Most likely some other country (or countries) would simply fulfill the same role of projecting their military and economic power onto the rest of the world to maintain their hegemony. We see this in limited ways already with many other countries, though with a few exceptions, they’re careful in how much they conflict with US interests. One of these, likely China, would move into that role and while the details would be different in some ways, many of the overall dynamics would be similar.
Now you got me questioning if China ever got involved in foreign politics and back a coup which was more favorite to them?
Chinese foreign policy has been fairly cautious and covert compared to other world powers. I think this has generally been a good strategy as it has avoided major conflicts with the US and Europe in recent times.
I can’t think of any coup they’ve directly supported but they certainly have supported military movements and governments in other countries, including Vietnam, North Korea, Myanmar, and Venezuela. So they’ve been a bit less prone to overthrowing governments but they aren’t afraid to use similar tactics to keep friendly regimes in power, and help those factions expand power. So is it a coup to help the North Vietnamese conquer the South? I guess it depends on the definition of coup which can be a fraught word.
Personally I’m not sure I see any of these as coups. The closest might be Myanmar but while China has protected and supported the junta there, it’s not totally clear they actually supported the coup itself. I interpret their actions as seeking stability and wanting to minimize Western influence.
China’s foreign policy model seems focused on making deals with the existing power no matter what. Part of that seems to be that China does not believe in odious debt like a lot of Western countries do. When settling debts, Chinese institutions have been far more insistent on keeping write-offs from occuring.
China has also generally pushed for more one on one transactional deals with countries. There have been some international institutions made like the AIIB, but I don’t see the institutional creation of systems like the USA tried to do.
What do you mean by keeping write-offs from occurring?
A lot of times, the IMF will lead all creditors of a country to restructure, reduce, or reschedule existing debt. What is happening is that Chinese institutions appears to be less willing to write down bad debt, holding up a lot of negotiations between debt holders. So, the debt doesn’t get reduced.
Is this a bad thing somehow? I would think reducing debts is generally beneficial, especially in times of economic crisis.
Removed by mod
Removed by mod
I think the modern American empire is seen as much more dangerous than the modern Chinese one. Especially with how it tries to subjugate people even outside its continent
In the current moment I would agree. I’m not sure that would be true in comparison to a hypothetical sole superpower China. But who can say for sure.
You might get to see that in Russia with how Putler is screwing things up.
Who needs to do that when they are loan sharking the countries
Bananas would cost more
no more banana for $10
There’s always money in the banana stand.
America genociding Gautemala avoided in such a timeline?
Oh did America “genocide (verb)” Guatemala?
Quick yt video on the topic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-BIA4dgAJ9A
History doesn’t provide answers to hypotheticals
That’s why they’re asking people and not reading a history book.
Difficult to say. For starters, we can’t know with certainty the full list of countries that were affected. We don’t know all the ways countries were affected. There’s so much we don’t know that it’s really impossible to say.
On a tangentially related note, this documentary series from BBC4 is a fascinating insight into the decision making process the US went through over dealing with foreign mass atrocities over the past 40 years: Iraq, Bosnia, Rwanda, Syria etc.
Warning: they do not hold back with the imagery of these events.
Did they also go into mass atrocities committed and initiated by the US? If you go around lighting fires and then come back around to put them out after donning an official uniform, should others consider you a fire fighter or an arsonist?
Is there a single instance covered that wasn’t a situation the US directly and purposely had a hand in creating?
You should watch it and find out for yourself.
I will, but this is an 8 hour series.
I know, I watched it all.
Any chance you’d be willing to provide answers to any of my questions based on what you saw?
Do you have any non-rhetorical questions on the topic?
Your questions aren’t really questions now are they?
Did they also go into mass atrocities committed and initiated by the US?
Not OP, didn’t watch the series. This is the kind of question you could answer by watching and if you aren’t interested in watching unsure why you’d ask.
If you go around lighting fires and then come back around to put them out after donning an official uniform, should others consider you a fire fighter or an arsonist?
