The 1936–8 period presents a problem for historical interpretation. Do these years merely represent the middle period in a march to war that can be dated from Hitler’s first assumption of power? Or are they a hiatus on the war path? Churchill, Duff Cooper, French historians such as Maurice Baumont, and many others regarded 1935 as a year of pivotal events, with the German occupation of the Rhineland in March 1936 marking off a new period. In The Gathering Storm, Churchill called 1936–8 a “loaded pause.” A. J. P. Taylor, in his pioneering work of historical revisionism, The Origins of the Second World War, followed Churchill, calling it a “half-armed peace.” Taylor argued that Hitler’s march into the Rhineland destroyed all reasonable hope that the League of Nations could provide an alternative to the Old Diplomacy of the pre-1914 period, to which Europe had to return. The raw calculus of national power was all that mattered. New reflexes were demanded of those who made the decisions for war or peace. Since no one was ready for this, a period of indecision and wavering ensued before the old-fashioned conservative, Metternichean Churchill position, based on an assessment of the European balance of power, could take hold. The policy of appeasement was thus a desperate last gamble to avoid these harsh realities, in the spirit of the New Diplomacy.

The years 1936–8 might also be thought of in terms of the idea of the two world wars as a kind of modern Thirty Years War, as Churchill and Charles de Gaulle later called it. Two historians who wrote during the Cold War, Arno Mayer and Ernst Nolte, pursued this theme by suggesting the era of the world wars to be in effect a protracted “international civil war,” Communism on the one side and fascism on the other. They viewed the period from two sides of the spectrum, Mayer the left and Nolte the right, but both through the lens of the Cold War which they saw rooted in the era of the world wars. To be sure, there was a kind of Cold War in the relations between Britain and Soviet Russia in 1921–7. There was as well a continuing effect on public opinion in Britain and France of fascist appeals to anti-Communism. This is not, however, the way the story finally went. There was no inexorable economic or social force that compelled the western capitalists to throw in their lot with fascism in order to crush the left. Indeed, the perspectives of the Cold War would have been quite fatal to the west in the 1930s. But in 1936–8, during the “loaded pause,” things did seem briefly to be shaping up along the lines of an international ideological civil war. On the one side stood the global Popular Front with its headquarters in Moscow, reaching its tentacles in the direction of Spain and China. On the other, the white knights of global fascism led by Mussolini and Hitler, urging the world to rally behind their struggle against Bolshevism. Which side would the Atlantic democracies choose?Since the United States was trying its best to stay out of the European quarrels, the decision came down to the British and the French. And since the British had maintained for so long a policy of balancing French power with that of Germany, it came down to the British. The United States was if anything more interested in Asia than Europe, so it had to make an independent calculation of its interest in the world ideological struggle. The Popular Front was a world strategy of the Comintern introduced formally in 1935 and designed ultimately to create a coalition to assist the Soviet Union to meet its threats in Europe and Asia. Like the perspective of National Bolshevism in the 1920s, it sought to harmonize Comintern policy and Soviet foreign policy. The efforts of Communists to alert their countries to the fascist danger were meant to dovetail with Foreign Secretary Maksim Litvinov’s campaign in the League of Nations (the Soviets joined in 1934) for collective security against fascist expansionism. There was no conflict between ideology and Realpolitik. The Communists of the world, including Trotskyists who vehemently opposed the Popular Front in principle, were visceral in their defense of the Soviet Union as the base of socialism. Similarly, fascists instinctively reached for the policies that would create world unity against the Popular Front. The ordinary nationalists and imperialists in the fascist countries who did not appreciate the urgency of the struggle against Communism would have to be pushed aside. The first steps in confronting the Popular Front were the Rome–Berlin Axis and the Anti-Comintern Pact of 1936 between Germany and Japan.