Oddbean new post about login | logout Him declaring war on the US after Pearl Harbor and giving the interventionists the push they needed to overcome the isolationists was bad. The Japs didn't help either tbf if they just stuck to defeated European colonial assets.
None of that mattered. FDR et al. would've manufactured a casus belli if one wasn't provided to them. Lusitania 2, perhaps.
He would have tried certainly but was having difficulty convincing people with the US naval war.
When someone has decided they're going to find a way to go to war with you, especially someone like FDR, they're going to find a way. It's silly to pretend that Germany could've threaded that needle and indulging the thought yields the wrong lesson.