Today is the 80^th anniversary of the surrender ceremony ending World War II aboard the U.S.S. Missouri over which General Douglas MacArthur presided. He said:

It is my earnest hope and indeed the hope of all mankind that from this solemn occasion a better world shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past – a world founded upon faith and understanding – a world dedicated to the dignity of man and the fulfillment of his most cherished wish – for freedom, tolerance and justice.

Fifty million had died in humanity’s greatest catastrophe that Winston Churchill deemed history’s most avoidable war. He recalled:

One day President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said at once ‘The Unnecessary War.’ There never was a war more easy to stop than that which has just wrecked what was left of the world from the previous struggle.

From Churchill’s perspective, it was avoidable because the Western nations had declined many opportunities to stop Nazi aggression earlier rather than later, when they were stronger, and Germany was weaker. They had earlier even failed to prevent the Nazi subversion of German. As Churchill recalled in his 1946 “Iron Curtain” speech: “Up till the year 1933 or even 1935, Germany might have been saved from the awful fate which has overtaken her and we might all have been spared the miseries Hitler let loose upon mankind.”

If only France with British support had expelled the Germans from their occupation of the Rhineland, which may have prompted a German army coup against Hitler. If only the West had responded to Germany’s illegal arms buildup. If only they had more vigorously opposed his crimes against his own people. If only they had opposed the occupation of Austria. If only the West had sought alliance with the Soviet Union, earlier, before the Soviets made their infamous pact with Germany. If only the West had stood with Czechoslovakia when it was still able to fight for itself. Perhaps the West could have done more for Ethiopia against invading Italy. Perhaps the West could have helped Spanish democrats resist both Communists and fascists. If only the West had stood with China against Japan’s invasion of Manchuria.

But the roots of calamity go deeper, earlier, across the Atlantic, to America.

America largely checked out of global geopolitics after World War I, mostly overseeing Latin America, maintaining its navy (thankfully), and pursuing global disarmament treaties. It was “isolationist” in the sense of avoiding ongoing friendly or hostile engagement with other great powers. There were no alliances.

The odd and self-defeating lesson America took from World War I was the primacy of non-engagement. America had entered the war reluctantly, only after German U-boats repeatedly violated free passage on the seas. America could ignore carnage in Europe but not isolation from its trading partners. While Britain and France were exhausted, and Russia, collapsed, America dispatched 2 million troops across the ocean, without a single casualty by lethal fire, and without logistical precedent in history, helping win an intractable war in just 19 months. America’s president had spoken over the heads of the despotic hostile powers directly to their people, offering a better world of self-government and international collaboration. The hostile governments offered their virtual surrenders to him, not to the other powers. He was subsequently received in Europe rapturously. The Peace of Versailles was a sprawling mess but little better could have been expected after 20 million slaughtered with all of the stewing resentments.

The American proposed League of Nations was overly idealistic but offered the mechanics for international collaboration. It failed ratification by the U.S. Senate because the American president was sick and stubborn, and his opponents hated him more than they had vision for the future. Thereafter, America stood apart from Europe and much of the world, proudly looking inward. It marinated in the mythology that its entrance into World War I was unnecessary and tragic, prompted by duplicitous and self-serving British propaganda, arms merchants, financiers, and eastern banks. It forgot the U-boats, German atrocities, and the nightmare of Europe dominated by a single autocratic despotism, with global implications. America prided itself in standing alone, trading impartially with the world, and dominating Latin America.

Rather than Europe’s reconstruction, America focused on payments for its war loans. Never mind that Europe was drained, and America had grown rich in the war selling its goods to war-torn Europe. “They hired the money, didn’t they?” was Calvin Coolidge’s popular response to European difficulties in repayment. It was stupidly short-sided, and the consequence would be another war, far costlier in money and men than the last one. Forgiving the European war debts would have been cheaper for everyone.

But America helped ensure the world hurled towards calamity, compounded by the absurd Smooth-Hawley tariffs. A stable Germany interwoven into a collaborative international financial system would not have succumbed to Naziism, which seized power with votes only from one third of the population, even during the Depression. There were many Americans, likely most, who saw the Nazi seizure of Europe’s largest economy as inconsequential to its own national life. Why should we care? And did Hitler’s subsequent aggressions affect us? Or for that matter, Japan’s?       

A wise America would have arbitrated international economic and security collaboration, preventing the Nazi and Japanese militarist takeovers of their countries. A wise America would have had solidified alliances with France, Britain, and other democracies before the tyrants took power, and certainly afterwards. The combined democracies, which included Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Dutch, Belgians, and Scandinavians, plus the Czechs, were economically and militarily stronger than the rising Axis powers. World War II could easily have been deterred through Western solidarity, but American leadership was always necessary.

Instead, America dithered, and gazed at its own navel, and reflected falsely on the lessons of the last war and fantasized that a global inferno would not affect the Western Hemisphere. It was not just a failure of leadership. The American people, according to opinion polls, favored nonintervention consistently until it was very nearly too late, after Europe was lost, and Japan was nearly ascendant over the Pacific and much of Asia. America was saved by its great industrial might, its intact navy (though much of it needlessly lost at Pearl Harbor), the great minds who still served in its armed forces, and by a few political leaders from both parties who endured and navigated the insane isolation until the nation was united by Japan’s direct attack followed by Germany’s declaration of war.

Supposedly, if apocryphally, Churchill said the Americans always will do the right thing after having tried everything else. Americans for over twenty years did try everything else, looking the other way, pursuing only myopic self-interest, putting their country superficially “first” on a course that almost led to irretrievable disaster. And then, at the very last hour, America stretched forth its mighty wings and swept ultimately everything else before it, concluding World War II as the strongest power in history.

A much wiser America then created a world economic system and network of alliances that have so far prevented another world catastrophe. Yet the last witnesses to World War II are dying fast, and the memories with them. Old lessons are forgotten. Narrow self-interest and grievances replace them. Shrewd benevolence, which kept America on top through international cooperation, is widely mocked. “My people perish for a lack of knowledge.” And: “Have you forgotten what the Lord thy God did for you?” Divine providence may not be so kind in America’s next great forgetting.

As Churchill noted in 1946:

There never was a war in history easier to prevent by timely action than the one which has just desolated such great areas of the globe. It could have been prevented in my belief without the firing of a single shot, and Germany might be powerful, prosperous and honored to-day; but no one would listen and one by one we were all sucked into the awful whirlpool. We surely must not let that happen again.

On the U.S.S. Missouri 80 years ago today, there was almost certainly somber realization that the great calamity that consumed 50 million lives had been avoidable but for human foolishness and folly.

“Let us pray that Peace be now restored to the world, and that God will preserve it always,” were MacArthur’s closing words at that ceremony. May the power of that prayer continue, supported by wise actions. America could have prevented that world war and, with benevolent wisdom and fraternal strength, can forestall another.