Tempering Consequentialism

We start from too hard a place, I believe now, if the question is "Was the US entry into WW2 good for the world as a whole."

The question shouldn't exactly be "was it good for us" either.  Things might be good for us, at least before the bending of the arc of justice, but horribly unethical elsewhere.

Fundamentally, my opposition to the US participation in WW2 comes from two things:

1) I want to assert that sort of non-interventionism is always the best policy (and WW2 is one of the troublesome cases, one of the very few troublesome cases in my view).

OK, so that's not something I should brag about...it's my bias.  But also, there's this:

2) It destroyed the republic of the USA, turning it into a horrific hegemonic empire, costing 20-30 million lives elsewhere in the world since WW2 (not to mention millions of Americans).  One could say that as a US citizen I was responsible for those horrors (as much as I sometimes, anyway, tried to stop them).  It had a horrible effect on all aspects of American life, society, and culture.  We've been turned into a CIA fishbowl with ever increasing merging of corporate and government control...the infamous Military Industrial Complex which includes Media and many other things as well.  We lost an enormous opportunity to build on the kind of world JM Keynes envisioned, with ever decreasing work and increasing leisure (and thereby also...lower economic growth and destruction), and instead got the treadmill to endless global domination.  Working ourselves to death for endlessly bigger homes and cars and military budgets to prove we're on top.  And the violence that we employ on the rest of the world comes back to us both externally and internally.  It's a horror.

Would Germany have been different as hegemonic leader?  I think, in the long run, if they had momentarily conquered Europe, they would not have gotten farther, and they'd eventually give it up as well.  In the long run, they wouldn't have been able to wield as heavy a hand on the rest of the world as the US has ever since.  If US had not entered the war, the Holocaust as such would not have happened (it was specifically US involvement which made them fear the end might be near and chose the 'final solution'), instead the virtual enslavement of the few Jews who ultimately didn't resist the move to Palestine to escape from it.

(Likewise, Russia, if they had won without our help, they would have been so weakened as to not be able to wield a heavy hand on much of the world...and possibly it would have even been good for all.)

But that could be wrong and may be too hard a question to answer anyway.  Not only is it very very hard to know these things...how things would have worked out otherwise.  There's a clear limit as to what we, individually and collectively, are responsible for.  We are just not responsible for the actions of others.  We are responsible for our own actions, and that is pretty much it.

We had no mandate from God or anyone to save the world from Nazis, Communists, or anything else.  (And all that was simply cover anyway...for our own global domination of course!!!)

So perhaps the question that should be answered is the simplest one.

Was the US participation in WW2 essential in order for the US people to remain free and secure within the US?

And I'd venture it was not, though some have argued with even that.