I’m attempting to better convey my reasons for why America should have shown more restraint concernign both world wars, and that our involvement was completely unjustified from a foreign policy point of view. I run into a wall when speaking (especially with veterans or active duty military) when they say “Well, what were we supposed to do when Hitler was conquering Europe and killing jews?” or “They sank our ship, we had to fight back.”
What are the best responses to these questions? Thanks!
The usual problem with interventionism discussions is that the discussion is taken out of context. For example, Hitler was a product of the Versailles Treaty and of US involvement in WWI. So these particular questions are from a very narrow time frame. I personally think US intervention in WWII was the best option (at least, from a global perspective), but it is interventionism to clean up the mess created by interventionism. So you are pulled into a vicious circle that is still ongoing. The main problem with interventionism is that you can’t control the results, like you can’t control an entire economy, so even from a cynical realpolitik perspective, it should be minimized. But, of course, politicians have idle hands and interests to serve.
Another point on WWII intervention is that the US was attacked (with the US providing incentives with the oil embargo on Japan and providing war materials to Britain and others). The US didn’t get involved because Hitler killed jews or because Japan was massacring Chinene civilians, just like the US is not invading Sudan over Darfur at the moment. So the emotional rationales of ‘oppressed people’ is usually bunk to hide more cynical goals.
If the USA had not entered WWI, the war would have been a stalemate. Versailles would never happened, which would mean the European front of WWII would never have happened. The American government is just as responsible for the post-war atrocities(like blockading food, even after the armistice was signed) as are the British and French.
As for the Pacific, if the US had not antagonized Japan they would not have attacked the Pacific fleet. The Japanese had no designs on American territory, their plan was to destroy America’s ability to project power in Asia. If the US did have a policy of projecting power on other continents, Pearl Harbor would not have occurred. America was not neutral pre-war, it was as bellicose as possible, goading the Axis to strike first. Roosevelt could not declare war without the support of the American people, but he enacted as many policies as possible to entangle the nation with the allies.
Hitler was no Napoleon. Europe survived Napolean with no help from America, why do you expect Hitler would have been any different? You admit that intervention in WWI led to unintended consequences, but what about the unintended consequences of WWII? Korean War, Vietnam, the entire Cold War? The Pentagon, the CIA, the military-industrial complex, the Atom Bomb?
World War II? I’ll pass, thanks.
Debating possible scenarios is, obviously, rather inaccurate. But without US material aid, Britain and the USSR probably wouldn’t have endured. Hitler would have had his ‘living space’. Hitler was a monster created by interventionism during WWI and after it, but Hitler was also problematic in the sense that there was no diplomatic way to deal with him. So I do consider US intervention warranted in the case of Hitler. But not without accepting the problem arising from interventionsim to begin with. And yes, creating further problems down the road. But to have a genocidal megalomaniac like Hitler out of power, it probably was the right call.
Hitler was stopped at the gates of Moscow before any US material aid had much effect on the ground. After the Russian winter offensive the first winter, Hitler had no realistic chance of winning the war. The best he could have hoped for was a stalemate on both fronts . . . and that would mean the eventual collapse of Nazi Germany because both UK and the USSR had greater industrial capacities than Germany . . . and after Nazi racist policies alienated Ukranians in the fall of 1941, the European Axis powers also lost all hopes of redressing the severe manpower disadvantage.
US forces were involved in WWII long before Pearl Harbor. US Navy destroyers were actively hunting UBoats in the Atlantic without Congressional Authorization of War.
I think one of the most striking facts about WWII is that the UK and the US, supposedly the most ‘free societies’ on earth, were supporters of the most murderous dictator on earth, namely mr. stalin. The anglo-american gov’t supported a communist regime ?..That’s odd…
Also, the anglo-american gov’t did not, at all, help saving the Jews. And the anglo-american govt’ commited a good deal of atrocities of their own.
