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quote:
ORIGINAL: thompsonx
ORIGINAL: tamaka
Where does it say that the soviets could have beaten the Japanese? It says that Japan would have taken over Asia and Russia would have taken over Europe if not for the intervention of the US.
The site you linked us to is a blog in which there are many contributors. Severel pointed out that the soviets had taken the measure of the japs in the thirties and that the japs had no desire for a second encounter.
That the only purpose of amerikan involvement was to prevent the soviets from controling all of europe.
It ignores and fails to address the question of why the soviets would be interested in occupying western europe.
Without the US, what would have stopped them? You don't have to worry about fighting them again if you control them.
There is little to indicate soviet imperialism in their rather short history from 1917 to 1941.
I'm always a bit puzzled as to why you believe that the Russians have never had any desire to expand west to enable them to protect their own borders.
The wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries demonstrated to the Russians that they had no defensible border in Europe, and they had to suffer large scale invasion and huge loss of life before being able to end those wars, with varying degrees of success and failure.
At the end of WW2 the key indication of the Russian desire to create as large a buffer zone as possible was evidenced not so much by how far they pushed into Western Europe, but by their their complete hegemony over Eastern Europe, most of which had never been part of the greater Russian empire. The brutal repressions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia and overlordship of East Germany, Romania, Bulgaria and to a lesser extent Yugoslavia and Albania were nothing more than an attempt to create as large a buffer against the the rest of Europe and the US. Even if you explain some of it as Slavic nationalism, it was still "imperial" rather than populist.
The dominance of the US and the dogged determination to maintain West Germany, including Berlin, as part of the western block was what stopped the Russian buffer zone from expanding further. You can argue that Stalin would not have chosen to roll on further and occupy France, Italy and Spain, but the survival of Europe in its current form has more to do with the power of the US (or perhaps more correctly the balance of power between the US and Russia), than any imaginary line which the Russian army would not cross.
You can argue about which country made the largest contribution to the war effort and defeating Hitler, but the US certainly ensured that the whole of mainland Europe did not become a Russian protectorate, even if it is unlikely that Russian troops would have been able to actively occupy the whole continent.
Whether that was worth it may be a moot point to some Americans, but as a European I am very pleased that is what happened.
I know you don't like "Cold War" rhetoric, but the rivalry and fear between the Eastern and Western blocks was very real, even if the morality and political justifications which were bolted onto that rivalry were pretty suspect on both sides.
That rivalry has been evident throughout Russian history with Europe and it remains to this day, however good or evil the participants on either side are painted.
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RE: The world without the US - 
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