just around ww2 when the us placated to french and Russia's demands during a war and afterward when they told patton no you can't take the army you have there in Europe and take out china , japan and russia . why god why think how quiet the world would now be without communism .
I think it's much more complex than that.
So after the end of WWII when for all the propaganda, the USA as a whole was tired of war and the cracks in being able to keep your Homefront going were just starting to show, you wanted to essentially go fight two huge populations over massive land masses with very harsh climates and terrain, that were actively ready to fight to the last person and were geared up for it, because you didn't like their governments?
Do you have any clue of how many Americans would have died for that?
The calculations on how many would have died for a full on invasion of Japan if they didn't surrender after we used the only 2 nukes we had, were staggering in themselves.
The Germans sent some of the best armies and equipment into Russia only to find themselves repeating history. A couple nuclear weapons would have had no major long-term effect. What were we going to do? Bomb the cities the Germans already bombed near to rubble?
And let's say if after a decade or two of mass dying, you finally managed to conquer them?
Then what? Try to play brutal overlords forever? Try to setup and keep in power your puppet government of traitors forever?
Do you think those countries would ever actually think any peaceful thoughts about the USA?
Instead of the actual relative peace the cold war produced (Remember prior to the end of WWII Europe was pretty much having wars every 50 or so years), you would have essentially had constant war with half the world that would have.
Oh, and also after WWII the Chinese weren't communists, the Communists didn't take over there until later when WE funded the Communists in Russia who then helped out their buddies in China with our money. (While we at the same time refused to help the nationalists).
Patton had his good sides, but like most military types that only think about war and can't comprehend anything else, he was wrong with how easy he thought it would be to just go play global empire.
What the USA did right, was learning from WWI and NOT leaving the Europeans to figure things out and make a mess of it, instead the USA played a major role in shaping post war Europe and Asia, using their economic prowess to build a stable order.
In the end, that order triumphed over the USSR which eventually collapsed without the need for large numbers of our citizens dying.
We played around later in China's back yard and our traitors (much like a certain recent general who was proud to say so) told the Chinese we were not willing to go all the way, so the Chinese Communists decided to get their own buffer zones the way they wanted them. So we fought 2 smaller wars to an essential stalemate and getting nowhere. Then eventually we came to an understanding with them and their economy eventually became a bit like ours and for all their bluster, pretty much they stayed mostly peaceful.
The reason the Chinese Communists didn't collapse like the Soviet Communists did is because WE decided to essentially shut down all our manufacturing and build it all back up in China and flood them with money. Had we treated them like the Soviet Union, they would have eventually collapsed.
