Zonie63
Posts: 2826
Joined: 4/25/2011
From: The Old Pueblo
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quote:
ORIGINAL: Politesub53
Zonie...... One continually sees comments on here about how Americans saved us, or how appeasement didnt work. My whole point is that while any US help was greatfully received, the first two remarks in this post are inaccurate.
I don't think that I've said anything to that degree. I don't claim to be an expert, although I'm reasonably well-informed about WW2 to at least know which countries did what and when. If I'm inaccurate or mistaken about something I've written, I'm grateful for any corrections to any errors in fact I might have made.
I don't think I ever said "America saved Britain," except maybe occasionally in jest (although I don't recall doing that here in this forum). I do recall mentioning Appeasement on more than one occasion (although not in this thread), although I've heard Brits themselves criticize Appeasement. I don't think criticisms of Appeasement are meant to be a gratuitous insult or anything like that. I'm not sure if you're taking it that way, but I honestly think there's a reasonable, rational, factual basis for criticizing Appeasement as a national policy - regardless of whichever government might have practiced it.
However, I think that focusing on Appeasement might be a bit of a red herring to some extent, since the issues in 1938 should have been settled with the Locarno Pact in 1925. They had all those years to settle these issues before Hitler even rose to power (and perhaps if they had, it might have even prevented his rise to power in the first place). Appeasement was more of a last-ditch effort to buy time due to a problem which was allowed to fester for years and got too big as a consequence.
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Lets take them one at a time.
Would America have got so involved but for Pearl Harbour, US interests that needed defending. I think not.
America already was involved before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The very fact that the Japanese saw the need to attack us at all is a clear indication of that. If we had been truly neutral and uninvolved, they never would have attacked. FDR was obviously concerned about both Japan and Germany and the potential threat to U.S. interests - which had already become linked to Allied interests and that of democracy itself ("making the world safe for democracy").
We weren't completely uninvolved, although FDR might have wanted to declare war sooner, but Congress was resistant to the idea. It was all he could do to get Lend-Lease passed, but a declaration of war was politically impossible at that point. The only thing that would have brought us into the war is if the Axis Powers were stupid enough to declare war on us, which is what they did.
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If appeasement was so bad, why didnt America do something about it, being you were all so exceptional etc. My view is it was at least worth a try and gave the UK much needed breathing space to build our forces.league of nations, so when the Munich Agreement was signed, the UK were not in a position to do much else.
I'm not arguing for American Exceptionalism here, and I don't think America was particularly exceptional - either then or now. I think the whole notion itself is probably just more of the same propaganda I've been hearing much of my life. An earlier post upthread linked to a National Review article on the subject, and the idea of "American Exceptionalism" was interpreted as a justification for American interventionism and militarism around the world, suggesting that America's leadership in the world is necessary because no other country is suitable for that role. I'm not saying that I agree with it, but I was just trying to figure out where such a notion would come from and why it has taken such hold on our political outlook and overall worldview.
As for America not doing something about Hitler in 1938, there are probably a number of reasons. I don't think our military was in much of a position at that time to be able to send over any significant forces to Europe at that time. We didn't really feel it was our problem at the time. Many felt that the combined Anglo-French forces should been enough to contain Hitler and that they didn't really need our help. How could we have known that the combined power, resources, populations, and industries of the two largest empires on Earth would not have been enough to contain Axis aggression?
Keep in mind that we had only barely started coming into our own, with most of our historical experience to that point being that of an upstart, a "second banana," so to speak. When it comes to global hegemony and geopolitics, your country has been in that game a lot longer than we have. When we first started out here, we were still too small and weak to be able to do anything beyond defend our own coastlines (and even then, it was a bit dicey). We couldn't afford to get involved in any European wars, such as wars between England and France at the time. Staying neutral was as much for our own security and survival as anything else. That idea stayed a part of our perspective for a long time, and this might also feed into earlier notions of "American Exceptionalism" (or other names the concept might have been called).
As for my own personal view on the matter of Appeasement, I tend to agree with your view that there was probably very little else they could do at that time. The Western Allies might have tried to work out a pact with Stalin back in 1938, although that would have been a bit dicey, in and of itself. The Munich Agreement itself caused Stalin's opinion of the Western Allies to be diminished, and he ended up signing a pact with Hitler instead. A lot of it is all "what if" and 20/20 hindsight now, but the road to war was already paved by 1938, so Appeasement is just a footnote in a whole series of events which led up to that war, going all the way back to the last war and even a few wars before that.
I'm not trying to cast blame on any one nation in particular, although at least in comparing the roles of Britain, France, and America, I think it's safe to say that over the long term, Britain and France have had a far more influential role in shaping European politics than America ever had, especially prior to World War II. Whatever monster was created which led the world into that war, it wasn't really America's monster, yet we still had to fight it anyway. It's not that "America saved you," but some Americans might wonder why the matter had to come up at all.
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RE: American Exceptionalism - 
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