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Wasnt Germany better off in the decades following WW2 than the British that defeated them?

That is largely irrelevant, they weren't in control of their own destiny at that point. What we learned in the 50s/60s was that the US leadership in the 40s/50s had a really good idea of how to build a country up and score diplomatic wins. They did amazing things in Japan and Germany.

Unfortunately, those people appear to all be dead. Now we have whatever Afghanistan and Iraq was meant to be.

Afg/Iraq became places to funnel money to friends in security contracting.

As much as I lament the quality of leadership at the moment (and not just in the US) I am not sure that we can equate Afghanistan with Germany.

It is one thing to denazify a "modern western country" that shares most of your values, culture and religion, and that has had institutions for some time. It is another thing altogether to pull off the deal in a country that has never had a working civil society, civil institions, education, etc. Especially if you do not share it's culture or religion, and there is a part of the country that is still actively engaged in a military campaign to obstruct you.

Not saying that it couldn't be done, or that mistakes weren't made. Just that you can't compare the two like that.

The US totally blew it in Afghanistan and its well-documented how most of the initiatives there failed due to corruption and mismanagement.

The underlying theory that the GP is getting at is that Japan and Germany were easy to rebuild because they had existing institutions and a society that trusted institutions. The idea is that it is kind of a self fulfilling prophecy; germany and Japan will "remember" how to be civilized, but under different leadership, Afghanistan and Iraq cannot revert to that.

It leans heavily on assumptions about countries and institutions.

It's true to an extent, but its not what happened in Afghanistan.

I don't doubt that, I was just explaining the argument. It has been recently popularized in tech circles by a viral appearance by professor Sarah Paine on the Dwarkesh podcast.

I am fully willing to believe that the US royally fucked up the rebuild of Afghanistan.

That could explain the success of rebuilding Germany, as it shared a lot culturally with the US, but what about Japan? Japan was, and to a large extent still is, a very alien culture, and yet the US rebuilt it extremely effectively.

> Unfortunately, those people appear to all be dead. Now we have whatever Afghanistan and Iraq was meant to be.

Both Japan and Germany had some semblance of democratic institutions, but they were taken over by authoritarians, often using violence:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incidents_in_interwar_Japan

Iraq had some history, pre-Sadam, and that seems to be returning:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iraqi_parliamentary_elect...

Afghanistan has had little of it in the last few decades (since at least the Soviets rolled in), and much less in the more rural regions.

There's a difference between rebuilding institutions and creating (perhaps from scratch) a civil society.

East Germany definitly never was. And even West Germany was considerably behind the UK in per capita GDP in US$ after WW2.[1] It had catched up at around 1970. Since 1970 the two were roughly equivalent: some years one was ahead some years the other.[2] However, Germany is now considerably ahead of the UK in terms of per capita GDP measuered in PPP (ie. adjusted to local prices: aprox. 20% now, or 10 to 15 years (depending on your reference point).[3]

[1] https://i.sstatic.net/azSk3.png

[2] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...

[3] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.KD?locat...

> East Germany definitly never was. And even West Germany was considerably behind the UK in per capita GDP in US$ after WW2.[1]

Germany was behind the UK even before WW2. Just the UK outproduced Germany in (e.g.) aircraft production, and that was even before the US got involved.

Adam Tooze wrote an entire book on the subject:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wages_of_Destruction

> Germany was behind the UK even before WW2.

Yep. -- I noticed that the first link of my comment is somehow not working. Here is another reference for those who want some numbers. It is a German publication ("Deutschland in Daten", PDF) but the relevant tables should be understandable anyway:

https://www.bpb.de/system/files/dokument_pdf/deutschland_in_...

For GDP per capita in "International dollar"/"Geary-Khamis-Dollar" for Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Great Britain, USA in the period 1850-2019, see p. 312 and 313.

According to this publication, 1930, 1940 and 1950 the German GDP per capita was about 75% of that of Great Britain. However, there was a big dip right after 1945 shown in the second table.

The German "economic miracle" ("Wirtschaftswunder") of the 1950s and 1960s was in essence not an outperformance of other western countries in absolute terms, but a catching-up process with them. The same holds for Japan. The process lost momentum, when parity with most of the other major economies was reached.

