Is/Was America and/or ShipmasterSane a Bully?

[Shipmaster Sane]

It took many years for Japan and Germany to even begin returning dividends, so to speak.

The rest of Europe, well, that's a different scenario to begin with, as they weren't our enemies in war. Well, France sort of, given the Vichy, but that ship long sailed. Europe makes for a poor and rather parasitic ally, I don't disagree, but letting the Nazis or the Soviets conquer it all and entrench themselves would not have been in our best interest either. That's fundamentally why we put up with their behavior, when push comes to shove.

Because you seem to want to talk about this in good faith let me be clear, at some point this argument expanded to cover general American Isolationism, to which some of my comments are pointed. Some comments may have crossed both subjects at times, though I dont see this as a huge problem because I believe them to be closely linked.

Whether or not the Soviets or Nazis would have been able to sustain themselves without choking to death on their own fuming, sputtering war machines without our involvement being neither here nor there, I understand that the idea of playing world policeman and setting people back on their feet, dusting them off, and trying to help them back towards the light may have been a decent one, but in practice it has proved disastrous and unsustainable. Japan we virtually conquered anyway, replacing their government, a great deal of their culture, and filling their country with our military and business on a scale very much unlike our other "reconstruction" efforts, contemporary or later, with again the exception of SK.

It was not wrong of us to try, it was wrong of us to not stop once we saw where things were going.


Providing trillions of dollars worth of endless help to traitors who despise us (europe) or dumping endless resources into territories we've subjugated but aren't going to claim is self defeating in the extreme.


As it stands, hitting and leaving does no more damage than our current policy of "hit and stick around for ten years getting shot at while we attempt to build the country back up exactly as fast as it collapses, then give up and leave", but accomplishes the same thing "whatever we were pissed about has been bombed into the stone age" with fewer casualties on both sides and a vastly smaller cost.

 

[ShadowArxxy]

I don't think it's reasonable to call Europeans "traitors" for serving their own perceived self-interest, especially since you're calling for Americans to focus more on our own. If America has no moral duty towards foreign countries, then the reciprocal is also true.

In my opinion, America has a moral duty to help other nations only in cases where America has taken unjustified actions against them in the past. We owe Europe nothing; we owe various parts of Central and South America a fair bit but it's counterproductive to attempt closer relations while they justifiably hate us. We owe Vietnam a LOT, and I've been very glad to see relations improving on that front.

Outside of specific cases of moral debt, I believe it's in our rational self interest to be as generous and kind a nation as we can afford to be, which doesn't mean letting Europe screw us over. I suppose you could call me a pragmatic moderate globalist, in that sense.

 

[Shipmaster Sane]

I don't think it's reasonable to call Europeans "traitors" for serving their own perceived self-interest, especially since you're calling for Americans to focus more on our own. If America has no moral duty towards foreign countries, then the reciprocal is also true.

It would be true if we had not already entered into the relationship, both parties willingly. It is not disloyalty to simply pursue your own goals, but it is disloyalty to enter into a pact with a greater power than yourself when your need is desperate and existential, only to turn your back on them when you think you can and deny you ever needed them to begin with.

We owe Vietnam a LOT, and I've been very glad to see relations improving on that front.

Vietnam was a french war, and we pulverized the NVA so badly they evaporated shortly after we left.

 

[ShadowArxxy]

It would be true if we had not already entered into the relationship, both parties willingly. It is not disloyalty to simply pursue your own goals, but it is disloyalty to enter into a pact with a greater power than yourself when your need is desperate and existential, only to turn your back on them when you think you can and deny you ever needed them to begin with.

That still doesn't make it treason, any more than it was "treason" for the United States to decide that South Vietnam had outlived its usefulness and pulled out.

The behavior of the various European nations is arrogant, selfish, untrustworthy, and arguably short sighted; it is not, ipso facto, treason. And trust is an inherently limited commodity in international relations anyway.

Vietnam was a french war, and we pulverized the NVA so badly they evaporated shortly after we left.

Vietnam was an American war.

It was America that permitted France to be treated as if they had been an ally post-WWII even though they sided with the Nazis (one of the biggest foreign policy idiot moves we've ever made), then allowed France to "reclaim" Asian nations that had liberated themselves from Japanese occupation.

It was America that wholly bankrolled France's brutal war against the Vietnamese for *daring* to actually call the increasingly blatant lie that France was supposedly not exploiting Vietnam, but helping it grow as an independent protectorate.

It was America that allowed its puppet regime to outright refuse to hold the agreed-upon elections for the reunification of Vietnam, then invaded on comically false pretexts.

What America should have done (in my opinion; I'm not so arrogant as to declare my opinion to be objective fact) was told France to pound sand from the very start and supported Vietnam as an ally in good faith, both pragmatically and in keeping with our own honor for the Vietnamese resistance's considerable actions to rescue American pilots who were shot down over occupied territory.

This would also have completely eliminated the "need" to let Japan off the hook for war crimes and spend a fortune reconstructing that nation. This is again pragmatic as well as moral; Cam Ranh Bay is a vastly better deep-water port than anything Japan can offer.

 

[Zachowon]

That still doesn't make it treason, any more than it was "treason" for the United States to decide that South Vietnam had outlived its usefulness and pulled out.

