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Comment by SkipperCat | Hacker News Reader

A lot of people, including myself, feel similar when looking back at WWII. The roles of good and evil were very clearly defined and that has forged the US foreign policy up to today.

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.

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You should read up a bit more on how people perceived it contemporaneously. It’s too easy to absolve oneself of having to think hard about the current goings on when we can look at WWII and act like the right answer was obvious to everyone.

This is an important point. There was a US isolationist strain as strong as it is today. The Man in the High Castle alt history, or The Plot Against America, both involve FDR not being involved for WW2, and that's where the US stands today: at a similar decision point about how it decides to act.

The right path is never clear when you're in the valley of the moment.

"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.

>> There was a US isolationist strain as strong as it is today

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.

The former President reportedly was ready to pull the U.S. from NATO in his second term, and has demonstrated a strong affinity toward the autocrats currently making life miserable for our allies, which has carried over to his entire party.

Leaving NATO is not "isolationism".

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.

> 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".

I agree, it's more than isolationism: it's sheer stupidity and the Hallmark of a compromised government official.

I disagree that it is stupid to require entities you make a deal with to uphold their side of the deal. It is stupid not to do that.

Not if you’re worse off for it.

I'm not going to engage with you because you are clearly being disingenuous. The "deal" that NATO represents is not spending, and GDP targets are at best a line in the sand of a proxy variable regarding readiness.

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.

you are confusing some words a former president said with actual events and material course of history. the US has been continuously directly or indirectly participating in wars for over 20 years at this point, while it directs the largest international military alliance in history and orchestrates the exclusion of its opponents from global financial markets. none of this is exclusive to any party; this is the logic of empire

None of this discredits the argument that there exists an isolationist strain in US politics today.

yes, a strain that has manifested in...withdrawing from one (1) conflict after 20 years. even the example he gives, of threatening to withdraw from nato, is counterbalanced by the fact that nato has in fact expanded since! this is a 'strain in american politics' in the same way that being a billionaire is a strain in my worldview or speaking russian is a strain in mexican culture

It also delayed critical military aid from Ukraine, ceding European ground to a violent and despicable autocrat.

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.

Giving a country military aid, but not as much military aid as that country might have liked, is not isolationism.

It just isn't. That's not what "isolationism" means.

Good god. No one is saying “the US is isolationist.”

no one is saying “There is no isolationist strain” either, just that it's inconsequential and meaningless

> ‘counterbalanced’ (whatever that means)

ah, you are engaging in bad faith. adios!

> I don't see much of an isolationist strain in the US today at all

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 words of one president versus having active military bases all over the worlf.

The words of an elected president (and at least half his party) absolutely qualifies as proof of an isolationist strain existing within US politics.

I would remark that the isolationist strain developed after WW I, and included a fair bit of the liberal intelligentsia, e.g. Charles Beard. The Library of America Reporting WW II cheats on this, and implies that isolationism was a fetish of Republican congressmen from ethnic districts. Not so.

I was under the impression that the US was rather isolationist back in President Washington's day. And he argued rather strongly that it should remain so after he left office - in 1797.

Obviously the US has gone through various phases. The one relevant to our decision making in WW2 was largely driven by what happened in WW1.

I mention that in my 3rd sentence, but as an American of Jewish decent, the sides of WWII could not have been any clearer. My family did not have the option to weigh the facts and choose a side, it was chosen for us. I am just thankful that we happened to leave Europe before it all fell apart.

You said that now we see it as more complex. You should read about the actual arguments that were being made for and against intervention at that time. There absolutely was not an obvious consensus in the US until Pearl Harbor.

That's true towards the end of the war, but in the beginning ?

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.

What help could they realistically send? Poland was between the two nations that were invading it and the UK was only just introducing a bomber (Wellington) with the range for a direct return flight to Warsaw (and such a flight was impossible since it passes over Germany). Marine access means a long Baltic voyage past the main German navy bases. An assault on Germany would have been via the neighbouring countries and so needed their cooperation, and would still have come too late to save Poland.

What cooperation ?

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.

When Germany invaded Poland, the vast majority of its (believe it or not limited) fighting power was fully tied up in that conflict. During that same time, The larger, stronger, better equipped French army could have (with the aid of the BEF) invaded Germany from its border with it (and possibly even through Belgium) and caused absolute chaos in the German's plans for expansion. ven if the French/British had failed to make that invasion decisive, it would almost certainly have broken the back of the entire chain of lightning victories and support for Hitler that came later. At the very least, that preemptive invasion attempt would have been able to mobilize the French Army enough to completely forestall the terrible consequences of low morale and rapid military collapse that eventually befell France when it actually was invaded so spectacularly.

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.

We did not send troops until '42, but from about 1941 FDR was sending massive amounts of aid to the UK and USSR thru the lend lease and other programs.

I have spent most of my life with the US involved in a variety of ... "not very clear cut things" and we'll leave it at that.

It also feels like some things have shifted and there actually is a lot more clarity lately.

Agreed. History is rhyming a lot, lately. Feels like we're reliving events from about 100ish years ago.

The post-hoc rationalizations are clearly defined, which makes people more comfortable paying homage to WWII despite it being incredibly dicey. I say post-hoc because the US actually had a rather large Nazi party forming. Most people joining the war were pretty aloof as to why. It was only when those troops encountered the the Nazi death camps that the state of things became clear. The US primarily joined the war effort not because we heard what was happening to Jews, not because there was a massive land grab occurring, and not because two countries had gone an absolutely psychotic blitzkrieg - but because the Japanese Empire dared to bomb our strategic island fleet. It was a major blow, but just enough to wake up a sleeping beast.

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.

It has been said if the US and its allies lost WWII, the victorious Axis would have tried and executed the US military leaders for war crimes for the bombing campaigns. A prime example of history is written by the victors.

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.

Were any axis leaders tried for war crimes related to bombing campaigns? Most of what I've heard of relates to smaller more specific warcrimes and ones related to genocide.

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.

No: https://www.lewrockwell.com/2008/06/patrick-j-buchanan/wwii-...

There was a strategic decision not to charge Nazis for the bombing of London.

> A prime example of history is written by the victors.

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.

> 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.

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.

The European theater of WW2 was a war between nazism and communism, with free countries on both sides, depending on where they happened to be located. East of a certain line, the initial aggressor was the USSR, not Germany. It was a confusing war, with some countries switching sides more than once and some countries being at war with some but not all major powers on the other side.

Things looked clearer on the Western Front, because it was a peripheral front outside the main conflict.

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