"We saved some people from genocide in eastern Europe, didn’t we?"
Eventually, ya fucking late-comers!
But that's actually the era I want to talk about here: post-WWII America cut off aid to England which it had sustained throughout the war. Despite the best efforts of Keynes we were pretty much left on our own shaky feet.
Now this left the country economically crippled, or at least verging on it. The consequence was the fairly rapid collapse of our empire and although it was a mottled affair (Jamaica only achieved full independence in 1962, India had it by 1947) it was pretty obvious that sans massive amounts of American cast it couldn't be held together.
But if we had of had the cash still flowing in? I really don't know! We might still have that land under our control, or else we'd have spent it on British infrastructure. Now as far as I can tell the former is the approach that Israel has adopted (the IDF costs a huge amount, as I'm sure you're well aware) while South Korea also has a truly massive army, but since it's not been doing any expanding has had more cash to spend internally.
So yes, I would take the fiscal materialist line on this. But it's worth bearing in mind that America only funds countries that it thinks will be useful to it.
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"We saved some people from genocide in eastern Europe, didn’t we?"
Eventually, ya fucking late-comers!
But that's actually the era I want to talk about here: post-WWII America cut off aid to England which it had sustained throughout the war. Despite the best efforts of Keynes we were pretty much left on our own shaky feet.
Now this left the country economically crippled, or at least verging on it. The consequence was the fairly rapid collapse of our empire and although it was a mottled affair (Jamaica only achieved full independence in 1962, India had it by 1947) it was pretty obvious that sans massive amounts of American cast it couldn't be held together.
But if we had of had the cash still flowing in? I really don't know! We might still have that land under our control, or else we'd have spent it on British infrastructure. Now as far as I can tell the former is the approach that Israel has adopted (the IDF costs a huge amount, as I'm sure you're well aware) while South Korea also has a truly massive army, but since it's not been doing any expanding has had more cash to spend internally.
So yes, I would take the fiscal materialist line on this. But it's worth bearing in mind that America only funds countries that it thinks will be useful to it.