As aggressive developments in Europe and Asia grew more ominous over the course of the 1930s, the United States Congress

Through his first six years in office, Franklin Roosevelt spent much of his time trying to bring the United States out of the Great Depression. The President, however, certainly did not ignore America's foreign policy as he crafted the New Deal. Roosevelt, at heart, believed the United States had an important role to play in the world, an unsurprising position for someone who counted Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson among his political mentors. But throughout most of the 1930s, the persistence of the nation's economic woes and the presence of an isolationist streak among a significant number of Americans (and some important progressive political allies) forced FDR to trim his internationalist sails. With the coming of war in Europe and Asia, FDR edged the United States into combat. Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor, however, brought the United States fully into the conflict.