alt Hacker NewsIn 1939 the US had an outdated navy, army, and air corps. European instability is the direct cause of the change in US military and economic dominance.
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One of my favorite historical fun facts was that despite the Wright brothers flying the first place in 1903, at the start of WW1, the US was completely incapable of building an airplane and had to buy them from France and Great Britain. Why? Because of patent wars [1].
The net effect of that was that Congress had to intervene and they created an avionics patent pool, a system that persists to this day.
So whenever anyone says that patents foster innovation, just look at this or any number of historical counterexamples.
As for WW2, the causes were historical. The US was still suffering from the aftereffects of the Great Depression and American isolationism. It's worth noting that there was a lot of sympathy towards Nazi Germany in the US with the American Bund Party who had a rally in Madison Square Garden in 1939 [2].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers_patent_war
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1939_Nazi_rally_at_Madison_Squ...
It helped that US soil was barely touched during both WW.