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One of the biggest errors one can commit is reading history through the lens of the present rather than through the lens of the past. Yes, we now know that the USSR became a military juggernaut in WWII and subsequently became a superpower at the head of an international league of communist states whose power only rivaled the US and the West more broadly. But things looked different in 1939. Sure, Stalin was a strongman and a thug, but so is Paul Biya, and most Americans haven't even heard of him, let alone are concerned about him. I'm not trying to equivocate the USSR in 1939 with Cameroon today, but if one were trying to evaluate international threats back then, it would be ridiculous to put the Soviet Union in the same league as Germany. Russia had always been a backwater, and Soviet attempts to industrialize and modernize hadn't really borne much fruit, resulting famines due to agricultural "reforms". Furthermore, Stalin's purges had left the military apparatus in complete disarray, and this is after they had collapsed in the first World War and not exactly had much success before that. At the same time, Germany was a historically strong power is intent on remilitarizing in contravention of the Versailles treaty, all the while spouting rhetoric that war was necessary for national hygiene and demonstrating that not only did it wish to annex heretofore independent countries that had German-speaking populations, but that it would invade other countries as well, even after it had explicitly promised not to. If Roosevelt had taken the same level of caution toward Stalin as he did toward Hitler, he would have been an idiot.
Indeed, and I can't think of a war where the post-war mythos served such a profound role in the post-hoc moral justification for starting the conflict than WWII.
Let's assume for argument's sake that Kennedy's view that neither Great Britain or France would have declared war against Germany over Poland without pressure from the United States. What is the justification for this pressure from the United States under the scenario? There's no credible threat against France or Great Britain, much less the United States itself.
If you remove the post-war mythos surrounding Holocaust and Hitler as the anti-Christ of post-war Progressivism, what in 1939 would motivate FDR to risk such an enormous conflict with disastrous consequences, and contrary to the opinion of 95%+ of the American public?
I'm sure there are many reasons we can point to, but none of them formulate the popular narrative we live under today for why we fought this war, and I think that says something profound.
In case you missed the point of my post, Hitler was the bigger threat. Roosevelt knew this—which is why he was so aggressive in his foreign policy—because all the evidence at the time pointed toward it. The "postwar mythos" you speak of is merely confirmation of this. You act as if Roosevelt was either entirely irrational or had some ulterior motive. And for what it's worth I trust Joe Kennedy about as far as I can throw his corpse. The guy was an egomaniac and an antisemite who made self-serving comments after the war to make it look like all the smart money would have backed him had it not been for that conniving Roosevelt. Even Chamberlain changed his tune when it became clear that Hitler had no interest in being appeased.
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