Many other countries have struggled to reconcile their differences after lesser conflicts, so what events and policies made peace among us something we most take for granted?
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Containment. See, at the end of WW2, America was already gearing up for its next rivalry/war, against the Soviet Union. As the war ended, they knew that they’d have to make sure that the USSR couldn’t overrun Europe, and they sure as shit didn’t want them to take Japan, so they spent a lot of money rebuilding those countries and stabilizing them.
This started paying off, as West Germany became filthy rich off of industrialization, as did Japan. Modernization and widespread rebuilding made Europe a powerhouse on its own, which was needed to keep communism at bay. European nations saw the strength in this, as the Benelux had its own trade union. (Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxemburg), which was a good idea: Collective bargaining with a larger economy meant that countries couldn’t economically bully you.
Then came the European Economic commonwealth, which would slowly become the EU we have today, created to ensure that both the old Soviet block and the new Russian Federation don’t barge their way into other countries.
In the meantime, the USSR saw its policies fail courtesy of rampant corruption and failure to modernize. Were it not for the British giving them the technology, they wouldn’t have had easy access to jet engines! Eastern Germany became a posterboy of what life under Soviet Russia was: Bleak, dull, fear-filled.
I remember learning that the Soviet government had to pull a movie showing the American poor, because rather than paint America in a bad light, it made the Russian poor ask “why do their poor own cars?”
Bonus point: This is why British rail is considered to be garbage: They’ve not modernized since they were constructed over a hundred years ago, whereas european rail was thoroughly destroyed during WW2.
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