this post was submitted on 26 May 2026
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You can't think of a particular laurel the USA has been resting on since 1945?
Being the only country to use nuclear weapons?
Needing the fascists to bomb a naval base in an island colony to reluctantly join the fight against them, rather than just war profiteering?
Have I lost the thread? We're just openly admitting now that we'd blame the US regardless of which decision they made?
This is literally my only comment in this thread. Are "we" an amalgam to you?
And even if "we" are to be considered an amalgam, can you find a set of comments such that "we" criticize every possible choice the US could have made with regard to a specific decision?
The USW has plenty of sins but to Axt like the US has done nothing good for the whole fucking world since 1945 is frankly absurd. You could argue it is a net negative and at least you'd have something to argue about but saying they've done nothing for the world is just stupid. The world has relied on the US for decades for massive funding of many many projects around the world. Was it self serving also? Absolutely but it still helped a lot and no one else was fucking doing it.
Now Diddy Trump goes in and gets rid of all the "extra" US spending so he can plunder even ire and who the fuck has stood up to fill the US gaps? Oh yeah. No one.
So yeah duck the US and their meddling but at least it had some collateral good. Where the hell are the other countries that just pointed at the US and patted themselves on the back for helping maintain world peace. Germany? England? France? Hello. Spend money on the world please. It needs it.
Think we'd be better off if they'd sat it out?
They did sit it out as much as they could - the Japanese attacked them and then the Germans declared war on them, the US was only involved out of self-defense.
We would probably have been better off if the US had declared war on Germany in September of 1939, rather than Germany declaring war on the US 2¼ years later out of solidarity with Japan.
Since we can speculate how much better it would have been if they'd joined sooner, can we also speculate if it would be worse - at all - if they'd never joined?
Folks love to read a history book on WW2 and tell themselves the only fascists that ever existed were the Germans, the Italian, (and occasionally the Japanese).
And then we say "they lost! we won! Problem solved!"
Maybe with some hand waving about how Russia was full of Tankies and it's a good thing we won the Cold War, too.
There's never any real analysis of why we joined the side we did or why we broke with them before the smoke had even cleared.
the book i like on ww2 history is about submarines. no geopolitics at all, just submarines and what it's like to be on a submarine (because my wife's grandfather was on one of the submarines they were talking about in the book? i read it two decades ago before i started dating my wife. her little brother recommended it to me in high school before i met her. and shit high school was not two decades ago.). aaand i think i forgot the name. it might be Iron Coffins.
Bro thats like asking if we'd be better off if the world was flat, too large a question with too many variables, completely impossible to actually give a proper answer
China might have become a Japanese colony, and all of Germany would have become part of the Soviet block.
The war may have lasted a year longer.
And the US wouldn't have become the leading superpower in the world.
The Nazis definitely wouldn't have won, though. They were on the back foot before the US military entered the war in Europe.
(I'm assuming the US would have still supplied the Soviets with weapons, cause there's no reason to assume they would let a good opportunity for profit go to waste)
On a side note, the US declared war only on Japan. They didn't enter the war to stop the Nazis for moral reasons, only as a reaction to being attacked themselves. So there wasn't really an option to sit it out.
The US was instrumental in backstopping Moscow and Beijing during the late 30s, which is what dragged us into the conflict at Pearl Harbor. Japan was trying to cut our supply lines to it's enemies.
Go back to 1932 and hypothesize that the Dems had flubbed it. Or that some neoliberal hack had taken over after Hoover and dragged out the Depression another four years.
Then imagine fascism fully taking hold in the US like it had in Europe. I don't think the Soviets benefit from that. I also don't think China becomes a Japanese colony (for the same reason Japan was run out of Vietnam without any real Western aid). But you also probably don't get Nixon opening the US economy to China in the 60s.
It raises a ton of question marks across the board. What happens to the Middle East, Latin America, and the Pacific Rim? What happens to India and the African states as they industrialize? What does Europe look like under a post-Hitler government? Etc etc.
Absent the US, I don't see how you get 1950s Europe in any conventional sense
OK, you postulate a lot more hypotheticals.
In the end, a lot of things could have had a major effect, and it's impossible to tell the result.
That's the fundamental problem with the premise. I might suggest comparing WW2 to profit prior periods of global war - the Thirty Years War or the Napoleonic Wars or even WW1 - when looking for a "what might have been?" hypothetical.
WW1 is actually a great comparison, as it illustrates a world that fought a brutal, self-destructive conflict and came out of it learning virtually nothing.
I vehemently disagree on the world learning nothing.
Chamberlain's appeasement policy was motivated by lessons learnt from WW1.
The "sitting war" that left Poland all alone against Germany while Germany's western border was wide open was due to lessons learnt from WW1.
The French defensive strategy was a direct result of lessons learnt from WW1.
The US reluctance to get involved was due to WW1 experience.
Even the crippling reparations for Germany that helped the Nazis rise to power in the first place were a result of lessons learnt from WW1.
My point is: The entire world learnt lessons from WW1. They did the best they could to prevent another war just like it.
But without the benefit of hindsight, they didn't realize how much had changed in the few interwar years, so they learnt all the wrong lessons.
Literally you are the same problem you despise on the right side. This type of person is destroying the world. And get. You think you are helping. Ironic.
All this blind single issue rage.
Hey, the world is more complicated than 0 or 1. Fucking read more and process before you blurt out the first thing your little meat engine had pop into it.
they took all the credit from the soviet union, just joining the war when it was really already lost for germany, because russia was pushing through the east.
Sure let's pretend Lend-Lease wasn't a thing.
After all, we only sent the Soviets 17.5 million TONS of aid.
That's so not true! The U.S. also sold weapons to both sides!