I guess if we’re talking about this literal situation, you’d be both? Is this what you claim is happening?
Is there a single instance covered that wasn’t a situation the US directly and purposely had a hand in creating?
They mentioned the Rwandan genocide. Do you consider the Rwandan genocide to be one of those “fires” that the US “lit”?
Well the troubles would have continued. So there that.
Ooh I think you need to read more about history. For once, CIA wouldn’t need to support drug dealers to finance its operations in Central America. Guess where those drugs were being consumed?
What?
the cia admitted to starting the cocaine epidemic so that they can use the money to fund rebel fighters to keep central american countries weak and dependent on the united states.
I probably should have capitalised The Troubles shouldn’t I
The world would be far more Socialized.
Just imagine how scared and hungry we could all be
Most countries would be socialist.
Other countries would probably still have some similar shit. People are people.
Not to mention some other country would’ve been doing this instead. Other countries do, the US has just been the most notorious and the king of colonialism
I’m not even sure the US counts as king but that’s for historians to argue I guess
Or colonial empire for that matter
Definitely a better place.
The US projects its own interests worldwide but those often overlap with the interests of other as well.
For example, the US often stipulates intellectual property and worker rights in it’s trade deals. The US actively protects shipping lanes. The US actively negotiates visa-free entry for American passport holders to other countries. The US invests in the economies of foreign countries to stimulate trade opportunities. The US controls the SWIFT banking network which makes it so that we don’t need to send gold bullion or pallets of cash to buy things from other countries, and participating in the system requires member countries to have certain controls in place that attempt to block bad actors. The US, through it’s embassies and ambassadors, deploys it ideology to foreign governments, and makes deals that allow foreigners to invest in the USA and Americans to open businesses in foreign countries.
The US actively shuns and makes life difficult for menace dictatorships on the global stage by creating trade exclusions.
There have been coups since the beginning of time and always will be, as it’s human nature. Many citizens of other countries have no belief that the future of their country belongs to them after decades or centuries of dictatorships or kingdoms. On the whole, history shows that kingdoms rise and fall for many reasons and the people sometimes benefit and sometimes suffer for it.
Obviously it’s a highly complex topic, but if the US wasn’t doing these things, then Russia or China would be, or there would be more powerful regional factions, which could reduce the size of the world in terms of travel and trade options for many.
Whether the US is the right one to be in control of this at this point in history is a matter of intense debate among some, but it could absolutely be worse than it is now.
It really depends on how far back you want to look.
If the US was to suddenly stop projecting its interests internationally, then as others have mentioned, then likely the world work become somewhat more socialized. European countries would probably step up and try to keep China in check, but without the US contributing to these efforts, it would cause a significant strain on their military resources.
If the US was to take an isolationist policy 100 years ago, then there is a good chance that WW2 would have been won by the Axis. The Allied forces likely would have put up a good fight, but I’m not sure they would have emerged victorious against the combined Axis forces. The war in the Pacific would have raged on much longer, and without nuclear weapons, there would have been an extreme loss of life invading Japan. At the very least, WW2 would have lasted much much longer than it did. Depending on the outcome, plenty of countries might currently be speaking German and debating if they should tear down 80-year-old statues of Hitler.
If the US was to take an isolationist policy 100 years ago, then there is a good chance that WW2 would have been won by the Axis. The Allied forces likely would have put up a good fight, but I’m not sure they would have emerged victorious against the combined Axis forces. The war in the Pacific would have raged on much longer, and without nuclear weapons, there would have been an extreme loss of life invading Japan. At the very least, WW2 would have lasted much much longer than it did. Depending on the outcome, plenty of countries might currently be speaking German and debating if they should tear down 80-year-old statues of Hitler.
The only people who believe this drivel are those who have only learned about WWII via Hollywood and YT videos. Go listen to an actual historian and you will not hear this fantasy. They will tell you that Germany had one foot in the grave by the time the US joined the Western front. The only ounce of truth in this statement is that the Pacific theatre would have gone on longer.
