What about the other coalition? Even at the acme of their conquests, Axis leaders knew their path to victory was narrow. “All the bowstrings of the Tripartite Pact community would have to be stretched taut,” said German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, “if the full potential of its power were to be realized.” In the end, though, many of the forces that drove this quest for global primacy hindered its prospects for success.
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To be sure, the Axis had advantages. Germany and Japan pioneered creative military concepts; Berlin produced jet fighters, guided rockets, and other groundbreaking weapons. Once again, Berlin ruled in pure military effectiveness. According to one analysis, each German soldier was worth 1.2 American or British soldiers. Ideological fanaticism was also a force-multiplier: in the Pacific, American military personnel were astonished at the ferocity of enemies who fought to the death. But every strength was counterbalanced by grave, even terminal, weaknesses.
The democracies produced imperfect leaders but created systems to sharpen their judgment. The autocracies had no such safeguards and paid a terrific price.
One such weakness was decision-making. Each strategic mega-gamble—Hitler’s double-cross of Stalin, Japan’s move against Pearl Harbor—made a certain sense in the mental world Axis leaders inhabited. Taken together, they were a master class in self-harm. No matter how close the Axis came to victory, no matter how impressively their militaries performed, there was something perverse about strategies that risked everything on a mad rush for hegemony—with strategic death as the consequence of failure. And if the decisions were perverse, so were the processes that yielded them.
Hitler’s hyper-personalized regime had enabled his spree of successes from 1936 to 1941; an absolute ruler willing to make big bets ran off the ultimate geopolitical hot streak. Over time, though, that system magnified the flaws of the zealot who ran it.
In a regime that vested total authority in a single leader, there was little capacity to stress-test war plans or systematically vet strategy. “My true intentions you will never know,” Hitler taunted his army chief of staff. As the war turned, an isolated and paranoid Hitler refused to conserve vital manpower by allowing trapped forces to retreat. The absurdities climaxed when German field marshal Erwin Rommel could not throw his reserves at Allied beachheads on D-Day because Hitler could not be awakened to give the okay. The democracies produced imperfect leaders but created systems to sharpen their judgment. The autocracies had no such safeguards and paid a terrific price.
They also paid a price for their cruelty. Many Soviet citizens might have welcomed the Nazis as liberators, given their experience under Stalin; they changed their minds once they realized their choices were resistance or death. Tokyo might have had more eager collaborators in Asia had it not exploited those areas so nakedly. Joseph Goebbels summed up the Axis view of morality: “If we win, we shall have right on our side.” Perhaps so, but right helped determine who won in the first place. “There is not a single country which in its heart is following the Germans,” said one Spanish official—which ensured that most countries that could oppose the Axis eventually did.
Then there were the pathologies of Axis mobilization. No country had a perfect record here; Harry Truman, then a little-known senator from Missouri, made his national reputation by exposing waste in Washington. But no such exposés were possible in fascist states, where wartime dysfunction made America’s model look quite good.
The Italian war effort was a joke, beset by corruption and cronyism. Japan conscripted virtually every household into its wartime mobilization, but never resolved crippling disputes between rival services, or between the military and civilians. Hitler waited too long to mobilize for total war, thanks to his faith in “blitzkrieg economics.” Even as German industry picked up steam, Hitler’s preference for administrative chaos allowed unending feuds and confusion. Moreover, all the Axis powers neglected logistics and sustainment—a huge mistake in a war in which getting forces to the fight, and keeping them in the fight, was paramount, and one that reflected the indifference with which totalitarian rulers treated their own personnel.
They didn’t treat their allies any better. In principle, Axis leaders knew they must hang together. “Their weakness,” said Hitler, “would be in allowing themselves to be defeated separately.” In practice, the fact that the Germans and Japanese considered each other subhuman—Hitler called Emperor Hirohito a “lacquered half-monkey”—condemned them to just that fate.
Whereas Allied technological cooperation was transformative, Axis technological cooperation was trivial. The Axis never pursued coordinated operations in the Middle East and the Indian Ocean, or even exchanged basic information about their plans. Hitler didn’t bother to tell Japan he planned to invade the Soviet Union; Mussolini had pulled the same trick on Hitler when he attacked Greece the year before. “Hitler always faces me with a fait accompli,” he grumbled. “This time I am going to pay him back in his own coin.”
