Berlin ceremony formalizes Germany, Italy, and Japan into the Axis alliance
France had fallen three months earlier, and Britain stood alone against Germany in the west. On September 27, 1940, representatives of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan gathered in Berlin and signed the Tripartite Pact, binding each nation to come to the others' aid if any were attacked by a power not already at war with them. The agreement gave formal shape to what the world would soon call the Axis. It was less a friendship than a division of spoils: Germany and Italy took Europe for their sphere. Japan took Asia and the Pacific.
The United States was not a party to the pact, but its architects wrote it with Washington in mind: the mutual-defense clause targeted "a power not already at war" with any signatory, meaning the still-neutral United States. The pact hardened American opinion toward Japan and accelerated the embargoes that preceded Pearl Harbor about fourteen months later.
