Sunday 12 April 2025 marks the 80th anniversary of the passing of one of America’s greatest presidents. Unlike the current incumbent, Franklin D. Roosevelt took the oath of office during the depths of a real economic crisis, characterised by bank panics, surging unemployment, and plummeting incomes. Over the next twelve years, he expanded the federal government to create a new deal for the American people, which pulled the country out of the worst depredations of the Great Depression, while building a durable political coalition. He also forged a close relationship with the universities, recruiting leading academics to help him deal with first the depression and then the international crisis. And slowly but surely, he moved America away from its traditional isolationism, seeking to deter, contain, and finally destroy Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime, before constructing a new rules-based order – what historian Elizabeth Borgwardt calls “a new deal for the world”. In the process, FDR truly made America great again.
Roosevelt was a pragmatist. While his advisers often complained that his “flypaper mind” could believe two contradictory things at the same time, he openly confessed to being an avid experimenter. “It is common sense,” he once remarked, “to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.” In domestic policy, this penchant for experimentation often gave Roosevelt’s policies a chaotic feel. Yet while the methods might be messy, the goals were clear, summed up in three simple words: relief, recovery, reform. Indeed, Roosevelt worked tirelessly not only to shelter Americans from the worst consequences of the Great Depression, but also to lift them out of it, while regulating the capitalist system to prevent a rerun.
Roosevelt’s clarity of purpose was not the only trait that made him such a great leader. Even in the middle of real crises, he always exuded optimism, maintained self-control, and invariably remained the calmest person in the room.
The contrast with Trump could hardly be plainer.
While Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan wanted a New World Order based on “might makes right”, Roosevelt pushed for a rules-based order.
Roosevelt equally hated authoritarian bullies on the international stage who he likened to gangsters. Such regimes could not be trusted – and for Roosevelt this was a major problem. Ever the optimist, he believed any problem could be resolved if the parties thought the other side would keep its word. But a self-professed realist, he also deemed it pointless to negotiate with a regime like Hitler’s who viewed agreements as merely a breathing space to regroup for a new round of fighting.
Animated by these concerns, Roosevelt decided after the Munich crisis in 1938 to adopt a policy of all aid to democracies short of war. A little over two years later, this morphed into making the United States “the arsenal of democracy,” with lend-lease, he breezily remarked, akin to giving a neighbour a hose to put out a fire.
While critics complained of a “big give away” that “will ruin this country”, Roosevelt proved to be correct. Lend-lease not only stiffened the British war effort. It also sparked a monumental US economic achievement, which dragged the nation out of depression and helped to make it the global hegemon, so that by 1945 it produced half the world's goods and services, including 46 per cent of its electric power, 48 per cent of its radios, and 54 per cent of its telephones.
For Roosevelt, great power came with great responsibility. This basic belief was symbolised by two aspects of his foreign policy. In the wake of Adolf Hitler’s stunning military successes in 1940, which resulted in both Western Europe and most of Scandinavia coming under Nazi rule, he expanded the boundary of the Western Hemisphere to include “all of Greenland, all of the islands of the Azores, the whole of the Gulf of St Lawrence, the Bahama Islands, the Caribbean Sea, and the Gulf of Mexico”.
This move was a precursor to sending troops to Iceland and building a base in Greenland in 1941, but there was nothing of the blustering bully in these moves. Denmark was under Nazi occupation. These islands were exposed to Nazi invasion. Their inhabitants favoured a greater US presence. And Roosevelt moved with diplomacy and tact, intimating that both Greenland and Iceland would revert to neutrality after the war.
It was a consensual approach to international politics that he tried to adopt when contemplating the postwar world. While Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan wanted a New World Order based on “might makes right”, Roosevelt pushed for a rules-based order. In 1944, he convened two conferences, one at Dumbarton Oaks, which drafted the outlines of the United Nations system for international security, the other at Bretton Woods, which created the International Monetary Fund to stabilise currencies and keep international prices stable and predictable.
In the wake of the destruction bequeathed by the Second World War, it was a vision that many around the world fully bought into. Thus, a final ingredient in Roosevelt’s ability to make America so great: his model of US power was based not merely on economic success but also on shared political values. For the past 80 years, key ingredients of the Rooseveltian model have remained intact. The current effort to destroy what remains threatens to weaken the United States. It also promises to spark the type of global instability that Roosevelt worked so hard to overcome.
Steven Casey’s new book, The Sceptic Isle: How the British Government Sold the Second World War, will be published by Oxford University Press in August 2025.
