What follows is a partially completed reply that has been sitting on my hard drive.
[quote]lucasa wrote:
Nominal Prospect wrote:
No. U.S. would have been better off minding it’s own business.
In the vein of Mufasa’s posts, how would you have dealt with Hitler? To just say, “We shouldn’t have done anything.” comes across like you think the whole “Nazi fad” was wearing off. IMO, letting Hitler take the rest of Europe and further develop nuclear, jet propulsion, and submarine technologies (among others) would only made things worse for Americans.
And there has got to be some moral relativism coinage in turning your back on your allies (or any genocide of that scope). Good men doing nothing and all that.[/quote]
I find it exceedingly difficult to even approach that question but I’ll do my best to provide you a constructive answer that fits into my existing rhetorical framework.
My initial, knee-jerk reaction to it is always the same:
Before delving into speculation, one must first understand that the problem was giving Hitler an opportunity to come to power in the first place - by intervening in WWI. The dominant theme of American foreign policy in the 20th century, which no one can reasonably deny, is that one invasion has led to another, and more invasions following, in a seemingly perpetual cycle. Critique of said policy, whether positive or negative, is not to be invoked at this time. I merely advance this in neutral terms as a point of historical fact.
If there is no quarrel with what I have just written, then we can move on and begin to address topics of hypothetical nature, such as what would have been the proper course of action for America to take after the first World War.
Now comes the hard part. The question you present is very thorny due to the complex nature of international relations.
I will advance two suppositions, as follows:
Supposition 1: The US made a mistake by entering WWI.
Supposition 2: Grand-scale foreign policy errors do not come without negative consequences for their makers, at least the majority of the time. The best that a country can hope for is that it’s errors will be canceled out by those of another country, but this will not always be the case.
This is very difficult to answer because it’s all hypothetical. Once you embark on the road to interventionism/economic fascism, who can say there is any turning back?