I would like to touch briefly upon the last large conflict humanity faced: World War II. In particular, I would like to examine who its winners were, as well as who were its losers, because the truth is much more surprising than most people remember it to be.
Of course, everyone knows who the most obvious losers were: the fascist powers of Germany, Italy, and Japan. But besides those nations, very few if any other world powers came out ahead once the dust had settled. The British and French Empires were both utterly exhausted by the war, and began to crumble within a few years of the war's end. By the height of the Cold War there was nothing left of their once mighty domains, and neither have been significant players on the global stage ever since.
That leaves but two other potential winners from the most bloody conflict in human history. One of them was the Soviet Union. And yet, a fact that has often been neglected by history is that, by the end of World War II, every city, town and village between Moscow in the East and Berlin in the West had been all but razed to the ground. This was due to the practice of "Scorched Earth", which first the Soviets practiced as they were invaded, and then the Nazis practiced as they retreated across their thousand-mile Eastern Front. Between that and the brutal tactics used by the two nations to "liberate" the people they were in fact conquering, by the war's end almost no hint of civilization remained in either Eastern Europe or Northwestern Asia.
The Soviet Union spent the next decade and a half rebuilding the shattered remains of their once-great nation, principally using the slave labor of their defeated adversaries, and yet many would argue that they still never fully recovered to the point of realistically challenging the Western World for global supremacy. Moreover, the tens of millions of young Soviet soldiers and citizens who were slaughtered by the Axis constituted the decimation of an entire generation of Russians, and the population of the country remains to this day but a fraction of what it would have been had the war not taken such a brutal toll.
That really only leaves one nation which could be said to have even remotely benefited from World War II: the United States of America. The question then becomes: How did we "win" the war?
The answer, as best I can gather, is that the USA won World War II by mostly staying out of the actual fighting. We helped the British in North Africa and the Soviets in Eastern Europe financially through programs such as "Lend-Lease", and eventually helped militarily through the invasion of Sicily, Italy, and finally, France and Germany. But that only occurred once the tide of the war had swung decisively in favor of the Allied cause, and the Axis war effort had begun to wane. And though we mostly defeated Japan without foreign help, by every metric our war in the Pacific took second stage to our efforts in the European Theatre, as Japan was the far weaker foe.
As a result of playing such a careful game of opportunism combined with conflict avoidance, we lost by far the fewest citizens of any major power in the war, with a little under half a million overall casualties, eventually helping us to dominate the Post-War Era, even unto this very day.
The lesson is clear: The only ones who can be said to "win" a war are those who do not fight it in the first place.
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