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Originally Posted by longsuffering
True to a point.
However, let's not forget that the US essentially rebuilt Japanese industry and their society while occupying the country after the end of the war.
S. Korea also benefitted from generous foreign aid from Japan and the USA.
We should also mention how Europe after WW2 was rebuilt on the back of the Marshall Plan.
I don't have the faintest idea how it could be done but the idealist in me thinks a Marshall Plan for the Middle East is an interesting albeit impractical idea.
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It's worth remembering that Germany and Japan were major powers before WW2, and in fact Japan had a short-lived empire of her own.
There's a kind of narcissism underlying the belief that for the last three centuries the fate of nations the world over has been wholly determined by the caprices of the West. No Western power aided Japan's rise to pre-eminence in SE Asia. They adopted Western systems, industrialized, and expanded on their own. After they were bombed to ruins it was their own social systems - the same ones that made them the most productive country in the region before the war - that built an extraordinarily innovative and productive nation out of the ruins. It's not as though the U.S. could have arbitrarily chosen Cambodia to turn into a global powerhouse of commerce and industry.
As much as its taboo to bring up among those who see only structuralism behind the fates of peoples, there are clearly cultural elements at play as well. Some social systems and values are better at generating innovation, enterprise, and prosperity than others.