During the "Romanian war scare" of March 1939, when the Romanian government, as part of an effort to enlist British support against German demands for the control of the Romanian oil industry, had the Romanian Minister in London Virgil Tilea make a series of highly misleading statements to the British government to the effect that they were under the verge of an immediate German invasion, Bonnet happened to be in London as part of the company accompanying the state visit of President Albert Lebrun. The importance of Romania was that Germany possessed no oil of its own and was highly-dependent on oil from the New World (the coal liquefaction plants that were to supply Germany with oil during World War II were not yet in operation). As such, a naval blockade of Germany would have had highly damaging effects on the German economy, and conversely, a German seizure of Romania would undermine the effectiveness of a blockade. When the war scare began on 18 March 1939, Bonnet's first response was to inform the Romanians that they should accept aid from the Soviet Union as there was nothing France could do to save them. The Romanians rejected the French advice while Jakob Suritz, the Soviet Ambassador to France, stated the Soviet Union would take no initiatives in resisting German aggression in Eastern Europe, and France must show the way.