What are the few easily recognized principles of existence, Lighter? ;-)

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Bobert - "We came VERY close to being just another Canada.....in the 1790s..." Yikes, Bobert!!! What a narrow escape you had! ;-D

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Old style conservatives were a reasonable bunch, I think. Eric Margolis, for example, says he's an old-style conservative, what could be called an "Eisenhower Republican". He disagrees almost totally with the radical conservatism that has taken over the Republican Party since the Reagan era.

Eisenhower himself warned against the rise of the USA military-industrial complex and its growing control over the national agenda.

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The 2 great wars...

It was indeed the entry of the USA into both WWI and WW2 that decided the outcome of those wars, though the USA arrived "late" in both cases. The enormous GNP of the USA and the fact that mainland America was effectively out of range of significant attacks by the Axis made the defeat of the Axis powers inevitable. (Canada was also a huge asset to the Allies for similar reasons, providing resources, manpower, training areas for pilots, and very signifant naval forces in the Battle of the Atlantic...but was still a relatively small player compared to the USA.)

To me, one interesting angle on this role the USA played in the world wars is that they might just as well have stayed out of the first one. There was no particularly pressing reason, either moral or strategic, why America had to join the French and English in defeating Germany and Austria-Hungary. All the participants in WWI were equally guilty of stumbling into that war through their entangling alliances and their mutual optimism about a quick and relatively easy victory. They all expected it to be over by Christmas 1914! They could't have been more wrong. It became the first modern technological war...total war fought to the point of utter exhaustion through attrition. In such a war, the side with fewer men and resources eventually loses.

If the USA had not entered WWI, the Germans would probably have won it. If so, things wouldn't have changed a whole lot. The French would have undoubtedly lost a bit of land around Alsace-Lorraine. The English would have remained in command of the sea, and would have been little affected by the result. The Germans would have notched up another victory, as they did in 1870, and they would have retained many of their overseas colonies. The Austro-Hungarians would have staggered on for awhile longer, despite their Balkan problems. Russia would have gone ahead with its Communist Revolutionary phase in much the same way. The USA would have been unaffected. France would have been humiliated by the loss of the war, as they were back in 1870, but "La Belle France" would have soon bounced back and continued on as it ever had.

Hitler and the Nazis would never have risen to power!!!!!!!

So, I think that it would have in fact turned out way better for just about everyone in the long run if the USA had never entered WWI.