Thanks for a great post -- well said!
I would only quibble, if that's the right word, with your analysis of our defeat in Vietnam. I'd say it was a real defeat and had real consequences that we suffer from to this day. Indeed, we may not yet have seen the worst of it.
How so, you ask?
Oh, how quickly we forget... First of all, Vietnam was only tangentially about the Viet Cong, the NVA, Ho Chi Mihn and all that. That was just the military battle, which Americans had finally won, by the early 1970s.
But what Vietnam was primarily about was the political war: radical leftist Democrats declaring war against America and winning!
Vietnam was lost to America when our radicals took over Congress and cut off all funding to support the South Vietnamese. Well, duh! With unlimited support from Russia and China, the NVA soon mounted a conventional invasion -- with tanks and all -- which overran the South.
And what were the consequences? Well aside from millions who died or fled the countries, there were revolutionary outbreaks in many other countries of the third world.
More importantly, Americans in our disgust next elected Jimma Carter the Elder (we now have Jimma Carter the Younger), as our Apologizer In Chief, and he spent four years on his knees apologizing to every two-bit tin-horn dictator he could find -- i.e., in Panama.
But arguably Carter's most important apology went to the mullahs & ayatollahs of Iran, and that brought down the Shah. And soon we will be facing the nuclear weapons that are ayatollahs' natural response to Carter's apologies.
So, just as we continue to benefit today from the courage and leadership of America's "greatest generation," we will continue to pay and pay for our defeat in Vietnam.
One more point:
"They had good reason to believe so, since the allies decided not to invade. Rightly so, in my opinion."
I'm sure you know there were voices at the time which warned direly against letting the Germans off the hook too easily. Among Americans the most notable was General John J Pershing, who (iirc) predicted in 1918 that unless the allies marched all the way to Berlin, the Germans would come back for round-two in twenty years. He was only off by a few months.
“Among Americans the most notable was General John J Pershing, who (iirc) predicted in 1918 that unless the allies marched all the way to Berlin, the Germans would come back for round-two in twenty years.”
Yes, but how many predictions do people make that never pan out? Pershing, I doubt, could have anticipated why Germany would live to fight another day. There was the “stab in the back” thing, yeah. But moreso, it was the depression, brought on by France’s aggression and Germany’s stupidity. Then there was the insane ideologue dictator thing, brought on by the depression among other things.
There was a way to set Germany on the right path, and it didn’t involve killing thousands more of their citizens. That was to encourage their economy. Treat them like a friend. Like we later treated West Germnay. Help them grow their exports, which truly was the only way for them to pay their reparations (if they ever were going to pay them). No inflation, no depression, no political turmoil and leadership weakness, and there’s nothing for Nazis to exploit. Who cares about who stabbed who in the back when times are good?
Of course, all this depends on world leaderes knowing how to act, and they don’t. They would screw up their economies roughly as bad as Germany’s in short order. All I’ll say is that even if invasion was the only way to put down Germany’s bellicosity, you can always invade in 1938 anyway.