been used. (The Japanese would have surrendered anyway, another discussion entirely). A nice opinion, but based on impracticalities. If the U.S. had kept a large military presence in Asia many of our allies & all of our post-WW2 enemies would have labeled such behavior as rankly imperialistic & I'm not sure they would have been wrong if such a far-fetched hypothetical had actually happened. I say far-fetched because we didn't really have the resources in manpower or material to keep a large military force throughout Asia since we were rather busy post-WW2 keeping Papa Joe out of those parts of Europe he hadn't already taken over. You could have thrown many of the U.S. post-war alliances out of the window if we had tried something like that. For sure NATO would probably have been impossible. As it was, Russia among others, hurled the charge of imperialism at the U.S. because of the forces we kept in Japan & that was just one Asian country. What other business would the U.S. have had in keeping a large military presence throughout the rest of Asia, a rather large area of real estate, than imperialistic designs on that area? And I would disagree about who exactly the U.S. overtly or covertly wishes to climb in bed with. Invariably they were (are) ruthless types, the reason they were brought on board in the first place. Saddam for instance was paid by the C.I.A. to torture (communists or sympathizers). That was his job. Clearly almost