Enactment of the measure was precipitated by the great international crisis of 1940-1941. Smashing victories had given Nazi Germany control of almost all of Europe. Making it worse, Hitler's Germany was allied with Stalin's Soviet Union until June 1941. Britain in the summer of 1940 stood alone, facing invasion and defeat. If, like France, it collapsed, control of the North Atlantic would pass inevitably to German hands, American freedom on the high seas would vanish, and the North American continent eventually would be exposed to invasion. Acting on these assumptions, the Roosevelt administration decided to aid the British, but it had to confront Anglophobia (especially on the part of Irish Americans), isolationism (especially on the part of German-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans, and Republicans), and the myth that the British Empire was so abundantly rich it did not need money.[2]