In WWII, did the US trade with anyone before they entered the war? Or did the stop trade for anyone.?

Answer 1

Yes, the United States sent supplies to Great Britain and other allied nations before the US entered the war. The US also attempted to halt Japan's imports of oil and other natural resources, prompting the Japanese to attack Pearl Harbor.

Answer 2

The USA traded with both sides before entering the war in December 1941.
The most notorious was when Standard Oil of America gave the Nazis the process for making synthetic rubber in 1940. This probably prolonged the war by some months as they were unable to import natural rubber which was a vital resource for a modern army.

Answer 3

There were lots of nasty debates on the floor of the US Congress and Senate but trade was carried out with Britain and France while trade with Germany & Japan was ended. The Soviet Union was more of a gray area, a situation clarified when Germany attacked Soviet Russia.

Here are a few links that may help.
and a blurb or two but I won't cut and paste an entire article..
http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/archives/worw.html
""""""Despite deep-seated mistrust and hostility between the Soviet Union and the Western democracies, Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 created an instant alliance between the Soviets and the two greatest powers in what the Soviet leaders had long called the "imperialist camp": Britain and the United States. Three months after the invasion, the United States extended assistance to the Soviet Union through its Lend-Lease Act of March 1941. Before September 1941, trade between the United States and the Soviet Union had been conducted primarily through the Soviet Buying Commission in the United States.

Lend-Lease was the most visible sign of wartime cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union. About $11 billion in war matériel was sent to the Soviet Union under that program. Additional assistance came from U.S. Russian War Relief (a private, nonprofit organization) and the Red Cross. About seventy percent of the aid reached the Soviet Union via the Persian Gulf through Iran; the remainder went across the Pacific to Vladivostok and across the North Atlantic to Murmansk. Lend- Lease to the Soviet Union officially ended in September 1945. Joseph Stalin never revealed to his own people the full contributions of Lend-Lease to their country's survival, but he referred to the program at the 1945 Yalta Conference saying, "Lend-Lease is one of Franklin Roosevelt's most remarkable and vital achievements in the formation of the anti-Hitler alliance."

Lend-Lease matériel was welcomed by the Soviet Union, and President Roosevelt attached the highest priority to using it to keep the Soviet Union in the war against Germany. Nevertheless, the program did not prevent friction from developing between the Soviet Union and the other members of the anti-Hitler alliance. The Soviet Union was annoyed at what seemed to it to be a long delay by the allies in opening a "second front" of the Allied offensive against Germany. As the war in the east turned in favor of the Soviet Union, and despite the successful Allied landings in Normandy in 1944, the earlier friction intensified over irreconcilable differences about postwar aims within the anti-Axis coalition. Lend-Lease helped the Soviet Union push the Germans out of its territory and Eastern Europe, thus accelerating the end of the war. With Stalin's takeover of Eastern Europe, the wartime alliance ended, and the Cold War began. """"

And a Truly informative link
http://www.answers.com/topic/reciprocal-trade-agreement
"""Secretary Hull's initial effort was to obtain reciprocal trade agreements with countries in Latin America, a region considered crucial to U.S. trade and security, where rival powers (especially Germany) were gaining ground at the expense of American exporters. However, Hull was able to negotiate agreements with only three of ten South American countries by September 1939, because the reciprocal trade program ran up against opposition from Latin Americans who opposed the most-favored-nation requirement that they abandon all bilateral arrangements with other countries. Since pressure from Congress on behalf of special interests ensured that the Latin American countries were not granted unrestricted access to the U.S. market, these countries would have been seriously hampered in their efforts to sell their raw materials abroad had they eliminated the bilateral agreements with European countries that absorbed much of their exports.

Between 1934 and 1947 the United States made separate trade agreements with twenty-nine foreign countries. The Tariff Commission found that when it used dutiable imports in 1939 as its basis for comparison, U.S. tariffs were reduced from an average of 48 percent to an average of 25 percent during the thirteen-year period.

The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade

During World War II the State Department and other government agencies worked on plans for the reconstruction of world trade and payments. They discovered important defects in the trade agreements program, and they concluded that they could make better headway through simultaneous multilateral negotiations. After the war, President Harry S. Truman used the RTAA to authorize the United States to join twenty-three separate countries conducting tariff negotiations bilaterally on a product-by-product basis, with each country negotiating its concessions on each import commodity with the principal supplier of that commodity. The various bilateral under-standings were combined to form the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), signed in Geneva on 30 October 1947.""






Peace