This fratricide took a toll. Germany and Italy competed to loot the resources of southeastern Europe. German soldiers stole supplies from their Romanian allies when things got desperate at Stalingrad. If the Grand Alliance was sometimes more like a band of in-laws than a band of brothers, the Axis states hardly acted like allies at all.
Fascist leaders believed that decadent democracies could never muster the necessary commitment and sacrifice. “What is America but millionaires, beauty queens, stupid records and Hollywood?” Hitler had asked. But in reality, fascist regimes rooted in the hard logic of domination struggled to master the softer skills that were indispensable in an endeavor as complex as World War II. The Grand Alliance fought a global conflict well, making choices and forging cooperation that put its power to good use. The Axis fought a war that was less than the sum of its parts.
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“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” That phrase, borrowed from Hindu scripture, occurred to the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer when he witnessed the first atomic bomb test in July 1945. Soon thereafter, American B-29s delivered death aplenty when they dropped atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Scripture also came to mind for the new president who ordered those bombings. “We have discovered the most terrible bomb in the history of the world,” wrote Truman. “It may be the fire destruction prophesied in the Euphrates Valley Era, after Noah and his fabulous Ark.”
Few events could have better ended World War II, because few events have so entwined creation and destruction. The atomic bombs themselves were a product of the prodigious scientific and industrial effort that gave America victory; the Manhattan Project featured a workforce and industrial base that rivaled the entire U.S. automotive industry. Their delivery, from bases in the Mariana Islands, testified to epic feats of logistics and power projection. The strikes against Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the climax of a remorseless coercive campaign featuring the razing of Japanese cities, a blockade aptly named Operation Starvation, and the killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians. Above all, the bombings affirmed a final lesson of World War II: how excruciatingly expensive it could be to repair a geopolitical balance once broken.
The Grand Alliance fought a global conflict well, making choices and forging cooperation that put its power to good use. The Axis fought a war that was less than the sum of its parts.
That price could be measured in the 60 million lives lost, or in the devastation of countries from Europe’s Atlantic coast to the Asian littoral. It could be measured in the boundless crimes of the aggressors, but also in the moral transgressions of the democracies, whether the fire-bombing of enemy cities or the internment of Japanese-Americans in the United States. In this sense, the use of the atomic bomb simply confirmed how the war had normalized the slaughter of civilians. “You might have killed someone, sir,” a police officer told Arthur Harris, the architect of Britain’s bombing campaign, after stopping him for speeding. “Young man,” Harris allegedly replied, “I kill thousands of people every night.” Not least, the war’s cost could be measured in the strategic legacy it left behind.
The Soviet Union was, in FDR’s words, “a dictatorship as absolute as any other dictatorship in the world.” It sought a global revolution just as complete, if more gradual, than Hitler’s. When the war ended, Stalin’s troops were occupying half of Europe; the Soviet Union had a commanding position at the heart of a shattered Eurasia. “The Soviet sphere,” commented British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin, “extended from Lubeck to Port Arthur.” With Stalin pressing for gains from the Dardanelles to Manchuria, that sphere seemed likely to expand. “A future war with Soviet Russia,” wrote Joseph Grew, U.S. Ambassador to Japan, “is as certain as anything in this world can be certain.” Whether humanity could survive such a war in the nuclear age seemed more doubtful.
The democracies weren’t ready for the challenge. In fairness, Roosevelt had known what he wanted in the postwar world: a new international body, the United Nations, to replace Wilson’s failed League; an open global economy to promote shared prosperity; a concert of great powers to keep the peace. But he hadn’t devised any real formula for stability in Europe, much less a backup plan if the Allies’ wartime comity gave way to postwar enmity.
The Allies should just “castrate the German people,” FDR mused during the war. He had approved a plan to permanently deindustrialize that country, thereby holding down one serial aggressor, but only by creating a power vacuum that might tempt others. And despite Churchill’s concern that the rapid withdrawal of U.S. troops would leave Europe at Stalin’s mercy, FDR had pledged, before his death, to do just that. “You really ought to bring up and discipline your own children,” he airily told Churchill in 1944; Europe was not America’s ward. Others, fortunately, were grappling more seriously with the geopolitics of the peace.
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Excerpted from The Eurasian Century: Hot Wars, Cold Wars, and the Making of the Modern World by Hal Brands. Copyright © 2025 by Hal Brands. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
