To briefly summarize the anti-war position:
- The costs of warfare are extremely high.
- The high costs are often imposed on unwilling participants.
- The outcomes of warfare are highly uncertain.
- The primary decision makers -politicians- face little incentive to produce beneficial results since they often have access to the involuntary labor of conscripts and can fund their operations involuntarily through taxation.
With these general metrics in mind, I want to make the case that Britain and the United States should not have entered into the second world war.
Consider the war from the German point of view:
Their Eastern Enemy, the Bolshevik regime, kept engaging in acts of aggression.
In 1917, they staged a coup against Czar Nicholas II and conquered Russia, leading to a four year civil war killing millions of people.
In 1918, the Bolsheviks assisted Rosa Luxemburg in the November Revolution attempting to annex Germany. In 1919, the Bolsheviks invaded Poland killing hundreds of thousands of people, and set up a puppet state in Hungary with Béla Kun.
In 1920, the Bolsheviks occupied Azerbaijan, the same year they occupied Armenia. In 1921, they invaded Georgia.
In 1932, they starved millions of Ukrainians to death in the Holodomor. In 1934, the Bolsheviks invaded Xinjiang, China. In 1935 Germans found themselves encircled by the Franco-Soviet Pact followed by the Czech-Soviet Treaty of Alliance. In 1939 the Bolsheviks invaded Finland, and Poland.
In 1940, the Bolshevik regime occupied and annexed Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Romania, Bessarabia (Today, Moldova), and Bukovina (today, Ukraine/Romania).
By 1941, the German National Socialists fought the Russian International Socialists under the guise of opposing the Bolshevik “international, worldwide conspiracy” as [Adolf] Hitler called it in his June 22, 1941 speech.
[Winston] Churchill understood the Soviet menace, saying in a 1920 article titled Zionism Versus Bolshevism, that Bolshevism is a “system of morals and philosophy, as malevolent as Christianity was benevolent…[and a]…world-wide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality.”
Hellbound and Down 
