Among the first historians to argue in favour of the back-door-to-war theory were Charles Beard, author of American Foreign Policy in the Making, 1932–1940 (1946) and President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941 (1948), and Charles C. Tansill, author of Back Door to War: The Roosevelt Foreign Policy, 1933–1941 (1952). Half a century later, journalist and presidential candidate Patrick J. Buchanan gave continuing life to the theory by insisting in his book A Republic, Not an Empire (1999) that, contrary to accepted opinion, the United States need not have fought in World War II. The country was forced into a conflict with the Axis powers only by Roosevelt’s determination to aid Britain and Russia against Hitler. Without American involvement in the fighting, Buchanan argued, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia would have destroyed each other, thereby sparing the world the post-1945 Cold War
Among the first historians to argue in favour of the back-door-to-war theory were Charles Beard, author of American Foreign Policy in the Making, 1932–1940 (1946) and President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War, 1941 (1948), and Charles C. Tansill, author of Back Door to War: The Roosevelt Foreign Policy, 1933–1941 (1952). Half a century later, journalist and presidential candidate Patrick J. Buchanan gave continuing life to the theory by insisting in his book A Republic, Not an Empire (1999) that, contrary to accepted opinion, the United States need not have fought in World War II. The country was forced into a conflict with the Axis powers only by Roosevelt’s determination to aid Britain and Russia against Hitler. Without American involvement in the fighting, Buchanan argued, Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia would have destroyed each other, thereby sparing the world the post-1945 Cold War