The behavior of the various European nations is arrogant, selfish, untrustworthy, and arguably short sighted; it is not, ipso facto, treason. And trust is an inherently limited commodity in international relations anyway.



Vietnam was an American war.

It was America that permitted France to be treated as if they had been an ally post-WWII even though they sided with the Nazis (one of the biggest foreign policy idiot moves we've ever made), then allowed France to "reclaim" Asian nations that had liberated themselves from Japanese occupation.

It was America that wholly bankrolled France's brutal war against the Vietnamese for *daring* to actually call the increasingly blatant lie that France was supposedly not exploiting Vietnam, but helping it grow as an independent protectorate.

It was America that allowed its puppet regime to outright refuse to hold the agreed-upon elections for the reunification of Vietnam, then invaded on comically false pretexts.

What America should have done (in my opinion; I'm not so arrogant as to declare my opinion to be objective fact) was told France to pound sand from the very start and supported Vietnam as an ally in good faith, both pragmatically and in keeping with our own honor for the Vietnamese resistance's considerable actions to rescue American pilots who were shot down over occupied territory.

This would also have completely eliminated the "need" to let Japan off the hook for war crimes and spend a fortune reconstructing that nation. This is again pragmatic as well as moral; Cam Ranh Bay is a vastly better deep-water port than anything Japan can offer.

So throw Charles De Gaul and the free french forces form World War 2 under the bus because of Vichy France? We allowed them to reclaim Paris form the Nazis, and take full control over their country again. They were an ally from the start, just not the whole country.

 

[ShadowArxxy]

So throw Charles De Gaul and the free french forces form World War 2 under the bus because of Vichy France? We allowed them to reclaim Paris form the Nazis, and take full control over their country again. They were an ally from the start, just not the whole country.

1. They were an ally mostly in name only; they did very little. Frankly, they barely did enough to justify just tolerating how much of an asshole de Gaulle was.

2. There's a categorical difference between, "allowing France in the fold" and "allowing France to reconquer its colonial territories".

3. Hell, we didn't just "allow" France to do so; we re-armed Japanese POWs against the resistance, even though the resistance was our actual ally , and at great risk to themselves saved the lives of hundreds of American airmen.

4. France stabbed us in the back in 1966 by withdrawing from NATO and essentially founded the trend of Europe parasitically relying on the United States to shoulder the burden of defense while at the same sneering at us. They didn't even have the excuse of being under post-war leadership which hadn't directly owed gratitude to the United States; this was under de Gaulle! So even in retrospect, this was an absolutely fucking terrible decision.

5. The attitude of modern-day France probably would not be nearly as bad if we'd actually pulled on the reins post-WWII. So "throwing France under the bus" would absolutely make the world a better place.

 

[Zachowon]

1. They were an ally mostly in name only; they did very little. Frankly, they barely did enough to justify just tolerating how much of an asshole de Gaulle was.

2. There's a categorical difference between, "allowing France in the fold" and "allowing France to reconquer its colonial territories".

3. Hell, we didn't just "allow" France to do so; we re-armed Japanese POWs against the resistance, even though the resistance was our actual ally , and at great risk to themselves saved the lives of hundreds of American airmen.

4. France stabbed us in the back in 1966 by withdrawing from NATO and essentially founded the trend of Europe parasitically relying on the United States to shoulder the burden of defense while at the same sneering at us. They didn't even have the excuse of being under post-war leadership which hadn't directly owed gratitude to the United States; this was under de Gaulle! So even in retrospect, this was an absolutely fucking terrible decision.

5. The attitude of modern-day France probably would not be nearly as bad if we'd actually pulled on the reins post-WWII. So "throwing France under the bus" would absolutely make the world a better place.

They helped make capturing africa not so hard. Being a lot of their colonies there stayed free of Nazi rule.

De Gaulle was an ass to America, they are still our longest known ally, so of course we aren't going to let them get out of thier own mess.

 

[The One Char]

1. They were an ally mostly in name only; they did very little. Frankly, they barely did enough to justify just tolerating how much of an asshole de Gaulle was.

2. There's a categorical difference between, "allowing France in the fold" and "allowing France to reconquer its colonial territories".

3. Hell, we didn't just "allow" France to do so; we re-armed Japanese POWs against the resistance, even though the resistance was our actual ally , and at great risk to themselves saved the lives of hundreds of American airmen.

4. France stabbed us in the back in 1966 by withdrawing from NATO and essentially founded the trend of Europe parasitically relying on the United States to shoulder the burden of defense while at the same sneering at us. They didn't even have the excuse of being under post-war leadership which hadn't directly owed gratitude to the United States; this was under de Gaulle! So even in retrospect, this was an absolutely fucking terrible decision.

5. The attitude of modern-day France probably would not be nearly as bad if we'd actually pulled on the reins post-WWII. So "throwing France under the bus" would absolutely make the world a better place.

We did these things because we wanted to keep France in NATO. de Gaulle saw the US as a rival, so he probably pulled us into Vietnam to fuck us.

 

[Zachowon]

We did these things because we wanted to keep France in NATO. de Gaulle saw the US as a rival, so he probably pulled us into Vietnam to fuck us.

They are still one of the strongest world powers in western Europe. So they have not done horribly. They are a l0ng way from the glory days though