By raising questions about America’s participation in World War II, Pat Buchanan has horrified American interventionists. People are simply not supposed to raise questions about America’s role in what has become known as the “good war.”
Was Nazi Germany a direct threat to the United States after 1940? It’s difficult to see how it was. After all, if Germany was incapable of crossing the English Channel to invade Great Britain, how would it have been able to cross the Atlantic to invade the United States?
In examining the European part of World War II, it’s also important to reflect on all the results, not just the good ones.
When Great Britain and France declared war on Germany (it is easy to forget that Germany did not declare war on them first), the goal was to save the Polish people from Nazi tyranny.
What was the result at the end of the war? It’s true that the Poles were no longer suffering under Nazi tyranny, but they were suffering under communist tyranny – and continued to so suffer for 50 long years.
Now, it’s true that the Soviet communists were American allies during the war, but why should that matter with respect to the Polish people? Were they supposed to be happier suffering under Stalin and the communists rather than under Hitler and the Nazis, just because Stalin had been a Western ally during the war?
In fact, I wonder how all those American, British, and French soldiers who died in the European conflict would have responded if they had been asked, “Are you willing to give your life so that the Polish people can suffer under Soviet communism rather than German national socialism?”
“But we couldn’t have just sat back and watched Germany invade Poland,” interventionists tell us. “That would have been appeasement of a brutal dictator and undoubtedly would have encouraged him to go further.”
The Soviet Union, however, invaded Poland about two weeks after Germany did. If the Soviet Union’s invasion of Poland was tolerable, why wasn’t Germany’s invasion of Poland?
“But we couldn’t have permitted Hitler to survive,” interventionists claim. “He would have been a threat to world peace, and might even have acquired nuclear weapons.”
But didn’t the world survive both Stalin and Mao, both of whom acquired nuclear weapons? The express aim of the communists was worldwide conquest and domination. (Recall Khrushchev’s famous line to the West, “We will bury you.”) Why would a similar threat by Nazis have been more dangerous?
The Rise of Communism
One of the worst consequences of World War II, of course, was the rise of international communism. At the end of the war, communists controlled East Germany, Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, China, and much of Asia and other parts of the world. It’s difficult to see how any of this benefited the United States, especially when we consider the Cold War, Korean War, and Vietnam War.
As Buchanan points out, if Germany had continued moving east and ultimately gone to war against the Soviet Union, it is entirely possible that the West would have been significantly better off sitting back and watching these two collectivist giants weaken each other through war.
Opposition to World War II
In all of the furor that Buchanan’s book, A Republic, Not an Empire, has raised, it’s also important to remember that prior to Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, most Americans opposed America’s intervention into the European conflict. President Franklin Roosevelt himself vowed in October 1940, when he was seeking an unprecedented third term in office, “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” (Some Roosevelt supporters acknowledge that FDR did not truly mean what he said, and point to all the secret steps he was taking to involve the United States in the European conflict.)
Roosevelt knew that Americans wanted no part in the European conflict because the consequences of World War I were still on their minds. Not only had that war entailed a horrific waste of American lives, but contrary to President Wilson’s hopes and dreams it had not turned out to be the war to end all wars and had not made the world safe for democracy.
In fact, World War I – along with the vengeful Treaty of Versailles – actually set the stage for the rise of Adolf Hitler and World War II. Perhaps worst of all, for the rest of the 20th century, America’s involvement in World War II set America on a road of continual war and intervention in an endless quest for everlasting peace. Perhaps that’s why American interventionists don’t like anyone raising questions about it.
