I’ve been catching up on videos on the YouTube World War Two channel: youtube.com as their progression to VE-day comes near.

But after all the many videos I am left with the sad realization that western leaders were stuck in old ways of thinking, both the elected officials and many flag officers.

Churchill is rightfully criticized by many but I think many people just don’t reduce the issue to a very simple one: an old man who could not think differently than what he was programmed in his younger days.

Roosevelt was not much better, though he had a bigger picture of the 20th century problems than Churchill.

Churchill’s obsession with Greece just strikes me as an old man trying to fix his problems he made a few decades earlier when he was in the Admiralty.

That he and the UK were more intent on keeping their colonial ways was picked up on by Americans at the time (see Gen. Stillwell.)

See also Gen. Montgomery’s decisions in Europe.

Trying to apply this to us today: One of the real shortcomings in our discussions today is to simply approach Putin, for example, as the bad guy, and not understanding the bigger picture.

The war in Ukraine is as much, or more so, about resources than it is about nationalism.

Putin can use nationalism and religion (the two seem to go together) to sell the war to his people, but the real battle is to control both agricultural and mineral resources.

And we today are fighting wars that will play out for the rest of the century.

But I feel that our leaders are doing a rather poor job of laying out visions for the future and why we have to make the choices we must make.

And Biden tries with his jobs-jobs-jobs campaign rhetoric, yet as is pointed out by many who seem to know quite a bit about the real world, we cannot consume our way out of our challenges.

So getting back to WWII - the Europeans caused the US to be so Europe-focused that Roosevelt and the US officers did not see that the war in China was going to be so important in coming decades.

I wonder what we are ignoring today, that will come to haunt us in 50 years.