Earth, circa 1898. It just hadn’t fully realized it yet. Europe was propped up by empire. No individual European country is self sufficient, which is why the collapse of empire led to the European Community immediately.

The US was the gold ring both sides wanted by the time of WW1. It entered, and the endless war ended almost immediately thereafter.

Of course, if the country chooses to be isolationist, then it doesn’t realize the full extent of its ability to project power. The country turned inward in the ‘30s. But, its industrial base needed no vacuum to develop. It was already there, a sleeping giant. In the ‘20s, it left the ravaged European continent in its wake. In the ‘30s, it had a downturn and flirted with totalitarianism, not unlike today. Democracy is both strong and brittle.

So, sure, we were isolationist before Pearl, but Roosevelt had already managed to make us the “arsenal of democracy” by the time we entered the war. It took our undersized military a matter of months to fully mobilize, and start producing like no other country ever. I do mean ever - no country ever went from isolation with virtually no standing army to the military that conquered Japan and did more than anyone aside from Russia to conquer Germany at the same time. No country ever had the industrial base to go from isolation to such two-front power, basically, in the blink of an eye.

We’d built that industrial base long before WW2 even started.

[Post edited by hoolstoptheheels at 01/31/2024 12:12PM]