Effective with the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939, the magazine began to divorce itself from the Communist movement altogether, including its dissident Trotskyist wing. Rahv and Phillips gave qualified support to the campaign for American rearmament and the country's preparation for war, opposed by Macdonald and another editor at the time, Clement Greenberg. A tentative truce between the editors averted a split, with Macdonald finally departing in 1943 to form the pacifist magazine "politics."