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Sorry, but I think that's a flippant and lazy reply. The reality is that no other major power had a navy that could rival Britain and France. The Dutch and Spanish might have still helped America, but without French opposition the British navy would have wiped them out.


Foreign and military policy doesn't exist in a vacuum. You can't just wave a wand, change one thing, and expect most of history to play out the same.

Navies are big, expensive things to build and maintain, and as such, they are usually designed and planned around various assumptions of potential future war scenarios. Were Britain and France friendly, or even in a union such as the Angevin Empire, their resulting navy would likely be much smaller than the combined sizes of their historical navy, since it would be pointless to maintain a navy of that size if no feasible set of combatants could challenge it.

It is also worth pointing out that large countries that manage to steamroll their opposition and establish an unparalleled hegemony tend to result in the creation of other countries that can challenge their ascendancy: the Mongol Empire creating the Russian Empire in this way is perhaps the best example.


France and British alliance would be less dominant than NATO, which is >80% of the global military spending. https://www.iiss.org/blogs/military-balance/2019/02/european....

Also, the original question was specific - was France the only credible major power to assist US? It is silly to answer it by speculating backwards, about events that may or may not have happened centuries prior to it.




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