> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize.

Those are the site guidelines. If you want to truncate quotes so you can attack a straw man, go somewhere else. (x & y) and (x) dont mean the same thing and you know that.

Of course their involvement was significant in how things played out. But your analogy would like be saying the USSR would have been dominated by Germany without the US entering the war with a Europe first strategy. It would have been a strategically worse situation, but it's really not clear if that would have made Germany successful on the eastern front.