the USA pretty much was gonna sit out WWII until Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and Germany declared war on America.
There's a credible theory that the U.S. knew Japan would likely attack Pearl Harbor soon, but did nothing to prevent it in order to facilitate the country's entry into WWII. That sort of action-by-inaction is easy to imagine one person at the top pulling off, and FDR was not in the isolationist camp.
Didn’t anti-communism become even more of a state religion after WWII than it was before WWII?
Yes, but FDR at least made it possible to take another path. At the end of WWII the Soviets didn't want to immediately get in another expensive war, and they certainly didn't want to get into a conflict with the only nuclear power on the planet. Former colonized people had worked directly with the U.S. throughout the war (e.g., Ho Chi Minh) and mostly just wanted what the U.S. claimed to support -- free elections and self-determination. The Vietnamese Declaration of Independence is closely modeled after the U.S. document for these exact reasons. The U.S. was also functionally in charge of creating the U.N. and the whole post-war legal and economic order, and we could have structured it in any number of ways that would have been cooperative rather than confrontational. Domestically, we had just portrayed the Soviets as good allies for years, and a president committed to peace could have doubled down on that.
We held all the cards and could have potentially avoided the Cold War had we had capable leadership. Dragging the imperial core to the point where that was even a possibility wasn't entirely FDR's doing, but he should get some credit for it.
There's a credible theory that the U.S. knew Japan would likely attack Pearl Harbor soon, but did nothing to prevent it in order to facilitate the country's entry into WWII. That sort of action-by-inaction is easy to imagine one person at the top pulling off, and FDR was not in the isolationist camp.
Yes, but FDR at least made it possible to take another path. At the end of WWII the Soviets didn't want to immediately get in another expensive war, and they certainly didn't want to get into a conflict with the only nuclear power on the planet. Former colonized people had worked directly with the U.S. throughout the war (e.g., Ho Chi Minh) and mostly just wanted what the U.S. claimed to support -- free elections and self-determination. The Vietnamese Declaration of Independence is closely modeled after the U.S. document for these exact reasons. The U.S. was also functionally in charge of creating the U.N. and the whole post-war legal and economic order, and we could have structured it in any number of ways that would have been cooperative rather than confrontational. Domestically, we had just portrayed the Soviets as good allies for years, and a president committed to peace could have doubled down on that.
We held all the cards and could have potentially avoided the Cold War had we had capable leadership. Dragging the imperial core to the point where that was even a possibility wasn't entirely FDR's doing, but he should get some credit for it.