Reich-5: Battle of Britain question

[mlangsdorf]

Originally Posted by ravenfish

Minor point: we respected the British "stay away from Germany or we will send our surface ships to escort you away" blockade in WWI. We distinctly did not respect the "stay away from Britain or we will sink your ships from below without warning" blockade that Germany was simultaneously trying to impose, and in fact treated its existence as something close to a casus belli. In WWII, the blockade situation was roughly the same, so, from the point of view of precedent, one would expect the response to be roughly the same.

Sure, that's all very true. My point was that a pro-Nazi POTUS could say "I intend to respect the German blockade of Britain and I forbid US flagged ships from entering into the declared exclusion zone" without causing a huge domestic political scene - or at least no more of a scene than FDR caused by playing it fast and loose with America's declared neutrality. There's no strong American imperative for breaking blockades. We respect them when we feel the cost of breaking them is too high, and we break them when we feel the cost of keeping them is too high.