You'll notice that much of the furor has come from the idea that the NSA might be watching what Americans are doing. For everything else there was effectively a big giant "Of course they were bugging $FOO, that's their job".

Obviously Europe doesn't feel the same way (and didn't with ECHELON)...

The US would have joined the war. By 1940, the US was practically involved in the war, just without men. German U-Boats were sinking American convoys, and American ships were destroying German U-Boats.

It was only a matter of time before the US would have joined the war, Pearl Harbor or not. FDR was prepared to fight it without the approval of Congress.

The US entry into the First World War was primarily to be a participant in the peace negotiations, so Wilson could present his 14 points, create the League of Nations and ensure American dominance in world politics (something the USA has refrained from participating in prior to the First World War, despite its economical power).

The Second World War pretty much started with American involvement, but it was not until Pearl Harbor that the USA could finally - publicly - commit its entire arsenal. But regardless, you would have found a way to join the war. Japan just did you a favour.

Yes, and? Did Europe intervene in the American Civil War, or in any of the multitude of conflicts in the Americas, East Asia, or Africa over the past 200 years? Even the rest of Europe abandoned Austria and Czechoslovakia to the Germans before Poland fell. Going to war is a huge commitment, and doing it purely for the benefit of a continent that has spent the last several centuries hell-bent on destroying itself sounds like a really bad idea.

The worst part is, when the US government does see a situation that calls for military intervention, like Vietnam or Iraq, that gets criticized as well.

Whining about Europe 'not intervening' in the 1860s completely misses the massive changes going on in Europe at the time - it's not like Europe was sitting around peacefully not doing anything in particular like the US was at the start of each World War. Only a few years after the US civil war finished, Germany came into existence and successfully invaded Paris, for example.

Even the rest of Europe abandoned Austria and Czechoslovakia to the Germans before Poland fell

Nice. In one breath you chide Europe for always being at war, in the next you chide them for not going to war enough.

Did Europe intervene ... in any of the multitude of conflicts in the Americas, East Asia, or Africa over the past 200 years

Yes, Europe did - the death of colonialism happend after WWII, considerably nearer to us than 200 years ago. The UK fought an open war against a South American nation only 30 years ago. The French still regularly intervene in Africa. The French fought in Vietnam up until Dien Bien Phu Falls in 1954, only 20 years before the US bugged out of there.

Hell, the UK fought against the Japanese in WWII, which again is much closer to our time than 200 years ago.

And the Russians - still a European country - intervened all over the place. Afghanistan throughout the 80s, for example. Immense amounts of material aid to North Vietnam. So on and so forth.

Good old American Exceptionalism. No-one else ever does anything, it's always up to the 'world cop' (who happens to be very selective about what he's policing). You've got a really simplistic view of European political history - I encourage you to read up a lot more on it (if nothing else, it's really quite interesting).

And when Germany manages to do that for the third time in 80 years, it's America's fault for not intervening?

Look, all I'm trying to do is refute the idea that it's somehow the responsibility of the US to step in and intervene whenever a war breaks out somewhere in the world. Germany invading Poland and France wasn't relevant enough to American interests to justify sending men across the Atlantic to die. It just seemed like business as usual. You can call that isolationism but it's not like any of the European powers stuck their neck out when it wasn't in their interests.

I mean, come on. You have just said that Iraq was a war that 'called for intervention', but you say the same is not true of the Nazis? This is despite nearly 10 years of a steady exodus of Jews from Germany to the US and other countries? It's not like no-one knew that the Nazis were oppressive, it's just the depth that they would eventually get to that was unknown.

You can call that isolationism but it's not like any of the European powers stuck their neck out when it wasn't in their interests.

I never said the US should be faulted for isolationism, though it is odd you cheer both their early isolationism and their later interventionism. I said that you were mischaracterising what was going on and engaging in double-standards.

For example, given that the French were intervening this year in Mali, as 'France' and not part of the UN, how does this stack up against your claim of "Europeans don't intervene in Africa and haven't for 200 years"? Where are the US ground troops intervening in Africa? The US navy, along with European ones, are intervening against the Somali pirates, but that's to protect shipping, it's not to help the people. I wouldn't be surprised if there were some, but I'm unaware of any.

Look, all I'm trying to do is refute the idea that it's somehow the responsibility of the US to step in and intervene whenever a war breaks out somewhere in the world.

The US bills itself as the 'world cop', which was exactly its rationale for invading Iraq. It's natural for people to expect it to live up to its own rhetoric.

Stop posturing--these remarks add nothing to the discussion.

> France and the UK were both hastily remilitarising and were buying time. Everyone knew war was coming, but the UK and the French needed more time to prepare, and it wasn't just the US that was suffering from economic depression in the 30s. They knew for 20 years that there would be another war - Marshal Foch said of the Treaty of Versailles "This is not a peace. It is an armistice for twenty years". He was only two months out.

