Originally Posted by aegyptos

You live there. Do I really need to explain this to you? Because France and Britain are next door to Germany. German rearmament directly threatened them. German rhetoric made it clear that Hitler intended war. The United States was not an ally of the French and British before the war nor was it threatened by Germany. We were isolated from European madness by the Atlantic Ocean and protected by our large navy. France was not isolated from anything being a front line state with a worthless and pusillanimous ally in the British. I think also its incorrect to describe the French foreign policy before the war as isolationist. French diplomats were active in eastern Europe trying to create an alliance that would threaten Germany from the rear. This alliance was called the Little Entante. France was also the possessor of a large oversea empire. Nothing isolationist about those things. America really was an isolationist state. For America, political isolation was the correct foreign policy with regard to Europe.