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Preamble: "The Governments of Germany, Italy and Japan . . . have decided to stand by and cooperate with one another in regard to their efforts in Greater East Asia and regions of Europe respectively, wherein it is their prime purpose to establish and maintain a new order of things calculated to promote and maintain the mutual prosperity and welfare of the peoples concerned. . . .
Article I: "Japan recognizes and respects the leadership of Germany and Italy in the establishment of a new order in Europe.
Article II: "Germany and Italy recognize and respect the leadership of Japan in the establishment of a new order in Greater East Asia.
Article III: "Germany, Italy and Japan . . . undertake to assist one another with all political, economic and military means when one of the three contracting powers is attacked by a power at present not involved in the European war or the Chinese-Japanese conflict.
Article IV: "With the view to implementing the present pact, joint technical commissions, members of which are to be appointed by the respective governments of Germany, Italy and Japan, will meet without delay.
Article V : "Germany, Italy and Japan affirm that the aforesaid terms do not in any way affect the political status which exists at present between each of the three contracting parties and Soviet Russia.
Article VI: "The present pact . . . shall remain in force ten years. . . . The high contracting parties shall at the request of any of them enter into negotiations for its renewal."
250,000,000 Strong. While Adolf Hitler glowered at the table top, Joachim von Ribbentrop launched into a speech which made clearer than crystal a fact that was crystal-clear already: the treaty was an alliance against the U. S. Cried he:
"The pact which has been signed is a military alliance between three of the mightiest States on earth. . . . It is to help to bring peace to the world as quickly as possible. . . . Any State, should it harbor the intention of mixing in the final phase of the solution of these problems in Europe or Eastern Asia, or attacking one State signatory to this three-power pact, will have to take on the entire concentrated might of three nations with more than 250,000,000 inhabitants."
What Germany, Italy and Japan had said to the U. S. was simply this: if the U. S. joins Britain in the European war, Japan will attack in the Pacific; if the U. S. interferes in the Chinese war or tries to stop Japanese expansion, Germany and Italy will attack in the Atlantic. If the U. S. can be frightened into isolation, the Rome-Berlin-Tokyo Axis thinks it can pick the British Empire to pieces.
No bombshell through the roof of the U. S. State Department was this treaty. Secretary of State Cordell Hull laconically observed that it was merely another brick in the structure of anti-U. S. Japanese foreign policy, which he apparently had despaired of altering as long ago as 1936. But nobody could deny that the treaty was a diplomatic defeat for the U. S., which for the first time in its history was now encircled by enemies.