Blindfolds

   Malevolent Neutrality: The United States, Great Britain, and the 
                               Origins of the Spanish Civil War                                                         by Douglass Little. Cornell University Press, 1985

            Far sighted the politicians of democratic Western Europe and the United States were not in the summer of 1936. For those who have repeatedly pointed to Munich as the place where the Western democracies most grievously caved into Hitler, they need to go back and reexamine that history. By Munich, Hitler already had no doubts that he could manipulate the British. It was in Spain in 1936, not Munich in 1938, that Hitler became emboldened. The civil war in Spain from the beginning gave the Western powers plenty of options to confront Hitler without going at him head on. Had they given even a modicum of aid to the fledgling Republic they could have made Hitler's experience there far too costly, while at the same time ensuring that Stalin would not be looked to by the Republic as its remaining option. Germany was barely a year into its rearmament program, and of course the three years Spanish Civil War gave it an enormous proving ground. Instead, Stalin's entrance on the Republic side late in 1936, after aid had been turned down by Britain, France, and the United States, just gave right wing groups in those countries more ammunition to claim the Republic was a closet socialist project. And in fact, had the Republic with Stalin's aid been able to stem the tide of Franco's Italian and German backed army, it would have been incredibly indebted to the Soviet Union.
              But then in 1936, we are talking about Baldwin in Britain, Blum in France, and Roosevelt. Consumed by their own domestic politics, none would win any prizes for clairvoyance on the world stage. Of the three, only Roosevelt later admits his error. This book written over 25 years ago by Douglas Little, an American historian who specializes in American diplomatic history, is still an insightful overview of how the policies of non-intervention championed by Britain during the Spanish Civil War masked deep foreign policy failures on the part of all three governments.