What do you figure he had to say after 1945?
Source: New York Times.
https://www.nytimes.com/1931/01/30/archives/united-states-ap...
https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1931v02/d6...
That's rich :) For all intents and purposes you're supporting it, you just like to support it while feeling morally superior.
And to that matter, some of what brought the U.S. into the orbit of WWII was a lower key version of the kind of foreign policies of that earlier era. Disrupting Japanese interests in Asia was very much about economic benefit and power balance in the mode of realpolitik.
And in the end, the Roosevelt administration remains unique in American history for how hard it pushed against colonialism. Truman was much more aligned with British interests in this way than FDR. So while the war is justified in the name of stopping two monstrous regimes, its precursors and its aftermath do carry a fair amount of the same taint that Butler thoroughly observed in his time.
Even the example you've taken for WWII, UK and US weren't the aggressor. The war already at their door for British, so they had a little choice in it. Similarly for US they knew, if they don't do something early enough, they could end up being a victim or suffer from it eventually. So they had to support Britain in the war.
There are many wars where multiple sides are belligerent. There are wars where a side manages to profit or benefit from a conflict without appearing as a belligerent. And there are wars where it's not clear who the beligerent is.
In the French Revolutionary wars, France appears as the aggressor, as they declared war first. But they declared war as a pre-emptive to gain advantage in a conflict with Austria over Bourbon restoration that they felt sure would come. And judging by contemporary history (the partitions of Poland, the Hungarian rebellion, the Revolutions of 1848, etc), they were probably right.
There is the Franco-Prussian war, a war which was essentially desired by both sides.
Most civil wars rarely have a clear beligerent side with slow escalation of violence by multiple parties.
We are deep into the era of nationalistic propaganda so we are used to conceiving of wars as clear conflicts between two cohesive political units: one the aggressor and one the defender. But that is a concpetion mostly born out of our experiences in the 20th century and even then it is highly biased by the popular narrative of WWII.
All of them were completely devastated, while the US was largely unscathed.
I really wonder what the world would look like today if they'd managed to avoid this senseless war and/or the first World War.
Sadly, that is true.
> the US was selling weapons to the allies and making piles of money doing so
Indeed.
War Is a Racket.
“WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.” - SB
We are told a version of things, and maybe that version is even mostly true, but I'm less sure about this now then I was when I was a kid in grade school.
(with the unstated assumption that the US was just in its choice to fight the Axis)
I actually don't think Smedley would have changed his message at all; I think he started from a false premise that he was 100% convinced of, and would have pointed at the enormous profits made by war industrialists in the US during WWII. He might not also notice that post-war US was the most economically productive country of all time, that it opened up huge options of African Americans, or even really recognize quite what motivated Hitler and the Nazis.
But what is undeniable is the US exited WWII in a very good position and lots of profits were made.
The USA started selling weapons to the allies long before it entered the war.
This is AFTER the allies attempted appeasement. If a foreign country wants to war, you can't not war. The only alternative is to roll over and accept new ownership, but usually new ownership disagrees with the people on how things should be done, so that "solution" largely isn't.
There was a period were Germany seemed unstoppable remember.
Your facile equivalence is rejected with prejudice.
It's your facile equivalence, that because these specific things don't apply to the US, American imperialism was morally justified.
You could just read the Wikipedia article on American war crimes, or learn about how much of the Nazi's ideology was based on American eugenics and racial segregation, or take even a glance at the last several decades of American militarism throughout the Middle East, but I guess you won't.
This is explicitly not a support of the parent's comment. The US was not great, and even had explicit segregation, but was not trying to spread it's own abysmal ideals to all of europe. Hitler was clearly trying to spread facism through all of europe, and eventually the world. His desire to do so was broadly popular in Nazi Germany, so the country's people were never going to stop him. Going to war to grind Nazi Germany into the dust was the only option. It is justified. We also didn't preempt anything. We sacrificed two sovereign countries hoping to avoid that war, which should be clearly not acceptable.