Hi Rog, all
Rog - most of the time I'm on your side with the free-market stuff.
Occasionally I'd want to disagree. You said:
>
> RISKY:
> Without US intervention in Europe, the UK and Western Europe would likely
> have fallen to the Nazis. I did not write this sentence to disparage
Europe,
> but to balance out accusations that the US was imperialistic. Nato won the
> war against similar Soviet aggression, again with the much needed and
moral
> support of the US.
I disagree with the first part of this. Just to run through the sequence of
events:
The Battle of Britain was the summer of 1940, Britain on its own against the
Nazi menace, 'finest hour' and all that stuff. The UK won in that it
succeeded in preventing operation sea lion (invasion of UK) and in
September/October 1940 Hitler decided to abandon his plans to attack the UK
(perhaps a postponement, but):
In the summer of 1941 Hitler launched Barbarossa and attacked the USSR. The
Eastern Front was by a very long way the most vicious and destructive
theatre in WW2. The Russians beat the Nazis. (D-Day and the invasion of
Normandy was important in stopping the Russian advance, not in beating the
Nazis - and that was a good thing)
In December 1941 you have Pearl Harbour and the US gets directly involved.
(Note that it was Hitler who declared war on the US, not the other way
around. We could have a good argument about whether the US would have got
involved in Western Europe at all if it wasn't for Hitler's delusions, but
that one can wait awhile!)
So I think it is wrong to say that the UK and Western Europe would have
fallen to the Nazis (actually, Western Europe DID fall). You could
legitimately say that without US involvement - both in war and after the
war - the UK and France, and certainly Germany, would have fallen into the
Soviet sphere of influence, either on the Polish or the Finlandisation
model).
That was the first point.
The second was to do with the vague charge of imperialism against the US. I
think there is something in this charge, but it needs to be made specific.
Let me ask the question like this: in what way does US domination of the
international financial architecture differ from British dominance of
international trade through the 'sterling area' of the nineteenth century,
especially bearing in mind that the most important part of the British
Empire - India - began as something set up by private companies? In what way
is US dominance of Saudi Arabia - for strategic reasons - different from UK
dominance of Egypt c. 1900?
One other aspect - US assistance for the UK was 'bought' by the UK, both
through lend-lease and through the 'sale' of bases throughout the world eg,
Diego Garcia, recently put to use against the Taliban. Although it is a bit
crude, you could say that the US bought a ready-made empire from the UK.
Of course it all depends on what we mean by 'empire' - but that can wait.
Keep having fun.
Sam
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