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Many realist explanations of French and British appeasement policies in the 1930s, including our own, assume or imply that policy was closely informed by intelligence assessments. One potential threat to these interpretations is the possibility that instead of intelligence shaping policy, the policy preferences of political leaders may have shaped intelligence, either through the politicization of intelligence or perhaps through the motivated biases of political leaders. In an earlier paper we demonstrated that the reports of British intelligence agencies in the 1930s were not politicized. In this paper we turn to French intelligence assessments of Nazi Germany in the 1933-39 period. Our general finding is that French military intelligence was consistently accurate in its assessments of Nazi intentions, but that until 1938 it consistently overestimated German capabilities relative to those of France. In terms of the politics of intelligence, we find very little evidence of French military intelligence assessments being significantly shaped by pressure from top political leaders for "intelligence to please." We find some evidence, however, that French military leaders deliberately inflated assessments of German capabilities in struggles to increase military budgets after years of neglect, that top political leaders were aware of this, and that they discounted some of these estimates. At many critical times, however, French intelligence assessments had a decisive impact on French policy, including the shift towards increasing reliance on Britain in the mid-1930s and the shift towards a more confrontational policy toward Germany after the Munich conference in 1938. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The “theory” of preventive war predicts that states are most likely to undertake military action in response to a rising challenger if they expect that the adversary will surpass them in military strength and then engage in hostile behavior, so that a future war with the challenger is likely. The biggest apparent anomaly for this theory is the Western rejection of a strategy of prevention based on better-now-than-later logic in favor of the strategy of appeasement in the 1930s. In our previous work on the Rhineland Crisis of 1936 and the Czechoslovak Crisis of 1938, we demonstrated that the British and French non-response is not at odds with preventive war theory because British leaders believed that the transition had already occurred prior to 1936, leaving France and Britain with few options, and because French leaders would not take a firm stand against Germany without British support. This interpretation begs the question of why Britain and France did not respond more firmly to the rise of Hitler and to German rearmament before 1936, either through military buildups of their own, a containment strategy based on alliances, or perhaps through coercive threats or preventive military action. In this paper, we address this important question with an analysis of British and French government documents and private papers. We conclude with a discussion of the limits of preventive war theory. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the anomalies in the theory of preventive war by looking at the case involving Great Britain, France and Germany in the 1930s. It cites that preventive war refers a war driven by the perception of a rising adversary, the fear of the consequences of an adverse shift in power and by the temptation to use military force to hamper the further growth of the adversary. It cites that France and Great Britain pursued a policy of appeasement rather than preventive war when Germany obtained a rise in military potential and power.