The US invested more effectively in nation building in Germany, Japan and Italy in 1946-49 than it did later in the US. The American empire doesn't really care about the variety of capitalism its allies choose. Look at the huge differences between AUS, CDN, DE, JPN, SK, GB, NZ, IT, F....

The next big test will be Taiwan. Think of TSM's fab as Taiwan's chip embassy or to important to fail forget me not.

"something to offer, swim fast": Ukraine is on track to becoming an eastern European Israel. The landlocked Iraqi Kurds, living in a much rougher and less accessible neighborhood, less likely.

Bismarck said the decisive fact of modern life is that North America speaks English. One may presume that, in his friendship with former President Grant, Bismarck chose not to remind Grant that the decisive factors in his civil war victory were:

1. 100000 German-speaking immigrant troops who had fled post-1848 political repression and

2. German immigrant votes that re-elected Lincoln thanks to organizing by the German immigrant leader Carl Schurz. Danke schon.

The Kaiser ignored Bismarck, which led to the republic saved by anti-slavery German votes and arms in 1865 defeating a German supremacist ideology of racial slavery (copied from the American South's Jim Crow) in 1945.