Panicky retrenchment and disunity also rendered the Western powers incapable of responding to the first violation of the postwar territorial settlements. On September 10, 1931, Viscount Cecil assured the League of Nations that “there has scarcely ever been a period in the world’s history when war seemed less likely than it does at the present.” Just eight days later officers of Japan’s Kwantung Army staged an explosion on the South Manchurian Railway to serve as pretext for military adventure. Since 1928, China had seemed to be achieving an elusive unity under Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists (KMT), now based in Nanking. While the KMT’s consolidation of power seemed likely to keep Soviet and Japanese ambitions in check, resurgent Chinese nationalism also posed a threat to British and other foreign interests on the mainland. By the end of 1928, Chiang was demanding the return of leased territories and an end to extraterritoriality in the foreign concessions. On the other hand, the KMT was still split by factions, banditry continued widespread, the Communists were increasingly well-organized in remote Kiangsi, and in the spring of 1931 a rival government sprang up in Canton. To these problems were added economic depression and disastrous floods that took hundreds of thousands of lives.

Japan, meanwhile, suffered rudely from the Depression because of her dependence on trade, her ill-timed return to the gold standard in 1930, and a Chinese boycott of Japanese goods. But social turmoil only increased the appeal of those who saw in foreign expansion a solution to Japan’s economic problems. This interweaving of foreign and domestic policy, propelled by a rabid nationalism, a powerful military-industrial complex, hatred of the prevailing distribution of world power, and the raising of a racialist banner (in this case, antiwhite) to justify expansion, all bear comparison to European Fascism. When the parliamentary government in Tokyo divided as to how to confront this complex of crises, the Kwantung Army acted on its own. Manchuria, rich in raw materials, was a prospective sponge for Japanese emigration (250,000 Japanese already resided there) and the gateway to China proper. The Japanese public greeted the conquest with wild enthusiasm.

China appealed at once to the League of Nations, which called for Japanese withdrawal in a resolution of October 24. But neither the British nor U.S. Asiatic fleets (the latter comprising no battleships and just one cruiser) afforded their governments (obsessed in any case with domestic economic problems) the option of intervention. The tide of Japanese nationalism would have prevented Tokyo from bowing to Western pressure in any case. In December the League Council appointed an investigatory commission under Lord Lytton, while the United States contented itself with propounding the Stimson Doctrine, by which Washington merely refused to recognize changes born of aggression. Unperturbed, the Japanese prompted local collaborationists to proclaim, on February 18, 1932, an independent state of Manchukuo, in effect a Japanese protectorate. The Lytton Commission reported in October, scolding the Chinese for provocations but condemning Japan for using excessive force. Lytton recommended evacuation of Manchuria but privately believed that Japan had “bitten off more than she can chew” and would ultimately withdraw of its own accord. In March 1933, Japan announced its withdrawal instead from the League of Nations, which had been tested and found impotent, at least in East Asia.

The League also failed to advance the cause of disarmament in the first years of the Depression. The London Naval Conference of 1930 proposed an extension of the 1922 Washington ratios for naval tonnage, but this time France and Italy refused to accept the inferior status assigned to them. In land armaments, the policies of the powers were by now fixed and predictable. Britain and the United States deplored “wasteful” military spending, especially by France, while reparations and war debts went unpaid. But even Herriot and Briand refused to disband the French army without additional security guarantees that the British were unwilling to tender. Fascist Italy, despite its financial distress, was unlikely to take disarmament seriously, while Germany, looking for foreign-policy triumphs to bolster the struggling Republic, demanded equality of treatment: Either France must disarm, or Germany must be allowed to expand its army. The League Council nonetheless summoned delegates from 60 nations to a grand Disarmament Conference at Geneva beginning in February 1932. When Germany failed to achieve satisfaction by the July adjournment it withdrew from the negotiations. France, Britain, and the United States devised various formulas to break the deadlock, including a No Force Declaration (December 11, 1932), abjuring the use of force to resolve disputes, and a five-power (including Italy) promise to grant German equality “in a system providing security for all nations.” On the strength of these the Disarmament Conference resumed in February 1933. By then, however, Adolf Hitler was chancellor of the German Reich.

A common impression of Herbert Hoover is that he was passive in the face of the Depression and isolationist in foreign policy. The truth was almost the reverse, and in the 1932 campaign his Democratic opponent, Franklin Roosevelt, was the more traditional in economic policy and isolationist in foreign policy. Indeed, Hoover bequeathed to his successor two bold initiatives meant to restore international cooperation in matters of trade, currency, and security: the London Economic Conference and the Geneva Disarmament Conference. The former convened in June 1933 in hopes of restoring the gold standard but was undermined by President Roosevelt’s suspension of the gold convertibility of the dollar and his acerbic message rejecting the conference’s labours on July 3. At home, Roosevelt proposed the series of government actions known as the New Deal in an effort to restore U.S. productivity, in isolation, if need be, from the rest of the world. The Disarmament Conference came to a similar end. In March, Ramsay MacDonald proposed the gradual reduction of the French army from half a million to 200,000 men and the doubling of Germany’s Versailles army to the same figure, accompanied by international verification. But a secret German decree of April 4 created a National Defense Council to coordinate rearmament on a massive scale. Clearly the German demand for equality was a ploy to wreck the conference and serve as pretext for unilateral rearmament.

Negotiations were delayed by a sudden initiative from Mussolini in March calling for a pact among Germany, Italy, France, and Britain to grant Germany equality, revise the peace treaties, and establish a four-power directorate to resolve international disputes. Mussolini appears to have wanted to downgrade the League in favour of a Concert of Europe, enhancing Italian prestige and perhaps gaining colonial concessions in return for reassuring the Western powers. The French watered down the plan until the Four-Power Pact signed in Rome on June 7 was a mass of anodyne generalities. Any prospect that the new Nazi regime might be drawn to collective security disappeared on October 14, 1933, when Hitler denounced the unfair treatment accorded Germany at Geneva and announced its withdrawal from the League of Nations.