When warfare was thought to be organized and civilized and ranks of men lined up to shoot ball and powder rifles at each other - warfare was a constant occurrence.
When war became brutal beyond imagining with entire cities being laid waste - suddenly the appetite for war diminished.
I read a story about India that made me sad - an “untouchable” ran a successful leather business and got a nice home in a “nice” neighborhood and a new well and satellite dish. His neighbors didn't like it and got together and beat him up and poisoned his well and burned down his house - dish and all.
That would be a lot less likely in America - where people are armed. “Then it would just be an armed conflict” someone told me - but no - being part of a mob enacting social “justice” on some uppity guy you don't like has a certain appeal to the internal animal - while bullets whizzing past at a couple thousand feet per second tends to be a real ‘weenie shrinker’.
If you look at the map of 1945 post-war, the Allies (us) we could have OWNED Europe, Scandanavia, Japan, the Korean peninsula, and the top 1/3rd of Africa.
What did we do? The Marshall plan, so that the Europeans could rebuild their OWN countries, and then go on to hate us.
In retrospect it would be fascinating to see what would have happened had we been hard-asses who kept what we won with our blood. Japan would have been fine. But imagine a prosperous, democratic Africa? A grateful republican France, no commie Vietnam, etc.