I don't see how that's anywhere at odds with what I'm saying, which is that Europe tended to have these wars from time to time and the US was justifiably reluctant to intervene.

> You have just said that Iraq was a war that 'called for intervention'

I said that's how the US government saw it at the time.

> but you say the same is not true of the Nazis?

> ...

> though it is odd you cheer both their early isolationism and their later interventionism

I did no such thing--I said it's hypocritical to criticize America for both isolationism and for interventionism. Please read what I actually wrote and make an honest attempt to comprehend it.

> The US bills itself as the 'world cop'

In 1939 they did that?

My whole point, which you have arrogantly refused to comprehend, has been to justify the initial American non-intervention in WWII, and in WWII the US never billed itself as any such thing.

I can offer no defense of American interventionism. I think it's consistently been a mistake. But if you're going to go around arguing that the US should have been interventionists in World War II, then you have to accept what it looks like when the US pursues a foreign policy of interventionism. Most people don't like how that turns out. Most people would prefer if the US would mind its own business and not get involved in wars overseas, but if they hold that position, it's hypocritical of them to criticize the US for not directly joining the Second World War before they had a good reason to.

No.

> or in any of the multitude of conflicts in the Americas

Yes, particular one that overlapped the American Civil War in time and neighbored it geographically. [1] Perhaps less in the Americas then elsewhere (particularly when the US wasn't tied up in its own civil war) due to the US's proclamation of regional hegemony (the Monroe Doctrine) and desire not get into a fight over that.

> East Asia

Again, yes, quite regularly.

> or Africa over the past 200 years

There, too.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_intervention_in_Mexico

The 19th century's balance of power was essentially established by intervening in other countries so as to not plunge the entire continent into war. During the Spring of Nations in 1848, Austria, Prussia and France intervened in several smaller European countries (as well as internally) to crush uprisings.

During the American Civil War, there were a couple of wars in Europe, which were much more interesting to Europeans, as these were part of the German and Italian unification wars. Besides, the USA was nowhere as powerful during the 1860s as Europe was in the 1910s, so the comparison is not really useful.

Remember, states don't have friends, they have interests. Why would the Europeans intervene in a civil war of yours? But besides that, the Europeans did intervene in several conflicts around the world, particularly in places where they had interests. Such as the Latin American independence wars (as well as other wars in Latin America), African revolts (remember the 19th century was the scramble for Africa) and East Asia wars that threatened their trading ports (such as the Boer War).

Which was my point--why would Americans intervene in a war of yours?

Which is why the US was reluctant to get involved in the World Wars. You can't have it both ways.

One is the good democratic fight versus the bad facists. US were hampered by the isolationist views held by quite a number of senators at the time, hence there was no direct involvement until after Pearl Harbour attack, which resulted in an almost uniform senatorial agreement on declaration of war.

Another is that US could have kept maintaining the profit stream from arms-dealing to both sides (Germany still imported American arms prior to 1941 or so, if I'm not mistaken) but got unwillingly dragged into the war.

Yet another more cynical view is that after the huge Axis loss at USSR, US just saw the opportunity to join in and mope up what's left of the Axis since winners get to dictate the terms. The Pearl Harbour event was a surprising but timely excuse.

"huge Axis losses" in the USSR didn't start happening until 1943 though. Even the Nazi defeat at Stalingrad wasn't until the end of 1942.

So that view is not merely cynical, it's also simply inaccurate.

Of course Pearl Harbour was what got the US directly involved and nuking Japan out in the end, but I hold the speculation that without Pearl Harbour, US would still declare war to either Germany or Japan anyway because of several reasons below: 1) US businesses were being harmed by the Axis, i.e. Germans attacking cargo ships meant to supply arms to Britain. Sooner or later the piled up losses would justify the entry in front of Congress.

2) The Japanese was expanding fast in Asia and they would not stop just short of US territorial waters, plus the imposed embargo had been pissing the Japanese off anyway. A clash was inevitable.

3) Letting USSR being the major player and eventual winner meant letting communism spread throughout Europe. There had to be a sizable participation from the Capitalist group in the war and the rest of the Western bloc was too tattered to muster that up.

The fact that that's not how it worked out is pretty good evidence that there wasn't a global capitalist conspiracy behind the whole thing after all.

Thankfully not, as the upper class in Britain at least tended to favour the Confederacy.

> East Asia

There's few parts of the world you could list that is a worse example of places Europe haven't intervened.

European powers were either one of the major sides or a supporting power in most wars in East Asia for a substantial part of the last couple of centuries.

You do realize the US "inherited" the Vietnam war with the associated campaigns in Laos and Cambodia from France, do you not?

