When Mussolini’s foreign minister, the charismatic ex-squadistra Dino Grandi, met Hoover in 1931, the president is said to have assured his Italian guest that the vocal minority of antifascists in America should be ignored: “They do not exist for us Americans, and neither should they exist for you.”...Hitler famously said that he had seen the statesmen of the West at Munich and they were “worms.” On this, at least, Churchill agreed with him. For Migone, the logic of appeasement was not a matter of moral weakness. It was systematic. The failure to impose sanctions on the fascists was the faded echo of a once-powerful strategy of financial hegemony. In view of the policies of the 1920s, America’s refusal to back even the minimal sanctions imposed by the League of Nations was entirely predictable. Instead, surging imports of American oil and motor vehicles propelled Italy’s murderous aggression against the only independent African member of the League of Nations. The State Department’s principal concern was not to punish this violation of international law, but the fear that if Mussolini were to be humiliated, his regime might collapse and Italy might fall victim to revolution.
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