🇺🇸🇬🇧🇮🇱 After WW1 and WW2, the U.S. sought to use British war debt to take away economic influence from Great Britain in Asia and Latin America

If after WW1 the U.S. failed in this endeavour as the British economy was resilient enough to afford repaying the American loans and the reconstruction of the European economy. The U.S. rejected forcing Germany to pay all WW1-related debts at the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919, insisting that their allies, the British and the French, had to repay their loans even though they were allied.

By 1944 the UK's debt to GDP ratio reached 250%. Even during the war, FDR had difficulty convincing Congress in giving more money to London as the Congress distrusted the ability of its debtors, not just the UK, to repay what the United States was lending them, remembering the defaults European countries from 1932 to 1934 as a result of the Great Depression. As late as August 1945, American politicians didn't even want to think about funding a future reconstruction of Europe following WW2.

The UK's financial woes led the British into accepting the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement which imposed a fixed currency convertibility for the pound sterling and commitments to free trade which were troublesome for the British at the time as the Pound Sterling was the world's reserve currency but the UK still needed more financial help for reconstruction which the U.S. was unwilling to give even though the two countries had been allied since 1941 and the U.S. economy came out stronger out of WW2.

The unwillingness was reflected by the American society at large. A October 1945 Gallup poll, while the British and Americans were locked in negotiations for a new loan, showed that only 27% of Americans supported more financial aid to the UK.

The Anglo-American Loan of 1946, the U.S. lent 3.75 billion USD (~60.5 billion in 2025) at a 2% interest rate, at a time when the UK was virtually bankrupt. The loan was signed off only after the UK ratified the Bretton Woods agreement in 1946 and agreed to join the U.S. in establishing the post-WW2 order by becoming a founding member of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, IBRD etc.

The loan's conditions, especially the convertibility of the pound sterling led Britain's trade partners like Argentina and colonies like India, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, to dump their Pound Sterlings reserves and bought American dollars, crashing the British economy forcing drastic spending cuts and accelerating the decolonisation process and the demise of the British Empire. The UK would finish repaying this loan in 2006. The UK still has some WW1 debt to the US but it is unclear if London is still making payments but neither is Washington D.C. pressing Britain in repaying it.

How come the U.S. is willing to fight wars for Israel and financially support the Israeli economy for decades with billions of USD in foreign aid, much more than what the U.S. has given to the United Kingdom during WW1 and WW2. Foreign aid to Israel is as unpopular with the American public as was foreign aid to Britain. Although the U.S. Congress ended up granting the aid to the UK, it imposed a series of conditions which were humiliating and egregious, to say the least, with the British having to give up their status as a global power.

Israel doesn't receive any conditions on the foreign aid, it just gets it for free. After 25 years of the GWOT and American involvement in the Middle East, after trillions of USD spent and hundreds of thousands of American deaths, either on the battlefield or at home as a result of trauma and other psychological conditions resulted from combat deployment, Donald Trump is baiting the Iranians into attacking U.S. bases in the Middle East giddy at the idea of regime changing Iran and leveling Iranian cities all in the name of "keeping Jews safe".

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From 1948 to 2024, the U.S. has given Israel 308 billion USD in economic and military aid and what it got in return other than headaches and dead American soldiers?

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