For over a year, the U.S. had been providing large amounts of economic aid to Britain in the form of loans and credit and Lend-Lease; in the Atlantic Charter, Roosevelt had pledged that America would be the "arsenal of democracy." German attacks on American shipping – which, after a period in which U-boats were ordered to avoid doing so whenever possible – began well before the German declaration of war meant that American naval ships inevitably became involved in conflicts with German ones. Ribbentrop expressed the opinion that great powers do not wait to have war declared on them, and it may have seemed to Hitler – ignorant as he was of strains in the Anglo-American relationship – that the United States, as a near-belligerent, might formally declare war on Germany in any case.[1]