Kappa
I said
The USA's entry into WW2 was its bid for global domination
WW2 was a historical singularity: an opportunity to recast the world's geopolitics. It was a complex situation and judgements of national self-interest were based on complex calculations and projections. Some of the factors in the USA's judgement are self-evident:
• The European countries and their empires were severely damaged and enervated;
• The USSR under Stalin was increasingly powerful and self-proclaimedly expansionist;
• Hitler, having entered a pact with Stalin, could not be trusted as a bulwark against Soviet expansionism;
• that if the USA limited its circle of influence to its own land area, the USSR was quite likely to dominate Europe and large parts of the rest of the world;
• that it was going to be necessary to revitalise the damaged non-Communist world in order to prevent Soviet domination, but in a way that was not likely to result in another warring outbreak between European nations;
• and that a consequence of this should be the transformation of the revitalised non-Communist world into a ready market for US products and services.
Many, many of the consequences of the USA's entry into WW2 were beneficial to the world in general and the US population and its leadership deserves our gratitude for that, not least for the US lives expended in the process.
Yes, the USA always “plays to win”. So tell me, what country doesn’t?
Having been forced into joining WW2 two and a half years after it started,
it would have been grossly negligent of the US leadership not to have attempted to maximise the positive outcome for the USA in every conceivable way. Why else abandon isolationism? The USA has always regarded itself as a nation with a mission, a vision repeatedly reiterated in Pesidential utterances. I am quite sure that Roosevelt saw nothing wrong whatsoever with a vision of the world dominated by American political and economic principles; whereas the likely opposite, a world dominated by the USSR, was anathema to the USA.
So the USA played to win. It was not Roosevelt's intention to end up with a Superpower duopoly; Roosevelt had intended that American political and economic ideas and systems should dominate, under US leadership. France and the UK's acquisition of independent nuclear deterrents were, I'm sure, an unwelcome development for the USA.
There is nothing wrong whatsoever with playing to win. However, this single-mindedness seems to me to have been a relatively new political phenomenon, not previously evident before the war, and one that the old-fashioned Europeans appeared not to have had to the same extent. Previously, as with corporations jostling for market share in a mature market, it appears to me that the geopolitical "great games" were played largely with balance-of-power and containment in mind. Japanese domestic corporate behaviour remains characteristic of this (I have personal experience). We can see this new dynamic played out in a multitude of post-war arenas, one of which is civil aviation.
So WW2 represented a singular opportunity to recast the world's geopolitics before the postwar business-as-usual of political and economic balance-of-power and containment resumed.
Of course the USA played to win, and winning meant a world dominated by American political and economic ideas.
I'm not a historian and don't wish to bore people further with these ramblings.