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In a 21st century world, WE TAKE FOR GRANTED things like the UN, NATO, the "special relationship", victory over the Axis, the delivery of the Atomic Bomb for the Allies FIRST, and so on, and so on, and so on. Winston Churchill could NOT take anything for granted. He knew FDR was always in the strategic position of being able to simply take his toys and go home to the Pacific. Especially when the majority of FDR's countrymen (prior to D-Day) wanted precisely that. Which is why while I agree Winston was shafted, I also feel that short of having George Herbert Walker Bush as POTUS in WWII, that shafting was all but inevitable.


All very true, except I don't understand what you're getting at about Bush. He'd have put the USA first too, I'm sure.
I am absolutely not a fan of any of the Bushes. But if we're going to rake FDR over the coals for being firstly loyal to the USA that elected him, I have to give the Bush-devils that much due as well. Of course their idea of what counts as "US" interest is not mine, as far as I can tell...

While GHWBush as POTUS is ASB due to his age, his father Prescott was old enough--and a US Senator.
Now bearing in mind that Churchill does not know of a certainty the Allies will win, that no one knows if an A-bomb is even practical or if it is that will be feasible any time in the 20th century--I want to remind everyone marveling over how OTL the British PM can be handing so much stuff over free to their chief rivals, that long ago I spoke up for his OTL policy of unstinting aid and support for the Soviets too. If there is some grounds for doubt which way Winston's personal loyalties lay in conflicts between Britain and America--does anyone believe he had any love for Bolshevism, or preferred Russians over either Anglo power? Of course not! He was infamous before the war for his unrelenting anti-Communism, and after it. During the war, once the Germans attacked, he put the whole matter of both his long and deep-seated hatred of Bolshevism in general and Stalin's support of the Third Reich for the past couple of years way back on the back burner, because Britain, and the whole concept of liberal Western civilization, needed all the anti-Axis allies it could get.
Perhaps as an American I am blind to the excessive degree of Churchill's America-philia and his betrayal of UK interests. But considering he treated both future superpowers with the same self-sacrificing zeal, I don't think that's really the explanation for his bending over so far backwards OTL.
For an American, with some pride in the brighter side of the USA as an ideal, I've always been an Anglophile, and it shames me to think of how Britain did get shafted after the war. We should have been more generous and considerate. The notion that much of our cold-shouldering of European interests after the war was out of love for the rights of the poor oppressed colonial peoples makes me roll my eyes, like this:

, because I know exactly how we turned around and treated those same peoples once they were nominally freed of their nominal colonial shackles. We turned right around and backed the crudest lot of warlords and thugs we could find, and half the time failed to maintain Western hegemony over them regardless of our calloused brutality in the name of anti-Communism. Clearly there is a lot of justice in the European perspective that our ideals were hypocritical and cynical.
I actually hope that in this timeline, with Britain, France, and even the Netherlands much stronger in the Third World than they were at this point OTL, on the whole the colonized peoples of the world will do better with various degrees on the spectrum from a more enlightened colonial regime to autonomy and even nominal independence but with ongoing special relationships with their former colonial patrons, than the OTL American model of everyone totally free on paper and in practice run by CIA-vetted strongmen. (You know, the types of regimes the Bush family tended to be personally involved in promoting, and from time to time in the later years turning on as the designated boogeyman du jour--it's very telling that the Bush presidents could never find anyone scarier to whip up a war mobilization around than their own damn recent proteges...


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It's inevitable that ITTL the USA will gradually gain in authority in the councils of the Allies. But it could be that by the time that happens, the post-war arrangements of power within the colonial spheres that made up most of the world will be worked out between a broad spectrum of native politicians and the colonial authorities, and American demands for a more "open" economic order will be largely toothless. Perhaps instead the USA comes to mutually profitable understandings between itself and the colonial powers collectively.
As for the Bomb--I quite agree that Britain deserved better of the USA than a polite, verbal, non-binding gentleman's personal agreement between FDR and WC personally that of course Uncle Sam would share with John Bull postwar, an agreement Harry Truman was not party to, probably did not know about, and had no inclination to keep. I do think we could and should have agreed to post-war profit sharing in some form or other and this should have been formally written up and signed and binding on whoever might inherit the White House.
But one way or another it was only smart, indeed apparently vital, for Churchill to guarantee the research went forward by a nation that could spare the resources and had the security to carry it out, otherwise it would not be inconceivable--to them, in their state of ignorance at the time--that the Germans and even, in wild nightmares, the Japanese, who had some top-notch nuclear physicists--might get there first. In hindsight I think the chances of the Axis, even an Axis in a significantly better position than OTL, had no chance of doing it, because as things turned out the key to having a Bomb was access to lots and lots of riches. The Americans (and British) could import materials from most places in the world, and could produce quite a lot domestically while still gearing up for a truly massive production of conventional war materials. We had vast acreage of land reasonably accessible to high-capacity transport and yet isolated from everyday life for all but a tiny handful of people, for security both in the sense of keeping secrets and also protecting the general population and core industries from the conceivably catastrophic consequences of success. And this secret secure wide-open tract in the middle of the desert was embedded deeply in a continent where no enemy army of any size could plausibly appear and no enemy attack of any kind, however bold and suicidal, could do more than peripheral damage. It only makes sense that the Bomb project happened in North America. In contrast the Axis had no access to resources on land they didn't actually control with troops on the ground, and none of it was secure, and all of it was densely populated, and worst of all they just didn't have the economic margin for the sort of extravagant risk of resources the Manhattan Project was.
But as usetron says, no one could know in advance just what would be required, the Bomb could have been relatively easy to make. If so maybe Britain could beat the Germans to the punch on her own, maybe with some minor project that didn't create a vast paper trail leading spies to locate the secret research centers they'd have to try to hide on a few small islands, or try to relocate to Australia (with Japan running interference) or Canada--just a hop away from the USA...and maybe playing those cards close to their vest would give the Germans just the edge they needed. We know better now, they couldn't know then.
At least Churchill didn't hand the same secrets over to Stalin, to further cover the wartime bet! (This raises a whole other topic, but before Churchill-bashers raise it consider carefully what it implies about an all-UK Bomb project...that's all I'm saying...

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