The coup d"etat

[Michael Barwell]

I am also intrigued about Harry's assertion that the delay of the United States's entry into WW2 was not motivated by isolationism or lack of public support, but by a Machiavellian calculation that it would be in the US' interest to allow the British Empire to crumble, clearing the way for the US to assume Britain's role in the post-war world. Harry provides no evidence, but I am certain that other authors might have trod this particular path.

Projections of Power: The United States and Europe in Colonial Southeast Asia, 1919-1941 (book review extract) http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1052
"Concluding her assessment, Foster argues that despite the complicated and at times contradictory actions taken and relationships established by the Americans in Southeast Asia between the world wars, this subject requires more than simply (and very valuably) providing a description of the complexities of this particular part of the colonial world. She notes the importance of this period for the emergence of the notion of a defined and delineated Southeast Asia, predating the formalization of this idea in such structures as the Southeast Asia Command (SEAC) in the 1940s. (That SEAC became known to some American soldiers as Save England's Asian Colonies' speaks again to an existing American ambivalence about empire.)"


Strong-arming economic empires're fine tho'.


I read a memoir by a USAAF fella in the ETO who took the piss out of RAF Bomber Command for it's area bombing campaign in contrast to the 'point' daylight affair, but he neatly side-stepped the fire-bombing of Japan by USair. Myopic convenience as history, par for national cause.