How did the USA manage to rebuild Japan into a democratic ally after WWII? What made that different from other failed attempts?
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There are some good answers here, but I think many are missing the point. It isn’t just was the US did differently; it’s what was so different about Japan.
There are two very significant points about Japan (and Germany, for that matter):
1. Japan was a unified nation. The people self-identified as a Japanese and saw themselves as one people. Compare this to the sectarian violence we have seen in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. Both of the countries have borders that were more or less arbitrarily drawn by outside powers. The people of these countries are often far more loyal to their region or tribe than to any central government. Afghanistan particularly can almost be thought of as a region more than a true nation.
2. Japan was an economic powerhouse. They were able to build massive war machinery and deploy it across oceans. It’s one thing to retool a factory that built warships into one that builds cars. It’s another thing entirely to build the factory, train workers and engineers, develop a system of commerce, etc. Neither Iraq nor Afghanistan that had mature, industrialized economies and certainly not the level that it would take to launch a World War.
Or to sum it up another way, US helped rebuild Japan and Germany after WW2, while it attempted to create nations almost from scratch in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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