The Faustian Bargain

The Faustian Bargain: an arrangement in which an ambitious person surrenders moral integrity in order to achieve power and success.

Wikipedia

The actions of Churchill, but far more significantly Roosevelt, in the lead-up to western involvement in this Second World War post the turn of Hitler against Stalin are difficult to explain or comprehend in conventional means. There was little or no reason for the United States to be involved in this war, as a few have commented before. We can add Hoover to the list of revisionist historians on this topic:

With his conquest of most of western Europe completed by the surrender of France in June 1940, Hitler was free to revive one of his foremost ambitions: the destruction of the Communist government of Russia and the annexation of “living space,” Lebensraum, from Russia and the Balkans…. Signs that Hitler was about to violate his alliance with Stalin and attack Russia began to reach the American Government immediately after his conquest of France.

It appears that Hitler’s alliance with Stalin was one of convenience. For an interim period, Hitler did not want a major conflict on Germany’s eastern front, preferring initially to consolidate and secure his western flank. That flank extended only to the channel – as previously outlined, Hitler did not have the capability to invade England, and primarily seemed interested in getting the British to return home, even to the point of allowing a relatively easy evacuation at Dunkirk.
With the western flank secure, Hitler was now free to pursue what seemed to be his primary interest – that of securing living space to the east. But why the east? Why not living space to the west? Perhaps because east is where the Germans were – other than a sliver of France, the Germans held no historic claim to land in the west, and certainly these lands could not be considered “Germanic.” However, to the east this was quite different. An obvious example was Danzig, but there were others in Poland and Czechoslovakia. Additionally, to the east was fertile land, and, of course, oil.
The east was Hitler’s objective, and Russia was the primary obstacle in his path. The United States government was aware of this, and so notified the Russians:

In the latter half of January, 1941, Under Secretary of State Summer Welles informed the Russian Ambassador in Washington, Constantine Oumansky, that Germany was preparing as attack on Russia late that spring.

Much of the knowledge that the U.S. government had regarding the coming attack by Hitler on Stalin was kept from the American people. Had this been widely known, and the implications understood, much of the debate regarding further U.S. involvement (for instance, for Lend-Lease) would have taken a different tone as the idea that Britain and the United States were under immediate danger would have been demonstrably false.

On June 22, 1941, Hitler and his armies of over 2,000,000 men attacked along the Russian border over a front of 2,500 miles.

And thus was born the opportunity to let these two tyrants knock each other out. As we know, instead of taking advantage of such an opportunity, both Britain and the United States wanted to be further involved. In fact, this event seems to have been the trigger for Roosevelt to step up his campaign of baiting the Japanese into attacking the U.S., as I have previously discussed here.
Hoover felt this was the greatest opportunity presented to Roosevelt:

The two dictators of the world’s two great aggressor nations were locked in a death struggle. If left alone, these evil spirits were destined, sooner or later, to exhaust each other.

Alas, it was not to be:

At a press conference on June 24, two days after Hitler’s attack, the President stated that “the United States would give all possible aid to Soviet Russia.”

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