MISTER, WE COULD HAVE USED A MAN LIKE HERBERT HOOVER AGAIN:

Boiled down to its essentials, Hoover's argument justifies not American isolationism, but hemispheric defense in preparation for a well-timed diplomatic, economic, and military entry into a world compelled to listen to what America has to say. The strategy reprises some of President Woodrow Wilson's strategy in his first administration: staying out of the European war; allowing the combatants to become exhausted; then working toward a (now-feasible) League to Enforce Peace composed of republican regimes. Immanuel Kant's famous 1795 essay, "Perpetual Peace," formulated a similar approach. Unlike some of the America Firsters, Hoover contemplated a considerable expansion of American influence in the world--but not at the price of a world-warring prelude.

Could Hoover's vision have worked in practice? Like the American and French revolutions before them, the Soviet and Nazi revolutions led to military expansion--but this time in the same quarter-century and on the same continent. Thus "Fascism and Communism were bound to clash and produce a world explosion." Because the ideas animating both revolutionary regimes were evil, "and evil ideas contain the germs of their own defeat," as Hoover saw it, "the day will come when these nations are sufficiently exhausted to listen to the military, economic and moral powers of the United States." Americans should stay out of the war while arming ourselves "to the teeth," ready to defend the Western Hemisphere in the unlikely event that a clear victor emerged in Europe. The underlying moral principle of Hoover's policy was that "American lives should be sacrificed only for independence or to prevent the invasion of the Western Hemisphere." He believed that "to align American ideals alongside Stalin will be as great a violation of everything American as to align ourselves with Hitler," and that "the aftermath of the war would be revolution and world-wide extension of communism, not democracy."

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