LogFAQs > #911934596

Blighboy posted...

We coexisted with Soviet Russia for nearly a century. We couldn't even make two decades with the Nazis. It would have been horrific if they'd been as long lasting as Soviet Russia or Red China.

There are several reasons why America co-existed with the communists far longer than the Nazis, none of which have to do with their ideology or relative body counts:

1) Probably the biggest one is that there were no such thing as nuclear weapons when Hitler came to power, but when relations soured between the US and the USSR near the end of WW2, nuclear weapons were on the field and suddenly the whole game changed. MAD was a potent deterrent to open warfare (and even then, a few close calls tells us that even that almost wasn't enough).

2) The main antagonists against Nazi Germany were some of the US's closest allies (chiefly France and the British Commonwealth); by contrast, most of the countries that the USSR was fighting/conquering did not enjoy as close ties with the US, so there was less of an impetus to get involved (and the USA, pre-WW2 and even for a while afterwards before the Cold War really took off, were substantially more isolationist than the US of today).

3) The USSR was, simply, far, far more powerful than the Nazis ever were. I dislike saying that any one nation was the reason for victory/defeat, given the incredible scope and scale of the conflict, but if you were to award the honours, the USSR is probably the MVP of the Allied war effort during WW2. Consider that the Soviets had more dead than the Americans had soldiers and that the Eastern front - where the Soviets fought the Nazis almost unsupported - was larger than the other three theatres of the war combined. And despite their horrendous losses, the USSR not only emerged from the war strong, they had enough left in the tank to become one of the two global superpowers (where the other had basically had next to no damage on its own territory). Even disregarding the question of nukes on both sides, had the US ever seriously decided to fight the USSR, it's very much an open question of who would have been victorious in the end.
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