[red-iron-pine]

yeah the seeds were there for sure -- they countries that were rebuilt were already the major empires.

you're not creating a new society from whole cloth, you're taking already battered Big Dogs and getting them back to being Big again (minus the, you know, Nazis and bad actors).

but they were already societies that had cutting edge tech and made serious end-runs at taking over the world.

South Korea would be the only real example of where you took the poor agrarian area and eventually grew it into an asian tiger.