Forces and to impose law and order in the Republican-held area, against largely independent armed militias of the labour unions (CNT) and parties, thus curtailing the social revolution inside the Republic. He also wanted to break the international isolation of the Republic in order to get the arms embargo – imposed by the Non-Intervention Committee – lifted, and from 1938 to search an international mediation in order to finish the war. He also wished to normalize the position of the Catholic Church inside the Republic. Eventually, the 'normalization' in Spain was intended to connect the Spanish conflict with Second World War, which he believed to be imminent, although the Munich Agreement between Hitler and British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain on 30 September 1938 definitively made all hope of outside aid vanish. PCE's support Although Negrín had always been a centrist in the PSOE, he maintained links with the Communist Party of Spain (, PCE), whose policies at that point were in favour of a Popular Front alignment. Negrín relied on the Communists to curtail the anarchist wing of the Spanish Left, and was forced to rely on the Soviet Union, then led by Stalin, for weapons and armament, because of the arms embargo. The government and the communists were able to exploit their access to Soviet arms to restore government control over the war effort, through diplomacy and force. The militias of the anarchists and the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (, POUM) were integrated into the regular army, albeit with resistance. The POUM Trotskyists were outlawed and denounced by the Soviet-aligned Communists as an instrument of the fascists. Republican Spain needed the Soviet Union's support because the Non-Intervention Agreement imposed on the conflict prevented the democratically elected government from acquiring arms and other war materiel in its own right on the open market arms to defend itself. Military situation On the military level, along 1937 he launched a series of offensives in June (Huesca & Segovia), July, Brunete and August, Belchite, in order to halt the Nationalist offensive in the North, but all failed and by October the Nationalists had occupied all of the Northern territory. Beginning December, he launched an offensive in order to free Teruel, but by February the Republican Army had to retreat after suffering heavy losses and the rebel faction launched a counter-offensive in Aragon, cutting in half the Republican-held zone. In July 1938 Negrín