To change the topic a bit, I find the concept of total victory/unconditional surrender that seems to have evolved very troubling. The war on terrr is a classic example: more soldiers have died attempting to vanquish Iraq and Afghanistan than were killed in the 9/11 attack. Same with WWII after Pearl Harbor. Madness. And our response to the 3d Reich’s declaration of war should have been: “You want war, come and get it.” No need todive headfirst into the fratricide on the European continent.
Has it ever been different though?
““You shall submit! We are masters and we will make you acknowledge it!” These words express the sentiment which sways the British nation in its dealings with the Boer republics; and this sentiment it is which, definitely displayed in this case, pervades indefinitely the political feeling now manifesting itself as Imperialism.”
Facts and Comments (1902) by Herbert Spencer (1820-1903)
Just a quick point to make about the Jewish Holocaust. A overwhelming amount of European Jews could have found safety in the United States if they were not denied entry due to the rascist nature of the United States immigration laws at the time. So the idea that the U.S needed to get involved in WWII to save people is silly. When the United States did get involved people still were slaughtered in the Holocaust before it was stopped and this would happen regardless of the tatics the Allies used. It would have been better if the United States was empowerd by the flux of human capital that Hitler rejected and acted as an asylum for all the refugees.
As far as World War I is concerned I think its a was ridiculous. The Lusitania was not a United States vessel it was a British ship that contained some U.S citizens on it. The Germans complained that they had reason to believe that it also had munitions for the British army but no one believed them. Turns out nearly 100 years down the road that the Lusitania DID in fact contain munitions. Overall I am not unciritcal of the German and Austro-Hungarian Empires in World War I but I must say that in the context of that time I am much more sympathetic to their side. After all it was England that was the first to violate United States Neutrality by denying non war related goods to be shipped to Germany from the U.S. This is a classic violation of Neutral nation rights. No third party country is allowed to intervene in the mutually agreed trade between two other countries unless the third party country is at war with one of them and even then they can only prevent the transportation of munitions or munitions material between the two nations. Regardless this violation caused an uproar in the United States at the time but then it was quickly forgotten by the political elites.
Isn’t that essentially the appeasement strategy that Britain employed that caused WW2 to be such a giant conflict, whereas nipping it in the bud could’ve saved millions of lives?
Negotiating in 1916 would have saved a lot of lives.
Negotiating over the Polish corridor and the prevention of communication between the two parts of Germany would have saved a lot of lives.
Not invading the Rhineland and attempting to set up a secessionist government in the 1920’s would have saved a lot of lives.
Not continuing the starvation blockade for a year after an honorable surrender would have saved a lot of lives.
Not preventing Germany and Austria from uniting after the war and not incorporating the Sudetenland land into Czechoslovakia would have saved a lot of lives.
I could go on; but my question is this. Which bud do you think we should have nipped? There are so many to choose from.
Nipping it in the bud, has not ended ‘Islamofascism’, it’s turned most of the world against the US. As an aside, the main blowback from the first Iraq war and decade-long embargo which killed hundreds of thousands of children was the intense resistance of ordinary Iraqis, not ‘al Qaeda’ (to the extent this is even an independent group and not a troupe of provocateurs manipulated by foreign governments), to the occupation.
Nipping it in the bud in Kosovo has opened a Pandora’s Box by legitimizing the creation of any ‘state’ that can find backers among the great powers.
In WWI, we were brought in when a British ship, loaded with passengers, including Americans, and cargo, including arms and armor for the British military (keeping in mind that most of Europe was still, at that time, composed of oppressive colonial powers), was sunk. We lost some citizens in a completely predictable and justified attack. Our interventionists wanted in, and they found an excuse. Unlike the rationalizations of WWII, it is hard to say that we really joined the good guys against the bad guys. We helped some a-holes defeat some other a-holes with enslaved (drafted) men. The result of this war, the Treaty of Versailles, ruined Germany and helped breed the anger that would create the N@zis. (geez louise, people, we’re having a discussion of WWII here and I can’t use the word Nazi?!? RELAX THE FILTERING)
In WWII, we often hear justifications for our involvement based on Hitler’s treatment of the Jews. This had nothing to do with why we went, most people didn’t even know about the camps, and even if we did, it wasn’t as if we didn’t make some of our own for Japanese, Italians and Germans in this country. As for saving lives, in intervening in WWII, we allied with Stalin’s Soviet Union. Stalin was at least as terrible a monster as Hitler, and killed at least 20 million people in his own country. We also ceded much of Eastern Europe to him after the war, subjugating further millions. Worldwide communism, which has been responsible for at least 100 million murders, was thusly bolstered. Japan, who we quite clearly prodded into attack, was utterly crushed, and the main obstacle to the rise of China as another communist power, well known for its murders of dissidents, was removed. Our ally, Britain, in their colonial arrogance, simply took some land in the Middle East, displaced its population, and declared it a special ethnic state (rather a vile idea, that) for Jews. This state has since become the broiling center of bitterness and conflict in that land of long memories.
