stylistic:tone
International relations

The political and emotional repercussions of the War transcended the national scale, becoming a precursor to the Second World War. The war has frequently been described by historians as the "prelude to" or the "opening round of" the Second World War, as part of an international battle against fascism. Historian Stanley Payne suggests that this view is an incorrect summary of the geopolitic position of the interwar period, arguing that the international alliance that was created in December 1941, once the United States entered the Second World War, was politically much broader than the Spanish Popular Front. The Spanish Civil War, Payne argues, was thus a far more clear-cut revolutionary and counter-revolutionary struggle between the left and right wings, while the Second World War initially had fascists and communist powers on the same side with the combined Nazi-Soviet invasion of Poland. Payne suggests that instead the civil war was the last of the revolutionary crises that emerged from the First World War, observing it had parallels such as the complete revolutionary breakdown of domestic institutions, the development of full-scale revolutionary and counter-revolutionary struggles, the development of a typical post-WW1 communist force in the form of the People's Army, an extreme exacerbation of nationalism, the frequent use of WW1-style military weapons and tactics and the fact that it was not the product of the plan of any of the major powers, making it more similar to the post-WW1 crises which arose after the Treaty of Versailles.

After the War, Spanish policy leaned heavily towards Germany, Portugal and Italy, since they had been the greatest Nationalist supporters and aligned with Spain ideologically. However, the end of the Civil War and later the Second World War saw the isolation of the country from most other nations until the 1950s, in which the American anti-Communist international policy favoured having a far-right and extremely anti-communist ally in Europe.