreed to absorption of the truncated state into the German Reich. There had been a contentious meeting between Hitler and the Austrian chancellor, Kurt von Schuschnigg, who made massive concessions to Hitler’s bullying but announced a referendum when he returned to Vienna. Hitler professed to find this intolerable, and when Mussolini, who had blocked a German takeover of the country in 1934, approved Hitler’s action, Germany invaded and met no resistance. Hitler gave a fiery speech to a wildly enthusiastic crowd packed into the square in front of the Imperial Hotel, where he had worked as a sweeper of floors and steps for the coming and going grandees of the capital of the Habsburg Empire 25 years before. Again, the British and French failed even to protest. Roosevelt, on his own authority, gave asylum to 17,000 Austrians, many of them Jews, whose passports were canceled by Germany. (It was 88 years since Daniel Webster had dismissed the Habsburg Empire as trivial and decrepit in the Hülsemann letter. Chapter 5).

Seizing Austria had merely whetted Hitler’s appetite, and there was not the briefest respite before he began demanding the integration into the Reich of the Sudeten Germans of Czechoslovakia. His technique was to single out an offending neighboring country, especially if it had an irredentist German population that he would claim was being mistreated, as he did with the Sudetenland, like a lion selecting a wildebeest, then to terrorize it with belligerent speeches and threats and military maneuvers, and then to demand concessions (that usually meant the effective demise of the target country). In the spring of 1938, it was the turn of the Czechs, and Hitler started ramping up his complaints and demands.

Czechoslovakia was an artificial state sliced out of the Austro-Hungarian Empire

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