towards the end we did nuke a country, twice, in a totally superfluous and cruel act

thats… a tough one. I’m not saying you’re wrong. We have a global standard we decided after ww2 about the extent combatants can “legally” injure civilians in a war.

When you look at the level of resistence by the Japanese during battles in Iwo Jima and Okinawa in particular, It points to the idea that they would not have surrendered, especially on their sacred island homeland. They had a split definition for “defeated” and “surrendered”. They could logically acknowledge being defeated, but they still would not tender their surrender, and would have fought for every inch, to the death. Even now they say this. They expected to lose on the beaches in Kyushu, but they were still not going to envision surrender. Westerners don’t think with this model of war, so we have to take this into account when introspecting what was an optimal path back then-- already a dicey path, as armchair-warrioring the past always is.

The firebombing of Tokyo killed double the number of civilians that the two nuclear bombs did. And yet we dont talk about those events so much. Its an interesting distinction to ponder.

I’m not an expert or military person, but I hear “war crimes” are actually very common in war. As an example, people note that the Mai Lai massacre in Vietnam was particularly heinous, but I’ve seen documentaries which say that that sort of thing happened all the time It just seldom got acknowledged. Mai Lai was extraorindary in its unusual amount of publicity. If this interests you, check out Kill Anything that Moves

On the other hand with my modern understanding of justification for using nukes, my heart agrees with you. There are always possibilities to do something else, or wait. But can I apply that to pre-UN pre-nurembourg pre-geneva convention times? tough one.

I can tell you that I am married into a Japanese family now, and many of them feel it possibly had to be done, but that it was heinous, along with the rest of the war. They also feel the start of the war was more or less mandatory, as the US had locked Japan away from resources it needed to continue existing in the form it was in. No apologies tendered for the initial attack. They feel the US started it, and not expecting the pearl harbor attack was simply stupid.

My wifes mother (still alive) talks about running as fast as she could from place to place in tokyo to get away from the firebombings, and the starvation that followed where people even ate all the grass, then laid down and died or wandered into the countryside. Her parents died in the fires so she walked into the countryside and walked 350 km to Nagoya as an 11 year old alone to find her relatives.

the EU’s stability and rules-based approach.

Great, but countries violating their own ICC laws to host netenyahu, promising him they wont apprehend him for war crimes is not a “rules-based approach” at all.

holding them to account. That part comes after, once democracy is assured.

How are you going to hold them to account after? Theres zero correlation between what the public wants and what the government does. The only moment you have any importance at all is for that one brief instant you vote. Thats all you get in our fake democracy. So I think you’re being dishonest.

I never stopped feeling angry that such an epic moron was elected president and used it to enable a genocide.