However, the USA have always been considerably ahead since WW2. -- So much to the slogan "Make America great again". It seems to be based on a very distorted self-image of having a backward economy, for which I have no sound explanation as an outside observer. And even if it were not about the general economic situation, but about a growing disparity inside the country, then a solution to better the situation, when the country is already so much ahead economically, cannot come from outside, but must be domestic.

It’s something of a red herring. Britain got the largest slice of the Marshall Plan money, they just wasted it on things like trying to maintain the Empire. One thing you’d learn from the book is Germany definitely wasn’t in a good shape in 55.

Apart from the Suez crisis and the Rhodesian embargo was there any serious British attempt to maintain the empire after the second World War?

Mau Mau, Malaya, Kenya

Those were efforts at preventing British colonies from becoming Soviet colonies, weren't they?

There was no effort to keep either Kenya or Malaysia as British. In Malaysia, the war continued after independence.

The entire effort by the British was to keep them as possessions. The wars continued after independence because non-communists took power.

> they just wasted it on things like trying to maintain the Empire.

they just wasted it on things like nationalizing the coal, gas, electricity, rail, air transport and steel industries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties#/media...

Nah, that’s really more a recent phenomenon, and is more to do with Britain’s weak growth over the last 20 years than anything else.

You probably only mean economic growth, otherwise that's hard to imagine

I suppose it's easier to achieve "growth" in percentage terms when you're starting from a low baseline (because your entire country got flattened by invading armies.)

Certainly not the ones occupied by the Soviet Union.

Which Germany?

The Allies defeated Germany, not the British.

It turns out that the British were one of the allies and about 380,000 of them died fighting the Nazis, so they have a good claim to having defeated Germany, with help from their friends.

Yes, I am not downplaying the role of the British and hoped no one would take it that way. The British were the first on alert as far as I know, and without them it would have been a whole lot worse.

USA swoops in towards the end (a large cost as well, but not as much of it and not on their doorstep) and takes a big role in creating the new world.

Reassuring to hear that the british consider soviets their friends. Not joking.

If we're going by those numbers, Germany was defeated by the USSR, and the British were the friends who helped.

From June 4, 1940 to June 22, 1941 Britain faced Hitler alone.

I'm not saying they didn't. But Britain didn't defeat Germany alone, and certainly didn't get the entire share of control after Germany was defeated. And after that the further decline of the UK showed that the power was shifting into the hands of those with wealth anyway, and here we are.

Since around Nixon (maybe?) there has been a gradual post-WW2 deregulation that really accelerated under Reagan and now with Trump its accelerating again. More and more keeps shifting into the hands of unelected, wealthy individuals who see that their power keeps growing and growing and as far as I can tell, won't stop until they have it all. It doesn't make any sense to me why that looks like a stable world to them, but the one thing that is certain is that there is no 2nd amendment that will stop the billionaire club.

And definitely not those cheese-eating surrender monkeys[0], amirite?

Wow! That was hard work. I'm hungry. Gonna go get me some freedom fries. Yum!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheese-eating_surrender_monkey...

Do you understand what I was trying to say?

Mostly because the Allies took over and invested a bunch of money into them developing in ways that didn't involve fascism.

That's not even remotely what happened

History disagrees with your bold statement.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan

No it doesn't. They didn't "invest", they took everything that wasn't bolted to the ground, and then they took that too. A third of the country was taken away and millions of Germans displaced.

My father worked as a mechanical engineer in West Germany after the war. He told me the French removed all the machines from the factories and took them to France, then the Americans installed much better new machines in their place.

The Marshall Plan was a real thing.

My father also told me that before the Americans decided on the Marshall Plan, they considered other plans (also named for American generals IIRC) one of which involved sterilizing all German men.

hollerith says >My father worked as a mechanical engineer in West Germany after the war. He told me the French removed all the machines from the factories and took them to France, then the Americans installed much better new machines in their place.

The Marshall Plan was a real thing. <

So damned funny!!8-)) The phrase "Grasping defeat from the jaws of victory!" comes to mind.

France received aid from the US, too. An unreliable source I just consulted says France got twice as much as West Germany got from the Marshall Plan.

But yeah, transporting those old machines back to France was probably a waste of Paris's time.

Give us your truth on it then I genuinely interested.

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