Unfortunately, those people appear to all be dead. Now we have whatever Afghanistan and Iraq was meant to be.
It is one thing to denazify a "modern western country" that shares most of your values, culture and religion, and that has had institutions for some time. It is another thing altogether to pull off the deal in a country that has never had a working civil society, civil institions, education, etc. Especially if you do not share it's culture or religion, and there is a part of the country that is still actively engaged in a military campaign to obstruct you.
Not saying that it couldn't be done, or that mistakes weren't made. Just that you can't compare the two like that.
Both Japan and Germany had some semblance of democratic institutions, but they were taken over by authoritarians, often using violence:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incidents_in_interwar_Japan
Iraq had some history, pre-Sadam, and that seems to be returning:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_Iraqi_parliamentary_elect...
Afghanistan has had little of it in the last few decades (since at least the Soviets rolled in), and much less in the more rural regions.
There's a difference between rebuilding institutions and creating (perhaps from scratch) a civil society.
[1] https://i.sstatic.net/azSk3.png
[2] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
[3] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.KD?locat...
Germany was behind the UK even before WW2. Just the UK outproduced Germany in (e.g.) aircraft production, and that was even before the US got involved.
Adam Tooze wrote an entire book on the subject:
Yep. -- I noticed that the first link of my comment is somehow not working. Here is another reference for those who want some numbers. It is a German publication ("Deutschland in Daten", PDF) but the relevant tables should be understandable anyway:
https://www.bpb.de/system/files/dokument_pdf/deutschland_in_...
For GDP per capita in "International dollar"/"Geary-Khamis-Dollar" for Germany, France, Italy, Japan, Great Britain, USA in the period 1850-2019, see p. 312 and 313.
According to this publication, 1930, 1940 and 1950 the German GDP per capita was about 75% of that of Great Britain. However, there was a big dip right after 1945 shown in the second table.
The German "economic miracle" ("Wirtschaftswunder") of the 1950s and 1960s was in essence not an outperformance of other western countries in absolute terms, but a catching-up process with them. The same holds for Japan. The process lost momentum, when parity with most of the other major economies was reached.
However, the USA have always been considerably ahead since WW2. -- So much to the slogan "Make America great again". It seems to be based on a very distorted self-image of having a backward economy, for which I have no sound explanation as an outside observer. And even if it were not about the general economic situation, but about a growing disparity inside the country, then a solution to better the situation, when the country is already so much ahead economically, cannot come from outside, but must be domestic.
they just wasted it on things like nationalizing the coal, gas, electricity, rail, air transport and steel industries.
Wow! That was hard work. I'm hungry. Gonna go get me some freedom fries. Yum!
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheese-eating_surrender_monkey...
USA swoops in towards the end (a large cost as well, but not as much of it and not on their doorstep) and takes a big role in creating the new world.
Since around Nixon (maybe?) there has been a gradual post-WW2 deregulation that really accelerated under Reagan and now with Trump its accelerating again. More and more keeps shifting into the hands of unelected, wealthy individuals who see that their power keeps growing and growing and as far as I can tell, won't stop until they have it all. It doesn't make any sense to me why that looks like a stable world to them, but the one thing that is certain is that there is no 2nd amendment that will stop the billionaire club.
