Yeah, we talked about that (probably a few hundred pages back at this pace)...

Bless the Long Peace.

It was a brilliant response to the hard lesson we learned in WWII, which we didn't learn from WWI.

I'm probably repeating what we said already...

But Stalingrad... showed us something...

The Germans were vicious and efficient but very much in the traditional European military mindset. We understood how they thought, how they reacted... and how to potentially demoralize them, which is a big key to winning a war.

The Italians... had deluded themselves. They convinced themselves they were still the Romans... forgetting that for almost 1000 years they'd been fat and lazy and hired other people to fight their wars for them. They didn't last long.

But the Japanese were scaring the shite out of us... their culture, religion and military approach was so different. Our Western inclination towards individualism made their inclination towards collectivism frightening.

And at Stalingrad, it finally dawned on us on a deep level that Communist Russia was more like a giant Japan in that mindset. And we said "Oh shite!!!"

And immediately the US decision-makers were split into 2 camps:

The Patton mindset that "once we've put the Russians and Japanese away we should immediately go after the Russians, which will be long and awful and costly but the longer we wait the worse it will be..."

And the other side, that devised the Breton Woods system and NATO and Globalism...

The countries of Europe came to Breton Woods expecting to be told "we own you, now!" or "Congratulations, those of you on the west are now American States, the east belongs to Russia," since that had been how the aftermath of wars had worked previously for the most part... well, except for the British, who somehow thought we were going to say "We're rightfully giving you all to the UK because they are the undisputed Masters of the Universe..." and they never quite got over the fact that we didn't do that...

When we told them "Here's how we're rebuilding your sovereign nations..." they were all like "WHAT!?! YOU'RE frickING KIDDING ME!!! ALRIGHT!!!"

The Russians got up and walked out, and forced the countries of Eastern Europe to adopt Communist governments.

But yes, if all those countries are sharing a security apparatus, essentially, then there's no more territorial fights on security concerns... there's no need to fight over land - in Europe or beyond - for resources when you're all able to buy things from each other and shipping is protected around the world by the US Navy.

And what we were actually doing was getting Western Europe to be human shields standing in the way of the U.S.S.R. and the US.

And if the US nuclear umbrella covers you, along with the UK and France, there's no reason to have your own nukes.

The last part is the only thing that really worries me if all this breaks down. Even with NATO intact Poland now wants Nukes... Poland is "cool" at the moment... but they have hotheaded tendencies... especially with Russia/Belarus... and that's a short travel time...