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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 25, 2023

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You can push the failure of statecraft further backward in time if you like. The premise is the same: if we fought on the side of the Soviets, we were fighting on the wrong side. After all, the Soviets and Nazis were allied for two years, from 1939-41.

The US didn't get to choose which side they fought on, or even whether to fight - Hitler's ally bombed Pearl Harbour and Hitler honoured the alliance by declaring war. Assuming that Barbarossa happens in any alternative timeline, the only way the US avoids ending up on the same side as the Soviet Union is to cut a deal with Japan such that Pearl Harbour never happens.

The world where the US gives the Japanese explicit permission to carve up the European colonial empires in Asia as long as they stay away from the Philipines and supports the Nazis over the Soviets in post-Barbarossa Europe is obviously worse for humanity (either the Nazis win, or WW2 is even bloodier because it takes the Allies longer to win). I don't think either result looks good for the US either. In both cases, the US ends up as the weakest of three blocs (with the other two allied), doesn't have access to the Middle East oilfields, and is almost certainly on the wrong end of a nuclear monopoly. (The Allied bomb effort in our timeline was dependent on refugee talent who went to Los Alamos specifically to oppose Nazi Germany - if the US is neutral, then the Allied bomb project ends up in some suitably out-of-the-way part of the British Empire, and the German bomb project has more time and resources).