I find the article rather convincing: I want to play a related alterna-history game that takes the article as a given. Did the Soviet Union make a serious stra

I find the article rather convincing: I want to play a related alterna-history game that takes the article as a given. Did the Soviet Union make a serious strategic error in declaring war against Japan when it did? Remember, we're taking it as a given that Japan surrendered to the Allies because of the Soviet Union. Moreover, it surrendered to the USA because it for very good reason preferred USA reconstruction to USSR reconstruction, in a way that mirrors whom German troops very strongly preferred to surrender to. What if, instead, the USSR had simply decided to bide its time? Some results: 1) Two rivals would continue to claw at each other for months, draining massive amounts of blood and treasure. 2) In the meantime, the Allies would be forced to have at least some number of fewer troops in Europe than they did in actuality. I don't find it plausible that the Soviet Union would see it in their interests to, say, invade France and Italy. But it would give the Soviet Union a much stronger negotiating position, and a United States devoting its resources to crushing Japan would be a United States not focused on rebuilding Europe. And a vacuum of power in the more developed parts of Europe would have been very tasty for Stalin. 3) On the con side, the USA would likely end up in a more powerful position in East Asia, if it won, decreasing Communist influence from China to Indonesia and Vietnam to India. 3.5) If the USA lost (let's define that as the cessation of hostilities while Japan managed to hold on to many of it's earlier imperial acquisitions), the USSR would have an embittered, genocidal, and highly authoritarian state with the capacity for total war on its border. 4) Also on the con side, Soviet influence would have been quite limited in Manchuria and northern Korea. The main base of operations for Mao in the Chinese Civil War would have been limited. 5) The USSR wouldn't have regained some positions in the Far East that it imagined were legitimately Russian. It also wouldn't have been able to uproot the large amount of industry that the Japanese had invested in Manchukuo. 6) Violating the Potsdam agreement that required the USSR to invade by August 9 would have decreased trust in the Soviet Union on the American side. 7) All those cons acknowledged, all of them except 6) could have been mitigated by the Soviet Union dragging its feet for six months or even a year more, drawing out and sabotaging back channel negotiations with Japan as much as possible, and then invading at the very end. 7.5) If it waited longer, Japan's willingness to surrender might have evaporated, leaving more time to get a full scale invasion of the whole of Korea, northern Japan, and a wider area of China going. That's on top of allowing for more preparation time, which may or may not have been useful. Thoughts, HN? If anything, I think this indicates that the Soviet entering when it did wasn't the main factor that ended the war, because from the Soviet strategic perspective dragging the war out as much as possible seems very preferable to what ended up happening.