Using the Nazis treatment of the Jews is an Ex Post Facto justification. The US and Canada turned refugee ships around during the Holocaust and even we got there taking out transportation links to the concentration camps was not a priority . And we allied with a man whose regime killed over 20 million people and who was a territorial expansionist in order to fight a man who killed over a 11 million and was a terriotrial expansionist, and what’s even funnier is the fact that Stalin didn’t have to fire a shot. We readily gave him control. We should have let the Russians and the Germans bleed each other out. I’ll disagree with the poster who said that Stalin could have taken care of Hitler without US support; the US Lend-Lease program was arguably a determining factor in the success of the Soviets against Hitler. It’s also doubtful Hitler could have held onto such a large territory following an exhaustive bloodletting with the Soviets. I have less of a problem with ships, albeit backed by proper constitutional instruments, being used to defend against submarines so as to protect the freedom of the Seas. But not engaging in economic warfare with Japan, staying out of the mainland of Europe, not sending military or financial aid so as to encourage the Brits and strengthen the Soviets, and adopting a more generous refugee program would have been preferrable.
I would argue this would have eventually happened in any case. The promise had already been made in 1916 to ensure the first intervention, an intervention which enabled the British to refuse the offer of a reasonable peace. What had been a stream throughout the 30s became a tsunami after the war was over. Hitler tried negotiating with the British to have the Jews under his control expelled to Palestine. After British intransigence and the start of Barbarossa, all deals were off and the camp system began in full force. The British were happy to keep the Jews hostage on the Continent in order to enlist the support of American media in pushing the case for intervention. That millions of Jews had to pay the price for this was of no concern to Churchill, a man who kept a model of the bombed-out city of Dresden on proud display in his wartime office. Churchill and Lincoln were the most cynical leaders of the past two centuries. At the outset of this one, Bush is making a good case for his inclusion. Although I’m still not sure how he will ever be canonized.
Well, to be sure, we shall not use the left way of thinking. Mr. Hitler and Mr. Stalin where both mass murderers, there is little dispute over this. However, when Mr. Hitler was still killing people one by one as a soldier in WWI or when he was drinking beer and doing nothing much else in the early years after WWI Mr. Stalin was already a mass murderer. Of course, Mr. Hitler improved his skills in mass mudering over years but he never got better then Mr. Stalin.
It is a shame to justify the affiliation to communism because of antifascism. And this is exactly what most of people in the West did.
If he had been a comic book writer, von Hayek may have dispelled people of this false dichotomy.
Each man’s record of violence perfectly reflects the political position he represented. Stalin, a man of the left, was happy to kill fellow citizens. Hitler, a man of the right, was happy to kill strangers.
Hitler’s favorite treat was cream puff pastries. Being religiously opposed to drinking and smoking, he would have fit in well in collectivist California, whose current governor’s fascist background makes him well suited to pushing through Malthusian austerity measures.
Well, killing is killing. However, while Mr. Hitler concentrated to kill entire nations (races) like Jews, Mr. Stalin & Associates wiped out the elites between the Pacific and the Atlantic Ocean and form the Polar Circle to the South China Sea .
If a hierarchy of evil could be done I suppose Mr. Stalin would easily will. Or maybe not?