For America WW2 meant opening up it's trade with the war. Let's not forget that Europe's welfare states were born in hardship.
The U.S chipped in quite a bit too. $15 billion, or $148 billion in today's dollars, which was almost 6% (!) of the U.S. GDP at the time. This was in addition to a previous $15 billion in aid before the Marshall Plan was enacted.
http://www.trumanlibrary.org/anniversaries/healthprogram.htm
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/127/3/399.full
Le baron de Beaumarchais (famous writer and weapon smuggler) that lobbied the french monarchy for helping the US revolution was clearly doing it for the sake of freeing the people from monarchy (he was one of the philosoph supporting the strange idea that merit matters more than birth rights).
You should really read more. Especially 'le mariage de Figaro'
According to a U.S. State Department history [1]: "In 1795, the United States was finally able to settle its debts with the French Government with the help of James Swan, an American banker who privately assumed French debts at a slightly higher interest rate. Swan then resold these debts at a profit on domestic U.S. markets. The United States no longer owed money to foreign governments, although it continued to owe money to private investors both in the United States and in Europe."
Granted, 1795 was a bit too late to help Louis XVI, who had lost his head two years before. Still, it was only 12 years after the peace treaty with Britain -- not too terrible for a brand-new nation, I'd say. And in any case, it'd be unconventional (to say the least) to try to blame the Americans for the French royal government's mismanagement of its financial affairs.
---
> Le baron de Beaumarchais (famous writer and weapon smuggler) that lobbied the french monarchy for helping the US revolution was clearly doing it for the sake of freeing the people from monarchy (he was one of the philosoph supporting the strange idea that merit matters more than birth rights).
Nations aren't monoliths; their governments act in response to pressures from all sorts of different people who have all sorts of different opinions and motives.
(Example: When the U.S. entered WWII, the triggering event was the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbor. But for months before that, and especially after the Nazi German invasion of the USSR in June 1941, a significant number of Americans had wanted the U.S. to enter the European war --- some to help the British, and some because they were Communists or sympathizers who wanted an immediate second front in Europe to take the pressure off the Soviet Union.)
In the rough French revolution context is basically the same as today: * huge debts contracted by gvt; * unfair repartition of the fiscality (the 1% wealthiest don't pay in proportion to their income); * producers (the 10% wealthiest) are not able to produce anymore because fiscality is to high;
The convocation of "tiers etats" that triggered the revolution was about asking how to make the repartition of fiscality more fair.
the 1% wealthier said we don't care we don't pay and you can't change the system anyway because we make the rules and they "mouhahaha"ed The remaining said, okay, are you losing your head (saracasm and irony)? and they said to the other europeans 1% (germans, brits, dutch, spanish)... Oh btw, we are not a kingdom anymore. As a result, we dont have anymore debts. Go fuck yourselves
The banks were pissed off and they said: WUT! Debts are to be honored, if people begin to think that money don't rule the world the world is doomed.
Thus the coalitions against France, battles (Valmy), Napoleon tricking Italia in Republic and then betraying them so that the bankers got another ennemy ...
And here we are, in the same situation again.
Now, takes Forbes top 500 fortunes of the world and tell me how much people are not xth generation dynasty kids.
I love Bill Gates he has a lot of merit, one of which is being well borned.
We do have a meritocratic system, but this system is biased because he is mainly accessible through birth.
This is the definition of a society based on casts. We are regressing in the name of a so called "liberalism" that looks like the "communism" of Lenin : an implementation that contradict the purpose.
Our political systems are wrong implementations of good ideas. How can we repeatedly fail that much collectively?
Not purely --- I would imagine that certainly American leaders had future markets in mind --- but there was definitely a large component of altruism, quite possibly more so than with the French support of the American revolutionaries in the late 1770s and early 1780s.
In the post-WWII era, the U.S. had nukes, as well as two broad oceans as moats. After the Japanese surrender we demobilized as fast as we could, in response to overwhelming domestic political pressure to "bring the boys home."
It might well have been feasible for us to have largely retreated to our own borders and leave the western Europeans to their fates at the hands of the Soviets. Instead, we spent billions, perhaps even trillions, to maintain forces in Europe to deter Soviet aggression and to try to help western Europe recover from the devastation of the war. (We offered Marshall-Plan aid to the Soviets and their vassal states as well, but the Soviets prevented those countries from accepting [1].)
Of course self-interest was part of the U.S. motivation. But there also was altruism, and generosity.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_Plan#Rejection_by_the_...
As opposed to the professionals, who dribble drive-by snark and Wikipedia links?
You could start your remedial reading with: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/France_in_the_American_Revolu...
Other than in an abstract sense, what does the American Revolution have to do with the Postwar Reconstruction, some 170 years later? And how does that mute or counter the statement I made?
The whole premise of social security in France after the war is that people with their basic needs unfulfilled voted for the nazis. So they decided that the State should provide some minimum services for everybody.
EVERYTHING we do ultimately comes down to trying to spread and preserve
* our genes * our family's genes * our friends' genes
and all the other social groups humans form, in the order of priority being group size smallest to least.
