WI: US with No Long Term Foreign Entanglments

Say the US, who in the TL still participates militarily in WW1 & WW2, coupled with Lend Lease, return to long-term public fiscal isolationism.

I.E. No Foreign Aid, UN Contributions, Foreign Military Spending, etc.

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What else would the funds be spent on?

Infrastructure? Social Welfare? Budget Balancing? Something Else Entirely?

Would we Still Need to Come off the Gold Standard?
 
With out US soldiers on the ground in Europe more wars develop there in the 20th Century. At least one of those expands into the Third World War which destroys any post WWII prosperity.

What else would the funds be spent on?

Ether intervention into a third global war, or fending off some other global power that interprets isolationism and a small military was a opportunity. Sure participation in NATO & the UN has been expensive, but WWII was far more expensive. Far more costly than backing up France against Germany in 1923 or 1936 would have cost. Prevention is nearly always cheaper.

Isolationism is a false economy. At the very start of US history the Barbary States correctly judged the lack of a US Navy as a opportunity for extortion of the US merchant fleet. A costly war became necessary to change that policy. That led to a low cost policy of naval patrols & 'piracy' suppresion, & other small actions to keep various states or nations from expanding their actions vs the US to a much larger and costly level.

Post 1919 the US misjudged its economic and political interests in a misguided effort to return to the late 19th Century policies. That failed, leaving a fellow republic and ally France in the lurch, resulting in a horriblly expensive global war. Keeping a capable expeditionary corps ready and being clearly willing to back France up in its effort to forestal Germanys military resurgence would have gone a long ways towards preventing a second global war.

Of course all that requires clever and long term diplomacy as well. Something that not all politicians are blessed with.
 
This is impossible, the US is going to get entangled in the international world eventually; especially if WW2 as we know it happens.
 
A different Battle of the Marne might do it. But in this case, London still might remain THE financial center and the British Empire is still quite powerful. I'm going to guess there is more trade protectionism with the respective empires so the US is relatively less prosperous as imports are more expensive and export markets smaller.

I think the US would have to get involved in the mideast if only for oil. A different WWI leads to a very different middle east though so it might not be as volatile.

Given the nature of oil reserves, true isolationism gets near impossible post the decline in West Texas production in 1970.
 
WW2 is fought utterly differently because there is no Philippines under US Control. Japan probably does NOT bomb Pearl Harbor if there is no obvious reason to engage the United States.

US Entry into WW2 is delayed. WW2 as we know it isn't fought, and a "bad ending" where the Soviet Union is beat up too badly to overcome Nazi Germany isn't impossible. However, the USA is going to fight WW2 sooner or later, per the OP, so I'll rule this out.

The United States still builds nuclear weapons, pretty close to OTL's schedule. If the USA isn't in a shooting war until something like Spring 1943, WW2 is going to see many more uses of nuclear weapons against cities.

Europe is going to be in a bad way; Hitler may well decide to use chemical weapons after facing nuclear attack. The UK can respond with Anthrax, but we'd easily have an utterly trashed Europe.

Meanwhile, the United States has zero interest in making any kind of sphere of influence discussion post-war, or any interest in chairing criminal trials against war criminals. In some regards, it would be harder to figure out what happened--by VE Day in 1947, the Holocaust has largely succeeded in killing Europe's Jews. The Nazis may have decided to apply the machinery against the "Polish Question", and made considerable progress in destroying the Polish people. But nuclear weapons blowing up cities is a good way to destroy a lot of bureaucratic evidence, and Berlin is likely hit.

The Red Army probably prevails in the East, assuming that the United States is still able to launch something like D-Day. There are a lot of political difficulties in the United States doing D-Day if their leadership transparently doesn't care about the world after their actions. That the US-UK special relationship never forms or even becomes a great bitterness while the war is going on is another monkey wrench into any kind of OTLish direction.

I'm not even sure what's going in the Pacific Ocean. The United States may very well not even embargoed Japan, leading to Japan simply distancing itself from Germany and buying endless war materials to destroy the Chinese Resistance.

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This leads to a different Post-War world.

Japan, the Soviet Union and nations like France and the UK are all trying to build nuclear weapons.

The Soviet Union's reach expands. Yugoslavia is firmly within the Eastern Camp, as is Austria. Greece, Central Germany and potentially Italy fall under Soviet Influence. Finland has probably been left largely alone. There is no United States to support Turkey or Iran against Soviet Moves, so the Soviet Union may well have expanded at the expense of both of these nations. There may very well be a Kurdish People's Republic in the Middle East, and it pays fealty to Joseph Stalin.

The Soviet Union plain annexes former Poland. There aren't that many surviving Poles anymore, so "West Russia SSR" gets added into the Union. Poles that disagree with this plan, like Karol Wojtyla, are reeducated in Siberia but unfortunately are unable to return home after remedial labor.

Meanwhile, in the far east, Japan's development of nuclear weapons has obvious uses. The Chinese utterly hate Japanese dominion over their homeland, and Japan has long since used chemical and biological weapons against the Chinese. The Japanese Atomic Campaign against the Chinese is enough to prevail, turning a very hostile occupation into another act of genocide; perhaps a hundred million people have died as Japan simply destroys cities in the Chinese interior to "Pacify" the nation.

This is exactly the sort of thing that the United Nations might express some frustration over, but in reality, the United Nations has never existed. Indeed, even Woodrow Wilson's League of Nations was never born. There is no UN Declaration of Human Rights, no war crimes trials for acts against humanity, and the United States keeps right on selling to Japan as they wipe out millions in atomic fire.

A dangerous precedent has been formed--that it's OK to use nuclear weapons to stop rebellions or in warfare. Future campaigns, like the Vietminh attempt to free themselves from French control or the Post-Stalin rebellions in Eastern Europe, will feature atomic answers.

By 1970, it is clearly obvious that the world is very likely to blow itself up. A lesser NATO-Analog between France, the UK and whatever Democratic buddies they can muster, a Japan that rules China through kiloton detonations, a Soviet Union that's grown fat at the expense of Eastern and Central Europe and probably a dangerous and radicalized India have built large numbers of nuclear weapons and prohibitions on their usage don't exist.

But the United States has its own nuclear arsenal too. And because it's not in anyone's crosshairs, it doesn't have to give a damn. So it doesn't, and as they expected, when WWIII breaks out, the United States is still standing on its own.

The reality of it all is that the United States has done rather well to avoid engaging itself in the problems of the rest of the world, but they've reached the end of the line. Trade shuts down as a massive nuclear exchange sets much of the world on fire. This time, the United States is in a bad way--they need Oil they don't have, and there's no where to buy it, nor is there much hope of the Middle East quickly leaving the state of nuclear warlordism that much of the world finds itself in.

Maybe, as Gasoline hits $10 a Gallon, there is a pang of regret that things have gone this way. Then again, the United States hasn't much cared for the world in a long time, and its worked out reasonably well for them.
 
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