Echoes of an Alternate "Might Makes Right" History of Betrayal

by

Danny Quah

Mar 2025

I have Asian friends who think Europe overly distant, and Transatlantic ideals of right and wrong both naive and out of touch with hard-truths Asian transactionalism. They forget how the WW2 Japanese occupation of Asia connected us all across continents, and that in a "Might Makes Right" world, might doesn't guarantee survival: Instead, it has rapidly diminishing returns, and, as a strategy played with blinkers on, it just means everyone loses.

Because I was back in London for a few days, I was reminded of what many British people think when they look at recent US behaviour towards other nations. Or, equally, when they hear observers opine how all nations serve only self-interest, so what's the big reveal when world events unfold how they have these last 50 days.

In the late 1930s Britain faced imminent threat of invasion by Nazi Germany. Churchill worked tirelessly not only to hold together hope for his people but to bring America and Roosevelt into the war. By 1940 Britain stood alone against German expansionism: Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Yugoslavia, and Greece had all either surrendered or been annexed, occupied, and invaded. If you want Might Makes Right, you have it exactly here: This was a time when nothing stood up to the German Blitzkrieg.

Churchill, however, held fast to two ideas: first, that subjugation by Nazi Germany would crush basic freedoms and livelihoods, and he would not let that happen to the British people on his watch. Second, that Nazi Germany had violently and ruthlessly violated the national sovereignty and territorial integrity of Western European nations.

To be clear, the brutality and inhumanity of Hitler's efforts to exterminate Jews and other non-Aryan minorities had yet to emerge. Churchill's stand against Hitler did not condition on the horrors of the Nazi final solution.

America resisted Churchill's efforts to be drawn into this conflict. For many Americans, the earlier WW1 involvement had shown them no clear gain but, more memorably, only horrendous cost in casualties. American reluctance, however, was rooted not just in their history but also in their then-present. The US, at that time, contained within it isolationists, Nazis, and other sympathizers of the Hitler regime. Conscious of American recalcitrance, Roosevelt continued to say No to Churchill's requests all through the Nazi dash across Western Europe and through the Battle of Britain. America's president did send across the Atlantic food and older military equipment: Undoubtedly, this Lend-Lease program helped Britain, but it was also done with an eye to extracting a good deal for America.

When the Feb 2025 Zelensky-Trump-Vance White House meeting was televised across the world, the British and the Europeans didn't see the same thing that others around the world saw. They looked into the echoes of an alternate history transformed by betrayal and infamy.

Asians should too.

In that alternate history, Roosevelt tells Churchill---wearing his ridiculous siren suit in the White House grounds---that America can bring about peace in Europe in two weeks if Churchill stops fighting, continental Europe remains Nazi, Britain hands over to the US in payment for Lend-Lease first, its Crown Jewels the British Empire, second the Lincoln copy of the Magna Carta, and third Britain's entire coal reserves. In this plan, while Churchill stays home, Roosevelt negotiates terms for peace directly and bilaterally with Hitler in Tehran and Yalta.

(Churchill siren suit. Getty Images)

Remember in the late 1930s Hitler and Stalin signed the non-aggression Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, and Germany and Japan are in political and military alliance. So once Roosevelt negotiates peace with Hitler, Germany does not attack the Soviet Union; Japan does not bomb Pearl Harbor; and Japan's conquests in Asia remain Japan's.

My grandparents and hundreds of millions of ordinary people across Southeast Asia would learn to be fine as part of the Japanese Empire and the East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.

Three key conclusions emerge. First, actions that seem locally optimal in the immediate conjuncture can have long-run spillover consequences that are damaging both to others and to oneself. It might seem to many of us,now far away from the physical action, that what happens on US policies surrounding Ukraine is someone else's business. The externality effects, however, can be profound for us --- as they were in WW2 for Asia looking at the Roosevelt-Churchill discussion. Second, there can be sharply diminishing returns to spending on military preparedness. Before the obvious success of the German Blitzkrieg, the conventional view was generally positive on France's military preparedness: there were those who thought the French army --- numerous and well-trained --- to be one of the strongest in the world. France's military leadership was experienced in large-scale warfare. Of course, weighed against this were misperceptions, tactical errors, and political disunity. But the point is, smaller nations face sharp limits: they do need to be militarily strong, but they cannot expect that that alone, absent coalitions, will suffice. Third, co-existent with individual diminishing returns, Great Power nations like the US enjoy increasing returns to scale in the devastation with which they can prosecute war. They need to be on-side, and in turn they will be the stronger for it.

I suspect few of today's Realist hard-truth transactionalists would prefer the alternate-history world I have just described to today's actuality. It is one thing to say, axiomatically, this is how nations behave. It is another to face the consequences of a history that can easily swing either way, depending on auxiliary assumptions beyond the central Realist hypothesis of directed, self-serving interests.

The Realist idea is not an objectionable one that nations only pursue their own self-interest. Far from it. As an economist, my immediate reaction on hearing that proposition is, Well, of course, what other assumption could sensibly take it place? What is objectionable, rather, is that that particular crude, street-talk Realist assumption---repeated over and over by some as if it were some deep revelation---is incomplete. It is an assumption that leaves too many degrees of freedom. How encompassing are self-interests? Do self-interests include the well-being of future generations of one's own family (a model whose recursive formulation of self-interests over time is for many economists a standard modelling device)? Does the assumption that Nazi Germany pursue only self-interest lead to a prediction that it would stop after invading Poland? Or after it Blitzkrieged the Low Countries? Or only after Nazi Germany conquered Britain? Does the hypothesis that the US pursue only self-interest predict that, in response to Pearl Harbor, America would build a stronger wall around itself? Or instead join Britain in fighting the Nazis and pursuing Japanese forces all around the Pacific and ultimately right back into Japan?

No complete theory is available to understand all world events. No all-encompassing solution is to be found in either the liberal internationalist idea that nations cooperatively look out for each other, or the Realist proposition that all nations serve only themselves. But it is not idealist fantasy to suggest that the US treat better those nations whose sovereignty and territorial integrity are under attack, and that when it does that, it strengthens itself. America did exactly this when it was no less Realist in the 1940s than today. And the inference is simply not logical to go from just the one Realist hypothesis---that every nation is self-serving---zoom right past this year's tumultous diplomatic events, and settle on how the world should be resigned now to having nations deal with one another only through a lens of "Might makes Right".

My own preferred hypothesis remains that even in the worst of circumstances and in the most fragmented of worlds, nations can still inadvertently cooperate, that they can do the right thing, even if it's for the wrong reason. But only if we build the right platforms for engagement.

Stephens, Bret. "A Day of American Infamy", NYT https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/28/opinion/a-day-of-american-infamy.html

(New York Times. A Day of American Infamy)