At its peak, the Lend-Lease programs assisted 38 countries with supplies and equipment to the tune of around $50 billion — the equivalent of nearly $700 billion today when accounting for inflation. Britain received the lion’s share, and eventually only about $8 billion was ever actually repaid, with most of that coming from the U.K. and France. Moreover, while intact equipment was meant to be returned under the deal’s terms, in reality there was little of that. Instead, what remained was sold to the allies at discount prices. No price gouging there.
In addition to help defeating Nazi Germany, Benito Mussolini’s Italy and imperial Japan, the U.S. received some other tangible benefits from these deals too. There was some reverse Lend-Lease and reciprocal contributions, including Mosquito photo-reconnaissance aircraft and aviation spark plugs for B-17 Flying Fortresses from the U.K., petroleum products from India, food for GIs in the South Pacific from Australia and New Zealand, and Joseph Stalin supplied the U.S. with chrome, manganese ore, platinum, gold and wood.
It was, however, all diminutive in scale compared to what allies got from the U.S. But that was never the point.
And years later, in 2022, former President Joe Biden cited Roosevelt’s program as he signed the Ukraine Democracy Defense Lend-Lease Act to supply military, economic and humanitarian aid to Ukraine in its defense against Russia.
Trump, though, doesn’t see the self-interest in helping allies, instead repeating the U.S. is safe thanks to “a big, beautiful ocean.” But Roosevelt didn’t believe that. In a December 1940 radio broadcast, where he introduced the idea of America becoming “the great arsenal of democracy,” he warned the country couldn’t stand aloof: “Some of us like to believe that even if Britain falls, we are still safe, because of the broad expanse of the Atlantic and of the Pacific.” Modern technology, he cautioned, had already effectively reduced the distances across those oceans.
Roosevelt’s Lend-Lease agreements provided for repayment not in terms of money or returned equipment, but rather required “joint action directed towards the creation of a liberalized international economic order in the postwar world.”
That, of course, isn’t something that would work for Trump — he wants to smash the order FDR laid the groundwork for.