American Betrayal: The inconvenient facts

i haven't posted on the controversy since it started. I'm reading American Betrayal and still think that the book is deeply, deeply flawed

Conrad Black makes a point here that gets to the heart of the West thesis:

But I commend to the other side the facts that in 1940, Germany, France, Japan, and Italy, as well as the Soviet Union, were in the hands of dictators hostile to Anglo-American democracy. Soon after the end of World War II, after the USSR had absorbed over 90 percent of the casualties the three principal allies (the U.S., the USSR, and the U.K. and Commonwealth) had suffered in subduing Nazi Germany, France, Italy, Japan, and most of Germany were all flourishing and democratic allies of the British and Americans; and about 45 years later, the Soviet Union had disintegrated, China was a capitalist country, and Eastern Europe was largely free, without the horrors of a war between the Great Powers. This was a stunning sequence of achievements, of the statesmen who are, apart from President Reagan, smeared by Mrs. West, and Messrs. Bukovsky and Stroilov.

John Lewis Gaddis made a similar point several years ago:

Most scholars today have come around to the view that the presciently provacative British historian A. J. P. Taylor buried in a footnote in 1965: 'Of the three great men at the top, Roosevelt was the only one who knew what he was doing: he made the United States the greatest power in the worl at virtually no cost.'