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Notes -
It was a threat to Europe certainly, but I don’t think it would have affected the Americas as much. They were genocidal especially against Jews and Romaní. But given the oceans that surround the American continent and the fact that the shortest pacific route would require a launch from the USSR, which I don’t think they could do without taking Moscow.
The threat is moral. The retreat of democracy, liberalism, human rights, and other enlightenment virtues. And certainly after the war the narrative of the Allies (except the Soviet Bloc) who later became NATO “saved the world” with the center of the alliance in Washington DC, who could boast a strong economy and military readiness because those oceans mean that war didn’t destroy our cities or kill our civilians. This same “save the world” motif tends to show up when we want to go to war. Every war since then has been fought “to stop human rights abuses.” Putin has in recent times been recast as hitleresque in the sense of seeking to destroy Ukraine, and wanting lebensraum. Even NATO bombings in Serbia were cast as stopping genocide.
Most of those later stories are at least somewhat true. But the larger point is that the logic of NATO’s right to stand astride the globe and to sanction or bomb or invade are based on the logic of WW2. We are holding ourselves out as moral paragons on the basis of human rights and liberal democracy and free trade as the proper way to do things.
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