Of course, there's a lot of things we know now which show the conflict was a lot more complex, but at its core, the Axis needed to be defeated for our western style of freedom to exist.
I don't think we'll ever have something as clear cut as WWII again. News was highly controlled by a few media institutions and our country (US) was much less fractured than it is today.
It also feels like some things have shifted and there actually is a lot more clarity lately.
The right path is never clear when you're in the valley of the moment.
Also in hindsight it is not always clear, if the choosen path was really the best.
As strong as? I don't see much of an isolationist strain in the US today at all. The paleoconservatives are isolationist, but they barely exist any more. The Biden administration appointed a neoconservative as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs.
And cutting ties with countries in NATO that repeatedly refuse to make the financial contributions towards defense that they pledged to make is also not "isolationism". NATO countries made a deal, part of that deal was 2% of GDP to defense, there are NATO countries that over and over have refused to keep their part of the deal, they promised to do something and year after year after year, broke their promise. Saying, "OK, we have had enough, deal is off" is not "isolationism", it's a common sense bargaining technique.
And "a strong affinity toward foreign autocrats", if it were true, would also not be "isolationism", it would be the opposite of isolationism. An isolationist country does not have a strong affinity for foreign leaders of any type.
I'm not quite an isolationist, but I lean that way. I wish Trump was an isolationist. I wish there was any major politician that was. Sadly, no.
I agree, it's more than isolationism: it's sheer stupidity and the Hallmark of a compromised government official.
It's unbelievably stupid to claim that members of an alliance are protecting their interests by rejecting mutual defense agreements due to flutuations in the order of fractions of a percent in a metric that is by its very nature completely arbitrary.
It is fascinating to see bent-reality arithmetic in real time:
“There is no isolationist strain”
“Okay yes there is but it’s ‘counterbalanced’ (whatever that means) through vigorous efforts by the opponents of that strain!”
That’s called there being an isolationist strain buddy.
It just isn't. That's not what "isolationism" means.
> ‘counterbalanced’ (whatever that means)
ah, you are engaging in bad faith. adios!
Huh
And I've just explained exactly how it's consequential and not meaningless. It succeeded in delaying aid to Ukraine. There you go: a consequence!
The US didn't join the war until they were attacked. Same goes for UK and France - they technically did declare the war when Poland was invaded - as there was a defensive agreement between the 3 countries - but in reality they didn't send any help.
France has a border with Germany - UK & France were supposed to launch an attack on Germany from there. In reality, they did a half-assed attempt to invade Germany and called it quits.
I believe that if UK & France did react, mobilize fully and went to war with Germany on 1 September 1939, the war would be much shorter.
Quite similarly, if the West did provide advanced arms (which we are providing now ! way too late) to Ukraine 2 years ago, Russia would be unable of unwilling to take any land and the war would be much shorter.
The above is in my view a near certainty if it had happened that way. More speculatively, had Churchill been Prime Minister instead of Chamberlain at the time of the Poland invasion (instead of becoming PM right at the time of the invasion of France), the British response would have been much stronger and that would have prompted an also stronger French response that could have dramatically curtailed the scope of the European war.
Hitler's army in 1939 simply wasn't good or well provisioned enough to sustain anything serious against any major enemy. It pulled off what it pulled off in the following months more through a mix of luck and sheer blunder by its enemies.
Things looked clearer on the Western Front, because it was a peripheral front outside the main conflict.
The problem with this hero narrative is the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union (contrary to D-Day propaganda movies) was instrumental to winning the war. So how does the Soviet Union fit into that considering that these same patriots claim the the Soviet Union was evil and hated freedom?
Note that I make no claims about what the Soviet Union was about. This is about the cohesion of the “our western style of freedom” belief.
I say WWII was dicey because we literally burned cities, we dropped nuclear bombs, we leveled entire cities with bombing runs as show of force. You can argue these things were necessary - and I agree! But it's important to realize much of this occurred before we knew about the atrocities.
If you read enough Sun Tzu, nobody really knows (from a warriors perspective) why they go to war until you're there. The populace almost never knows the truth, even through time, because most of what they're told is a story that changes with time. It's true of most wars.
PBS did a great documentary of Nazis in the US pre-WWII
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/nazi-town-...
It elaborates on your point about the large US Nazi presence.
I'm sure there's more examples, but the only allied case I can think of was a soldier convicted for hiding in an ambulance and shooting from it.
There was a strategic decision not to charge Nazis for the bombing of London.
Not quite; that requires equalities; the Nazis and that version of Japan were not nearly equal in their evil or atrocities to the Allies. My point moreso was that the Allies were doing a thing in war we don't do anymore, which is matching force with force - which today is illegal. We have the Geneva Convention that stops us from doing that anymore. Now of course, late in the war we discovered the death camps and that is the post-hoc rationalization that I'm referring to but nonetheless the Geneva convention is a byproduct of the shock of what it took to win. It more or less attempts to put a ceiling on the ferocity of war.