LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Franklin Delano Roosevelt: United States
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During World War II, Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, Great Britain's prime minister, personally determined Allied military and naval strategy in the West. They gave priority to Germany's defeat and, in view of Hitler's claim that Germany was never defeated, only betrayed, in the first war, insisted on unconditional surrender. Although Roosevelt had joined with Churchill in the pre–Pearl Harbor Atlantic Charter (1941), a broad and idealistic statement of peacetime aims, he insisted during the war on limiting the Allied effort to military victory. He had great faith in his personal powers of persuasion, and, despite indications that Stalin's ambitions in Eastern Europe might violate the Atlantic Charter, Roosevelt foresaw Soviet-U.S. cooperation through a United Nations.
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Roosevelt's third term was dominated by World War II, in Europe and in the Pacific. Roosevelt slowly began re-armament in 1938 since he was facing strong isolationist sentiment from leaders like Senators William Borah and Robert Taft who supported re-armament. By 1940, it was in high gear, with bipartisan support, partly to expand and re-equip the United States Army and Navy and partly to become the "Arsenal of Democracy" supporting Britain, France, China and (after June 1941), the Soviet Union. As Roosevelt took a firmer stance against the Axis Powers, American isolationists—including Charles Lindbergh and America First—attacked the President as an irresponsible warmonger. Unfazed by these criticisms and confident in the wisdom of his foreign policy initiatives, FDR continued his twin policies of preparedness and aid to the Allied coalition. On December 29, 1940, he delivered his Arsenal of Democracy fireside chat, in which he made the case for involvement directly to the American people, and a week later he delivered his famous Four Freedoms speech in January 1941, further laying out the case for an American defense of basic rights throughout the world.
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The main foreign policy initiative of Roosevelt's first term was the Good Neighbor Policy, which was a re-evaluation of U.S. policy towards Latin America. Since the Monroe Doctrine of 1823, this area had been seen as an American sphere of influence. American forces were withdrawn from Haiti, and new treaties with Cuba and Panama ended their status as United States protectorates. In December 1933, Roosevelt signed the Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, renouncing the right to intervene unilaterally in the affairs of Latin American countries.[52]
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Roosevelt is the outstanding President of the twentieth century. In polls of historians, conducted variously since 1948, he has always been voted among the three greatest presidents in US history, Lincoln always coming first and Roosevelt or George Washington coming second. Roosevelt transformed the office of the President and, indeed, transformed the economic and social structure of the United States. He built the presidential office into a powerful and organized unit of government. He established the Executive Office of the the President. He drew on many of the leading minds of the time.
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Franklin D. Roosevelt had demonstrated little personal interest in the Alaskan overflight issue, but another situation drew his attention to Canada. By mid-1934 the task of replacing the 1922 Washington Naval Agreement, slated to expire in 1936, occupied military planners in a number of countries. Japan, which had accepted a level of naval inferiority relative to Britain and the United States (a ratio of 3:5:5) in 1922, no longer found that arrangement suitable, and Britain, already concerned by the growing power of Adolf Hitler's Germany, could ill afford a renewed Pacific arms race. So when the British suggested a modest shipbuilding program that might mollify Japan, Franklin D. Roosevelt argued instead for imposing a 20 percent reduction in naval tonnage on each signatory, a proposal that the Japanese, not surprisingly, declined to accept.
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After 1938, Roosevelt championed re-armament and led the nation away from isolationism as the world headed into the war. He provided extensive support in terms of money and munition and ships (but not soldiers) to Winston Churchill and the British war effort before the attack on Pearl Harbor (Dec. 7, 1941) pulled the U.S. into the fighting. During the war, Roosevelt, working closely with his aide Harry Hopkins, provided decisive leadership against Nazi Germany and made the United States the principal arms supplier and financier of the Allies. American forces played the major role in defeating Hitler in western Europe (as Stalin's Russia played the major role in the East). U.S. forces played the major role in defeating Japan in the Pacific, and gave strong support to the Nationalist government of China.
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