[yodon]

> "tough times create strong men, strong men create easy times, easy times create weak men, weak men create tough times"

The quote is intended to apply at the national level, not at the personal level. Think WWII and the way the US came together in what is called the greatest generation, or the way England came together in what Churchill called it's finest hour. Then think of the arc in which the unified actions of those generations led to prosperity, and then to challenges, and to failures and division.

[SketchySeaBeast]

But the United States was so strong in WW2 because it was isolated from the war - the initial hit it took to bring it into the war didn't affect its production capacity. It was able to turn itself into a giant war machine because it wasn't a tough time for North America - it had been spared the destruction of WW1. Sure society came together and sacrificed for those few years, but it was so insulated from the actual conflict it had people arguing to be isolationist.

[simiones]

WWII was a time of plenty for the USA (well, for the civilian population). At the very end of the war, the USA controlled more than half of all the money in the world. There has never been a time in history when a single country was as wealthy as the USA was at the end of WWII compared to its contemporaries *. And yes - all that huge wealth and power led to the USA growing ever more wealthy (in absolute terms) and ever more powerful. So no, this quote doesn't apply to the USA after WWII.

The UK after WWII, or in fact France and Western Germany, are better examples, though I think that the huge amounts of money that the USA decided to pour into them through the Marshall Plan were much more responsible for that then "strong men" forged in the war were.

* The USSR had just lost 20 million people - about 10% of its population. Germany, Poland, the UK, Austria and other European countries had been bombed into oblivion, as was Japan. Most of Africa was still recovering from European colonialism, as was India and most of SE Asia. China was still in the midst of its civil war, and had suffered some heavy losses because of Japan.