Emotions are the definable channel to that "gene preserving" desire.
Everything we do in life is to achieve a certain emotional state (think about it). We don't want money. We want what it will mean to us (e.g. security, power, fun, freedom, etc.). We don't want a relationship, we want what it will mean to us (love, belonging, etc.).
Nature's calibrated human has his emotions correctly / optimally linked to spreading and preserving his and other humans' genes.
Yes, I do. I believe that I have personal experience of people doing thing detrimental to themselves, that they know are detrimental to themselves, that they do willingly. We are capable of overriding our emotional and physical reactions.
I suspect you have already decided on your conclusion, and will fit all evidence to that conclusion.
'Force de Frappe'
(Also ask whether the French would actually have used nuclear weapons to stop a Soviet non-nuclear attack on France. That's relevant because in a conventional war without U.S. forces, the Warsaw Pact forces could have rolled to the Channel in weeks if not days.)
No, it was NATO that served as the real deterrent to the Soviets. NATO was largely (and expensively) underwritten by the U.S. Le Grand Charles [de Gaulle] withdrew France from the NATO military alliance in the early 1960s. That freed up who knows how much in the way of French resources, with France still effectively still living under the protection provided by NATO.
Personal note: When I was a kid, my dad, a U.S. Air Force officer, was stationed in France; we lived "on the economy" in a little farm village, where my sisters and I went to the local schools and as a result were bilingual. We were upset when we thought we were going to have to move back to the U.S., and leave our friends, sooner than scheduled because of de Gaulle's announced intention to kick out U.S. forces. (As it turned out, that didn't happen until after our scheduled move back to the U.S.)
I dunno whether the French would have, but I know the Americans would have. It was US policy through much of the Cold War that conventional forces in Europe were only to be a "tripwire" to trigger a nuclear response, rather than a force strong enough to contain a Soviet attack on their own. This allowed the US and other NATO nations to economize on conventional arms and avoid having to conscript massive numbers of men.
Try this thought experiment:
First, recall the Soviets' ability to absorb fearful military punishment, as well as their willingness to act brutally in eastern- and central Europe during and after WW2; in East Germany in 1953; in Hungary in 1956; and in Czechoslovakia in 1968.
Second, imagine that in the 1950s or 1960s the Soviets had invaded Germany --- but also imagine that there was no effective NATO protection because (hypothetically) the U.S. had gone isolationist.
Third, assume that the Soviets had punched through Germany; reached the Rhine; and pushed through into France.
OK, now let's assume for the sake of argument that in response, the French had nuked the invading Soviet forces, but not the USSR homeland (for fear of provoking massive Soviet retaliation), using only small, tactical nukes.
It's not unreasonable to think that the Soviets would have responded in turn along much the same lines as they did in WWII --- but this time with their own nuclear weapons --- by obliterating the French armed forces, and probably a French city or three to make sure the message got through.
The French would (sensibly) have surrendered, of course. The Soviets then would have done much as they did in eastern Germany after WWII: They'd have carted off everything useful that they could, as war booty (euphemistically described as "reparations"). They probably would have shipped thousands of people off to slave-labor camps in the gulag, most of whom would not be seen nor heard from ever again. They'd have settled in to administer the ruined France as yet another impoverished Soviet vassal state under a Communist puppet government.
So France's nuclear Force de Frappe likely wasn't a real deterrent to the Soviets, but instead was merely anti-American and anti-British posturing by de Gaulle, safe behind what he knew would be the protective shield of NATO military power.
(Do de Gaulle's attitude and actions remind anyone else of what Hamid Karzai has been doing lately?)
Also ask whether the French would actually have used
nuclear weapons to stop a Soviet non-nuclear attack on
France.
The thinking was, for the same reason France might not use nuclear weapons against a non-nuclear attack, the Soviets might not use large nuclear weapons against a small nuclear weapon attack.
When you compare the US and the French system, you don't get to just say "well, they did it why can't we?" as if that question exists in a vacuum. We have a defense program which is a massive government expenditure -- which pre-empts other government expenditures such as single-payer health care -- so a fair comparison would have to look at the fact that the French had a de facto defense subsidy.
If each country in Western Europe had been responsible for building up the kind of deterrent force which we were able to present, the calculus for a single-payer program would change. Certainly Force de Frappe was a strategic asset. Can you concede that without NATO (dominated by the US) the French investment in defense would have needed a drastic increase in order to fill that vacuum? If there were no NATO, at the least I think you can acknowledge that all of Germany would have been a Soviet client, putting France on a front line against the Warsaw Pact countries.
That's not the way it appeared at the time. Up until the mid-to late 1960s, it was entirely rational for Western leaders to conclude that the USSR wanted eventually to dominate all of Europe and even the Western Hemisphere. [1]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cold_War#Beginnings_of_the_Cold...
But how much of that appearance came in form of various gaps that were essentially paranioa turned into a marketing hoax for the weapons industry?