But, to go back to the original point, wasn't the main reason why it was never threatened with actual invasion literally because they were more powerful militarily? Or is it people's positions that the US would never have been attacked if they'd be militarily weak?
America wasn't more powerful than most countries until the twentieth century. With one exception - 1861-65 - the US Army stayed remarkably small, and although the US Navy was significantly larger (and dwarfed the "six-frigate Navy" of the War of 1812) it still wasn't as big as the largest European battle fleets. But the US military was strong
enough, and the Atlantic Ocean wide enough, to make war with America more trouble than it was worth.
In addition, the US government sank a fantastic sum of money into fortifying most of the major harbors on the Eastern Seaboard to make them difficult for foreign fleets to attack. Before the advent of aircraft carriers, trading shots with land-based fortifications was usually a losing proposition for navies unless they amassed overwhelming superiority. Placing forts at every harbor severely limited any European power's ability to project power into America. Even though the US Army was small, European powers couldn't land an army large enough to fight the Americans without taking the major US ports - which were fortified on land and defended by a navy large enough to matter.
Ultimately, American defense spending during the nineteenth century mattered. The single best example to prove the point is the Mexican intervention in the 1860s. Mexico was not saved from a European invasion by the mere existence of the Atlantic Ocean. The USA did not have to deal with such an invasion, because it was stronger militarily - enough to make European statesmen less sanguine about war with America than war with Mexico, despite plenty of European-American diplomatic disputes. Might there have been a real Aroostook War, or a war over the Venezuela-Guyana border, if the American military were smaller? Maybe - but war would certainly have been
more likely in those cases than it was historically.
It's fun to poke holes in American blowhards, and of course anyone who thinks that USA#1 could have soloed the entire world in 1850 like a game of
Victoria II is an idiot. One doesn't have to put on any airs about the capability of the US military to point out that it was strong enough to actually defend the nation.
Yes, but that could have been done with minimal military involvement. To help winning wars by providing one side with weapons, you might need a navy to secure the supply lines, but not much of an army.
I don't think so. Neither did Stalin, who spent three years
screaming for the Western Allies to open up a second front in Northwest Europe. Clearly, American industrial production, American infrastructure support, American oil, and American food were all
necessary conditions for the Red Army to survive and fight back and win, but they were not
sufficient conditions for that to happen. The US Army obviously did not play the largest role in defeating Nazism, let alone the only role, but it was indispensable.
As far as that whole line of discussion goes, I think that it's a bit silly to say that the Americans were "punching down" in the Second World War. America could not have defeated Nazi Germany without the Soviet Union, full stop. (Or the Commonwealth, for that matter.) American industrial production and manpower were not limitless. Without Soviet troops to hold the fascists at bay, the Americans would be pressing their own factory workers into uniform. Invading France in 1944 was, as amphibious operations go, relatively smooth. Invading a France garrisoned by an extra seventy-to-a-hundred
Wehrmacht and
Waffen-SS divisions released from the Eastern Front would be harder to the point of near impossibility; the US Army would need to be much larger than it actually ended up being. Similarly, without American industrial production and raw materials, Stalin would have had much more serious limits on his own military manpower - manpower that was running dangerously close to dry at pretty much every point from late 1942 onward. Even the Grand Alliance, the mightiest coalition in the history of the world, had constraints on its actions.
None of that means that Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were serious threats to destroy the USSR and UK and invade America, like something out of a bad alternate history. But there was undoubtedly a not too far-fetched scenario in which the Allies could not muster the military power to destroy Hitlerism, either.