Edit: I didn’t touch on this but should have…the whole idea that a nuclear attack on Japan was necessary or even justified in any way is not only incorrect but is a racist, genocidal excuse for not one, but TWO of the most horrific acts in our entire history. You should be ashamed for propagating this tired lie.
he did mention isolationist, so… we’d also have to consider how the eastern front would have evolved without lend-lease. not a historian so perhaps consensus is the Nazis still wouldn’t have had a chance, but still
Good points. It’s difficult to find a clear answer to how important lend-lease was to the Soviet war effort. During the war, the USSR and US obviously had good things to say about the program, but the start of the Cold War soured this discussion, leading to the US overstating and the USSR understating the impact. Here’s an excerpt from a paper by a British scholar exploring the topic. Emphasis is the author’s:
It is neither possible nor fruitful to try and put a precise measure on the material value of allied aid to the Soviet war economy, if only because of the unavailability of many Soviet production data. Whatever the value of western aid, the Soviet war effort was measured in human life and suffering incomparable with material aid from outside. Further, the Soviet economy became much more of a war economy than other combatant nations. Nonetheless, it seems that the contribution made by deliveries from the USA and, to a lesser extent, Britain and Canada, played an important part at crucial times and in crucial areas. First, and above all, was a vital margin of food supplies, second was the provision of specialist or deficit products such as aluminium and copper, specialized tools, high quality steels. In this respect lend-lease supplies overcame bottlenecks. However, it must be stressed that the major impact came after the Soviet counterattack and the beginning of German retreat. Such aid directly and indirectly helped defeat the German forces, and was in such a way a substitute for a second front, but it did little to defend the USSR from the initial onslaught. Third, some of the raw materials and more especially machinery and transport equipment was of positive value to the Soviet economy after the war. For this, the tyre plant is the best but not the only example.
It is nonsense to repeat the figure of four per cent of Soviet wartime production and disingenuous to disparage western aid - a feature evident in Soviet literature and one criticized even by Khrushchev. It is nonetheless true (and this is a point repeated in some Soviet works) that Britain and the Empire received far more than the USSR from the United States. Lend-lease, in this respect, may be seen as a temporary substitute for foreign trade. Britain was a major trading nation, highly dependent on imports, especially for food and raw materials. The USSR, on the other hand, was an economy with little trade dependence whose foreign trade turnover had fallen steadily during the 1930s…
The part left off at the end compares repayment of aid sent to the British vs the Soviets. A fairly short read that will give some more context to the conclusions I shared above.
One of the main points the author makes is that lend-lease was used by the US as a stand-in for entering the war and opening a new front in 1942 as the allies (and Stalin in particular) were requesting. In this context, lend-lease was a replacement for reopening the Western front in 1942, an action that could have been far more impactful. The US provided material aid in lieu of entering the war, shifting the human burden of the war onto the other Allied forces and particularly the USSR from 1942 to least at 1944 (note that lend-lease aid extended wider and was provided from 1941-1945).
Overall, the impression I’ve gotten from sifting through academic writings on the subject is that while lend-lease certainly helped take some of the pressure off of the USSR (mainly in the form of producing food, trucks, and raw materials), it’s most likely that the result would have been the same. That said, wondering over historical what-ifs, while fun, should really be constrained to recreational musing and shouldn’t be taken seriously.
amazing comment, thanks!
Why stop at 100 years? Imagine 150 years. No US - Spain war, no US intervention in WW1. Maybe that would have meant no WW2.
And isolationism includes not helping Nazis and their allies like Texaco, Ford or IBM did?
The “It’s a Small World” ride at Disneyland.
deleted by creator
I am just wondering if the US stayed Isolated after WW2 and did not intervene in any countries business like over throwing dictators or supporting or starting rebelens and suchwhat would the world look like today? Would they look at the US and see that democracy works or would they go with some other type of governance?
deleted by creator
Japan would probably still be isolated.
in 1853 US sent warships to force Japan to trade with the west.
Its imperial aspirations were fueled by western thought.
