Much to comment upon what you have posted.
As long as the USSR was involved in the ‘war’ against Germany, along with France and Britain, et al, who were either deeply entrenched in socialism as was the USSR in communism, or playing with the idea excludes these doubful allies from being considered Democratic.
America, due to its clueless politicians, get sucked into global conflicts like dust to a vacuum cleaner. Our ‘allies’ didn’t care much for capitalist republics they only were interested in what our factories could deliver.
Your point about the evil Treaty of Versailles is spot on!
Paragraph 3 is also correct, in my view.
In respect to the balance of your observations that deal with the American Civil War, I agree that I disagree. This article I posted dealt mainly with the usurpation of power by a somewhat mad Abraham Lincoln. He was insanely grasping at everything and anything to increase his power as absolute wartime ruler. Imagine. Swearing out a warrant for arrest of the Chief Justice, for example.
Abraham Lincoln and the North deserved a defeat, but it would have been extremely difficult given that most of the South’s equipment was used for bailing hay or plowing fields.
We there’s a lot of agreement, the confusion of evils in the Civil War understandably results in disagreement. Lincoln, after all, came over to the Republican Party from the Whig Part. Not from the Free Soil or Liberty parties.
I’ll also say this: If the South had freed the slaves (e.g., via compensated emancipation, along with an invigorated the property qualification for voting so as to prevent the outbreak of mobocracy) the North could not have prosecuted the war for long, and the South could have successfully wrested itself free of the tariff.
Very late in the game, the South did offer to free the slaves who joined the Confederate Army. So, by the end of the war, it became clear that the the South had miscalculated how Northern resolve could be mustered by the slave issue, at the beginning of the war.
Germany declared war on the US in 1941. That is how we came to fight a war against Germany. Soviet Union had been an ally with Germany against Poland, just as Poland had been an ally with Germany against Czechoslovakia. Germany, in attacking Poland and USSR was attacking its allies. In attacking Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, and Luxembourg, they were attacking neutrals. In response to the German attack on Poland, (with whom Germany had a non-aggression pact) Britain and France declared war on Germany. In response to the German attack on USSR, US extended lend lease to USSR. It was hoped that it would be enough.