What would have happened if we hadn’t joined in the war against Hitler? What if we hadn’t responded to Pearl Harbor? One possibility, I suppose, is that they would have continued to “march” across the oceans to bring the war to the US. That is not certain, though, since you can’t do what-if history and test out your hypotheses. Perhaps, if they had succeeded in keeping us out of the war, we could have remained isolationist; traded with them and gone on without fighting.
I think we can question every war in such a way. I only chose WWII because that is the most outrageous. Everyone assumes that was a “good” war. No one ever questions it. The case is quite compelling for the need for fighting that war. But we can never know what would have happened if we didn’t fight it. Maybe Hitler’s empire would have fallen of it’s own weight in a decade or two, just as the Soviet Union fell.
I think there’s no way to answer this question except with opinions that are pretty much meaningless. This is like asking “which war did you like?” “Which war did you approve of?”
In general, I don’t approve of any war. As I have said many times, war is the failure of diplomacy. This doesn’t mean I don’t approve of having strength. I believe we can learn much from game theory, and, although I don’t know much about it, I think the “tit for tat” theory is pretty effective. Appeasement was bad gaming. Everyone knows that. Europe needed a credible threat against Hitler. Failing that, the US should have thrown their support to Europe much sooner. Had these things happened, then I think there would have been a much greater chance for diplomacy to succeed.
Hindsight, of course, is 20–20. We didn’t know then what we know now. So, even though we could play this what-if game with every violent conflict in history, I’m not sure what purpose it serves. One might as well ask, “under what circumstances could diplomacy have prevented every war that ever occurred?” That question is free for the taking, should anyone want to ask it. I’m not going to.
