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1, 2, and 3 are not all that different given the economics and politics of the.
Basically every wealthy country followed the same idea, of not just free-market capitalism, but imperalistic capitalism. The way to get rich was to conquer some 3rd countries, take their resources, and then sell them back manufactured goods at an inflated price. Then you use your high-tech manufacturing to dominate the world, forever.
Britain especially, but also France, Dutch, Belgium, and some others had all emerged as "winners" of the great imperialism game of the 19th century. They had nice little empires for themselves, and were raking in the cash. Germany, eastern Europe, Italy, and Japan were "losers"- potentially strong nations which had lost their chance to grab an empire and were now falling behind. Russia was sort of a weird case where it had a ton of land and resources but was still undeveloped and uncolonized, so it had the chance to either emerge as a great power in its own right or get colonized by someone else.
Once you're in that kind of system, there's an obvious dividing line for how the alliances would shake out. Britain et. al. wanted to maintain the status quo of capitalism. Germany and the others still wanted to do capitlism, but rearrange the map a bit to grab some colonies for themselves. Russia wanted a whole different system where they could develop and be left alone. Nobody was thinking "let's just develop our service sector and leave the 3rd world alone in peace" because that just wasn't how people at the time thought, at all.
It's weird to say this about a country that very aggressively tried to invade almost everybody around itself.
The Soviet idea of empire wasn't a perfect analogue to English or French or Dutch imperialism... but it wasn't that far off either!
Fair point. It's easy to think of "the USSR" as being a singular country, but it really wasn't. It was the Russian Empire. So you could slide them into that side of "winners of the global imperialism game" alongside the English, French, Dutch, etc. But they were kind of different in that they didn't have any wealthy, 1st-world "core" to the country the way those other countries did.
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