That the US fought with the British, French and Russian empires against China in the Opium wars?

Now, arguably those are not good arguments for continued intervention. On the contrary. While I think there were some very good reasons why the US ought to have intervened in World War II earlier, I also wish the US had learned more lessons from some of the wars mentioned above (and a lot of other foolish wars the European colonial powers were involved in).

Instead the US seems to have seen the way the waning colonial powers acted as a recipe for how it needed to behave as its own power grew, with - for anyone paying attention to the outcomes of the colonial wars - predictably horrible outcomes.

> Even the rest of Europe abandoned Austria and Czechoslovakia to the Germans before Poland fell

It's easy to look back and regret those. But the politics around them, and the patchy history of Europe, made them politically "tricky". The Austrian "Anschluss" happened on the background of the German Austria's previous attempts to merge with Germany, which was denied it by treaty, including the Treaty of Versailles. In 1938 Austria was under a semi-fascist dictatorship, and there was then pressure for a referendum on the issue (with extensive support and threats from Hitler). Facing lack of support from Mussolini who had previously protected them against Hitler, the Austrian government accepted a large number of nazis into government, who then used their positions to prepare and conduct a coup against the austro-fascists supported by threats of force on the basis of allegations of plans to rig the referendum. It was then the Austrian nazi government that handed control over to Germany in a manner designed to effectively be a request from the Austrian state for the Germans to enter Austria. They then carried out a vote to legitimise the takeover.

The combination of events made it politically extremely hard for outsiders to do much more than complain. Europe should go to war because a government asked for military support from a neighbour following allegations that the previous dictator may have tried to prevent the will of the people, in the face of widespread public support for the nazis? In retrospect, probably. But without the knowledge of what Hitler went on to do, it was squabbling between two authoritarian governments over control of an artificially created country with a history of wanting to merge, where the new dictator likely had as much or maybe even more support than the old dictator.

In the case of Czechoslovakia similarly, the state was an artifical creation from parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, that included a substantially ethnically German population in certain areas (Germans made up 23% of the population of Czechoslovakia) that had genuine grievances of oppression against the elite of the country, and the government also purposefully moved parts of the German population to the West, making it even easier to make excuses.

So Hitler was similarly able to play the role of someone who at least plausibly wanted to "liberate" the German population, and present the whole thing as "rectifying" a situation that was only 20 years old and an outcome of a previous war when the will of the people in question had been largely ignored when the borders were drawn up, and so got Sudetenland. When Hitler went into the rest of Czechoslovakia, he got the support of Slovakia, and both Hungary and Poland used the opportunity to annex area - he was not the only agressor, and support for going to war over Czechoslovakia when even the government over a substantial part of the twenty year old country took part in the aggression against the rest and supported the German invasion was not an appealing proposition.

While there were certainly fears and lots of people who had concerns about it, Hitler played people up against each other, and was dealing with governments who all had gotten their hands dirty in drawing up fairly arbitrary borders without the involvement of the affected people and/or through wars within the last few decades. Combine that with a strong degree of denial - nobody wanted to rush into a new war - and a lot of admiration for what Hitler had achieved domestically in Germany, coupled with a grudging acceptance that perhaps giving these people what they seemed to want might not be such a bad idea if it resolved some of the remaining tensions created by the Treaty of Versailles.

In retrospect, of course, that was stupid. But then in retrospect it was stupid to not intervene when Hitler remilitarised areas Germany was not allowed to militarise and in a whole host of other situations leading up to the war.

But the cases of Czechoslovakia and Austria were still substantially different than the case of Poland, both because they came first, but also because they were clouded in politics and could be "explained away" as something other than naked aggression. By the time of the invasion of Poland, though, there was no denying that Hitlers ambitions did not stop at "liberating" German speaking groups in weird little newly created states, and with the rapid fall of further states

Sidebar to a sidebar, but it went a little deeper than that. The British industrialists tended to favor the South -- and supplied weapons to the Confederacy in the lead up to the war -- because they depended on Southern cotton imports. Their industrial interests were heavily tied up with the South's.

There was actually a very real possibility that Britain would have gone further, and a lot of internal political pressure for it to do so.

Yes they did. Both Vietnam and Iraq are leftovers from European interventions.

The rich would have made more money selling arms to both sides. (In fact some did.)

"wall Street and the Rise of Hitler"

http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/0945001533

You can probably find it as a pdf someplace too, as it is a pretty old book. Read it and try to see the difference between the US industrialists and German industrialists in the dock at Nueremburg. Same sh*t, different piles imho.

Their people or their governments? Their people disagree with this, as we do. Their governments have long appeared to be cooperating, even if they drop their monocles into their drinks every time something like this comes out.

But I would presume that even parliamentary government must bow to public outcry in some form.