Why was the US an ally of GB/France/etc and not Germany/Italy? Contrary to your belief, greed can be ideological -- striving for global free trade is an example of this.

That's a big difference, and one you chose not to respect.

His CiC may not have agreed, but my grandfather told me, to my face, that he fought fascism and was proud to do so.

EDIT: To make clear what I meant, re: your comment: the state-building narrative the US has adopted substitutes the righteous struggle of people like your grandfather in order to avoid acknowledging, among many things, the reluctance to participate in world affairs and the frankly brazen pro-Nazi stances of many in the american public and the government at the time.

Well, certainly, the Roosevelt Administration was, but they were (prior to Pearl Harbor) also forced to maintain an outward pretense of neutrality while backing the Allies, because a large part of the rest of the US was also motivated by ideology...to either be sympathetic to the Axis Powers (one large, well-bankrolled faction) or to be opposed to intervention (another large, well-bankrolled faction, that often worked together with the preceding one against any interventionist policy.)

Businesses in the US were serving both sides of the conflict.

http://www.ibmandtheholocaust.com/

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust#cite_ref...

However, by 1940, it was very clear that the US was going to get dragged in anyways, and it would serve the US interests first to start preparing for war before it starts (note that the draft was instituted over a year before Pearl Harbor). Moreover, the US was neutral only in name: various acts passed more or less saying that the US would give aid to anybody so long as they were British or French. (Originally, it was cash-and-carry, but when Britain exhausted its cash reserves, it became Lend-Lease instead).

Also, the US formally joined the war in 1941, but were providing material support to the Allies and otherwise prepping before then.

The intelligence services knew. The general public didn't.

The US provided support to the side they ideologically agreed with -- it wasn't just a case of "Germany randomly declares war on the US".

It's not correct to say that we have to attack a country/dictator in order to stand up to them.

The whole reason Japan started their program of military expansion in the first place was to guarantee access to natural resource, e.g., petroleum, needed by their industry.

By 1943 Japan was facing chronic shortages of petroleum products, rubber and other essential supplies because of interdiction by the US Navy's "Silent Service" (submarine force). And that was before Japan lost most of her navy, most of her large transport ships (by 1945 Japan was reduced to using mostly small wooden transport ships) the Phillipines, Iwo Jima and Okinawa (which while in Japanese hands could be used to operate aircraft to give Japanese shipping some protection from the US Navy).

It is unlikely that Japan could have done much more than feed itself after 1945.

My bad, I totally forgot that the Cold War never happened and that the soldiers of WW2 didn't form a hard border in Berlin that they were not friendly over.

As far as I know, no? The US was quite far from Berlin by the end of the war, and did not engage the USSR in battle for territorial control of Germany.

> saving dozens of countries from communism?

Surely not "dozens", but was there even one? The other Allies essentially handed Poland over to Stalin.

I believe GP was referring to a few years later, when the Berlin airlift broke the Soviet blockade of West Berlin - a clear attempt by the Soviet Union to expand their spehere of control to West Berlin and eventually West Germany as a whole.