How successful would the US have been as a 20th century aggressor?

If in the first half of the 20th century if the US had the aggressive territorial expansionist ideals of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union how successful could it have been, assuming it'd face opposition from other nations?

The US had a more robust industrial base than either nation there.
 
You mean like the US taking a 3rd go at Canada? Perhaps Mexico and Central/South America. Power projection for the US is way more limited outside the Western Hemisphere.
 
I doubt any of the European Powers would care if a 2nd Mexican-American war happened. The Central American nations can't hope to fight the US. They would keep growing Bananas.

Canada would be a problem because it happens to be British.

I am not sure what would happen if the US tried to turn Colombia, Venezuela, and maybe Equator into Banana republics. Once you leave the Caribbean, US power projection would begin to drop off fast.
 
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No, despite what WW2 might suggest it is not impossible to defeat the US. If they were the aggressor then their enemies will come up with the ideas and risky plans to defeat them. I'm not saying they would, but its not a given they won't.

It also largely depends on how the rest of the world looks like with an aggressive US(possibly nazi or communist?). I mean how does Germany look, what about Japan?

If they want to attack the rest of the world, do preemptive strikes and break all the rules of war like the other side did OTL then they are going to get in trouble with timescale and planning. Just like the other side OTL.
 
If the US matched Imperial Germany's per capita defence spending from 1900 they could maintain a military/naval force about 50% bigger than Germany's in 1914; an army as big or bigger than Russia's and a navy as big or bigger than Britain's.

But such a force wouldn't be powerful enough to invade Europe and probably Japan and could be matched by alliances around the world, so I guess a stalemated Cold War would be the result.
 
Given how the overwhelming portion of the planets industry was in the USA?

The Western Hemisphere would be overrun.

Best case scenario, the Americans stay out of the other hemisphere.
 
The United States could probably overrun all of the Americas at worse and conquer the ENTIRE world at best.

It depends on the POD and when.

To make the US conquer to world just have the US stay out of WW2 and maintain some willingness to trade with both sides. Atomic bomb is developed, albeit later...without british or canadian help.

When WW2 ends or both sides exhaust themselves in a stalemate. Have the US exploit its nuclear monopoly and force a new world order upon europe, japan and its former possesions.
 
If in the first half of the 20th century if the US had the aggressive territorial expansionist ideals of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union how successful could it have been, assuming it'd face opposition from other nations?

The US had a more robust industrial base than either nation there.

Expanding the Bannana Wars then, Panama, Dominican Republic, Hati, Vera Cruz, Nicaragua... Toss in a outlier like Shanghai in 1927 & the Marines were busy fellows those decades.
 
Conquering North America and puppetizing most of South America would probably be the best they could do without massive overstretch. Beyond that and holding what is currently taken will be extremely difficult simply due to distance and population.
 
The entire world except Vietnam at best

Evil Amerika wouldn't have had a problem with a bunch of nukes to solve that problem, besides, no China or USSR to provide supplies and weapons.
Not a lot of fight in North Vietnam with the Red River Dams knocked out and Haiphong a radioactive ruin
 
Without general plan ost levels of brutality, annexed the entirety of North America including the carribean would result in an unimaginable inssurgency.
 
Does literally every other Great Power wreck themselves in two major wars, as OTL? If so, then the US could probably establish itself briefly as a global hegemon; if OTL is a guide this hegemony might last 25 years if they're lucky. Short of that, the US would just be an even worse regional hegemon in the New World with some influence in the Pacific and/or Africa.

The US was really not anything like as powerful in the early-mid 20th century as it is commonly portrayed, it just had the very good fortune to be the last man standing. While it would have been the strongest state in the 20th century even without the world wars, the gap between it and powers like Britain and Germany would not have become overwhelmingly large until after 1950, by which point states such as Russia (which without world wars could easily outpace the US by the early 21st century) would begin to catch up. This is putting aside the rather important factor of 'who is allied to who'...
 
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