Posted: Wed Apr 08, 2020 9:52 am
North German Realm wrote:Vistulange wrote:A threat is meaningless if the other side knows it's not practically possible to carry it out, however.
The US acted in a very, very, very smart way in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, considering its position as a superpower, and perhaps the hegemon of the new world order. Had it acted in a manner hostile to its Western Allies - making unreasonable demands counts towards this, yes - it could have driven them out of the Western sphere and into the arms of the Soviets, just like Cuba went after the Bay of Pigs invasion. Despite the distaste for the communism of the sort the Soviets practiced, again, 1945 wasn't precisely the year Joseph Stalin was "the big bad empire", he was rather "Uncle Joe". He would become the villain - along with the USSR - more towards 1947-ish. It would not be wholly odd to think that countries such as the UK and France gravitating away from the US and veering closer to the USSR, if they were threatened with the usage of US atomic weapons, out of the blue, just because the US could. By this, I'm not asserting that suddenly, the UK and France would have become founding members of the Warsaw Pact, but the US would have certainly lost its allies in Europe. The argument could be made that the US could keep them on its side by force, but I honestly don't think that would have been realistically possible, especially considering the extreme distance between the US and its hypothetical satellite states. If the USSR had to invade Hungary and Czechoslovakia from half a world away, it probably couldn't have, and the same goes for the US. To make such a thing possible, one would need to keep those satellites militarily weak, so that they cannot resist a US invasion from overseas, but that just makes them ripe targets for the Soviets.
Anyway, I've rambled. Tl;dr: Hindsight is perfect, but it would be unreasonable to expect the US decision-makers at the time to suddenly start bullying everybody, especially people they had just fought a long war with, simply because it had atomic bombs.
Except it wouldn't be impossible. The US had nukes. Not many of them, but enough to be able to fulfill a threat. The Chinese Civil War didn't end until 5 years after ww2 ended, meaning it could produce more far before the Soviets developed their own. It also occupied Okinawa, giving it a perfect airbase to organize nuclear bombings from. And demanding its allies not do anything while it was dealing with a rebel threat endangering the stability of one of the four Victorious Powers is not hostile.
Refer to my prior post.
Ankenland wrote:Vistulange wrote:The US acted in a very, very, very smart way in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, considering its position as a superpower,
Stopped reading there.
Nope, screwed it up massively. Should've nuked the Russians and the Chinese immediately, and then everything else, until there was nothing left but NATO and its protectorates.
Flushed the opportunity down the drain and no one will ever get it again, now we have to put up with all these dysfunctional people, forever. It would have been easier to just glass them.
Yes, it's obvious you stopped reading there. At least don't admit it like this, it looks bad.
Also, there was no "NATO" in 1945. If you're going to stop reading, at least get your history right.