Global celebrity Charles Lindbergh and master politician President Franklin D. Roosevelt dueled over America’s entry into World War II prior to Pearl Harbor. The world-famous aviator, through the America First Committee, professedly opposed U.S. involvement as a fool’s errand that would foster dictatorship at home.

Roosevelt insisted America’s entry was indispensable to preventing Adolf Hitler from exporting his police state and extermination camps to the Western Hemisphere. His platform was the White House fortified by three presidential victories in 1932, 1936 and 1940, the latter shattering President George Washington’s de facto two-term limit.

Historian H.W. Brands in “America First” wonderfully chronicles the duel between titanic personalities with galloping prose — a reader’s delight. But things are seldom what they seem. Ulterior motives predominate. Brands briefly digs below the surface to question whether Lindbergh and Roosevelt were sincere, but further digging would have unearthed a mother lode of insincerities.

President Roosevelt craved power, the raison d’etre of virtually every politician. Henry Kissinger noted, “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”

War was Roosevelt’s excuse to justify a pathbreaking third term. Roosevelt’s professed horror at Hitler’s threat to democratic dispensations or the diabolically racist Nuremberg laws stretches credulity. His administration refused landing to more than 900 Jews fleeing the Third Reich on the St. Louis. Of that number, 254 later perished in the death camps at Auschwitz and Sobibor.

Roosevelt was an Ivy Leaguer, and Ivy League schools were then notorious for artificially capping the number of Jewish enrollees. Confidential files kept in his personal safe in the White House as well as correspondence in his personal files make it clear that where to settle the Jews had been on FDR’s mind for years. The one place he knew he didn’t want them was the United States of America.

Roosevelt’s attachment to democratic norms was dubious. Lynching, disenfranchisement and subjugation of Black people during his administration was rampant. He opposed a federal anti-lynching law. He created concentration camps for 120,000 innocent Japanese Americans during World War II and maintained segregation in the armed forces.

The president touting the United States as the arsenal of democracy to support the United Kingdom headed by Winston Churchill and Soviet Union headed by “Uncle Joe” Stalin was laughable. Dictator Stalin’s show trials and purges murdered tens of millions as documented by Robert Conquest. Stalin slaughtered millions more kulaks. He perpetrated genocide in Ukraine through the Holodomor. Before Hitler’s invasion in 1941, Stalin had attacked and occupied Poland, Finland and Romania under the umbrella of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact.

As for the United Kingdom, Prime Minister Churchill proudly proclaimed, “I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.” As World War II unfolded, the empire governed over 400 million inhabitants or 23% of the world’s population occupying 35.5 million square kilometers. None enjoyed self-determination. They subsisted under the British thumb with no representation in the British parliament. Indeed, after the Battle of Britain in 1940, U.S. weapons were mainly used to defend the British empire, not the United Kingdom.

Lindbergh’s ulterior motives for opposing entry into World War II are cloudier than Roosevelt’s in support. He was not a politician. He was not a philosopher. He had no mastery of the Declaration of Independence or Constitution. He was not against an American empire, including its suzerainty over the Philippines, Guam, Panama, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua and Mexico. Lindbergh was no John Quincy Adams, who urged war only in self-defense in his July 4, 1821, address to Congress: “[America’s] glory is not dominion, but liberty. Her march is the march of the mind. She has a spear and a shield: but the motto upon her shield is, Freedom, Independence, Peace.”

Lindbergh’s antisemitism was undeniable. He perceived Jews as a race distinct from Americans and with distinct interests. He accepted the Service Cross of the German Eagle from Hitler’s reichsmarschall in 1938, Hermann Goering, after the Nuremberg laws had reduced Jews to non-persons.

On Sept. 11, 1941, Lindbergh delivered a speech in Des Moines that spoke volumes. He assailed Jews for allegedly supporting war against Nazi Germany. In a sentence worthy of the fraudulent “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” Lindbergh declaimed that the “greatest danger to this country lies in” Jewish “large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.” He then characterized Jews as a separate race like the British who are motivated by reasons “which are not American” and who have “their own interests.”

The Roosevelt-Lindbergh duel distracts Brand from a much larger truth. War is in the DNA of the species. The craving for power and domination dwarfs all other hormonal gratifications. From the beginning of time, as Thucydides observed, the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must — even if it means self-ruination like Napoleon’s march to Moscow. The United States struck a Faustian bargain at the time of the Spanish-American War to trade the republic for empire as God’s putative new chosen people obligated to dominate the world to discharge the white man’s burden.

Since 9/11, the United States has embraced perpetual war from which there is no escape but for the collapse of the American empire like its predecessors.

Bruce Fein was associate deputy attorney general under President Ronald Reagan and is author of “American Empire Before the Fall.” His website is www.lawofficesofbrucefein.com and X feed is @brucefeinesq.