Of course there could not have been a negotiated peace where possible future events were taken into consideration. Germans and Japanese were inherently evil. Once they were eliminated peace would reign. The war worked out perfectly for the Soviets and their agents in the U.S. government. The two rivals containing them were eliminated. Modern warfare relies on demonizing the opposition. Japanese soldiers fought to the death. There was no comparable Bataan Death March. If a Japanese did not want to fight to the death he was assisted by a GI. The American people did not want any part of this war. They had had enough with the “War to End All Wars.” Progressives have had us in a perpetual war
“Germans and Japanese were inherently evil. Once they were eliminated peace would reign.”
Nonsense.
One could say the Hitler was evil for the Holocaust and some other things, but they, Germany and Japan simply had bad leaders and their leaders tried to be nationalist-imperialists at a point in time in world affairs when the age of imperialism and the acquiring of colonies was reaching a point of (a) not securing peace but creating & increasing international tensions and (b) sustaining control of colonies was reaching diminishing returns.
The Soviets kept & expanded their land-based colony system from Eastern Europe, across Central Asia and to the shores of the Pacific, but as much as it helped “mother Russia” in some ways, it was an economic basket case. They were not the future, they were mimicking a time that has passed.
There is not much moral difference between the Soviet Union’s hold on Eastern Europe and what would have been fascist Nazi Germany’s hold on much of Europe if they had prevailed against Russia. And the idea that having imperial Japan left holding much of its Asian occupied lands would have been some morally superior outcome than what actually happened is ludicrous.
Lastly, in the long term, Germany and imperial Japan were, during the war, posing more of threat globally to western interests than was believed to be true of Russia. The west made choices that they believed were expedient, not ideal, but the least of possible bad choices. The west could not help Germany against Russia and at the same time fight Germany from marching across western Europe. The west could not help Japan against the Soviets in Asia and fight Japan everywhere else in Asia that Japan had occupied territory. You conflate, wrongly, consequences with intent.