Quite illogical to intend to wage war vs the Axis when the enemy is the Communists. Since the Axis in this game didn't pose a threat to the US, there'd be no reason to fight them in the first place. If the USA wanted to knock out the Russians, they could've decided to do so on their own. In fact, since the Axis were the ideological counterpart of the Communits, the USAs best bet would be to wait until they were at war with each other and hopefully decimate themselves.
As I mentioned, both have high 'threat', as I said it's possible the US may have at some point seek allies. Soviet may have been seen as the bigger 'threat' but with no direct way to get to them (Japan in the west, Germany/Italy in the east, USSR effectively landlocked except in the almost useless far-eastern theater, but with no nearby friendly bases, invasion there would both be risky and pointless, USA may have decided it needed 'democratic' allies to help guarantee it's own independence. It's best shot for that would have been the Western powers. Would that mean fighting a war potentially with the Axis? Perhaps.
It's also possible that with no war declaration there might have been talk of a 'Soviet German' pact, even if there was no formal alliance.
The way logic works and the way crowds and leader thinks are strange indeed sometimes at the ground level (e.g. the bomb gap and missile gap during the cold war). The 'real' events are abstracted seem plausible to us because we know this ground level context that surrounds it. As history diverges in HOI3, I don't see it as fatal that different attitudes could have emerged, different scares, different opinions. By changing any one thing you have a sudden ripple effect that affects everything else (e.g. butterfly effect). Changing many things means that I can accept that given a fairly workable system, reasonable supporting circumstances (although they may be many changes at the ground level that feed into it) can be seen.
I don't really think it's that far of a leap. Because this is an abstraction we don't have the full range of context and interactions that could have potentially lead up to the these events, I prefer to assume that the context is plausible. That's not the say the system can be tweaked.
In either case, I do prefer the USSR simply declare war on the Germany themselves, but this is a potential alternative. Living in a dangerous world usually does entice nations to try to form alliances, even if there are potential drawbacks and external negatives to it. Where that threat comes from in reality may not even be that important, only the perception of threat may be.
Another example of context would be Perhaps the 'red scare' would have happened earlier and the USA leaders may have felt the Soviets were going to grow too powerful if they managed to conquer Germany, and based on their information, the Soviets were in a very good position to do with the German empire spread so thin. This war in Germany would become a 'race to Berlin' to try to capture as much of Europe as possible. The axis become more of buffer and trading piece between the allies and communists.
Again, we'll never know of these types of lines of thought would have been pursued, or are even really feasible really. People think of of the darnest things, and other people believe them. It has (and will continue to) cause many strange things to happen in History.
Yes, I agree with you fully. As you can see on the "House Rule"-section in Sudden Carnage we have taken away Soviets posibility of beeing super aggressive as non of us like the idea of Soviet "behavior" triggering US entering the war against Axis. In the best of worlds, this would be modded somehow - but we like time and/or knowledge to deal with it ourselves. Thus the blunt House Rules.
