The U.S. should have stayed out of WWI.
Bunch of dying European empires battling to see who was the toughest.
“The U.S. should have stayed out of WWI.”
One school of thought argues that a stalemate without American involvement would have saved everyone from a major world war only 20 years later. The Hapsburg Empire wouldn’t have been dismantled, the disasterous reparations wouldn’t have been saddled on Germany.
“The U.S. should have stayed out of WWI.
Bunch of dying European empires battling to see who was the toughest.”
In his single-volume history of the First World War (New York: Knopf, 1999; ISBN 0-375-40052-4) the late Sir John Keegan - possibly the most accessible military historian of the 20th century - offered the concluding opinion that the causes of WWI remained a mystery.
And he laid the high casualties not at the feet of incompetent generals, but to systemic factors. Industrial advances made increased firepower possible, but equivalent advances in tactical mobility and battlefield communications had not yet occurred. Once the order to attack was given, the clashing forces marched beyond contact with HQ and the generals became as powerless to affect the outcome as the lowliest private under their command.
The United States was founded as a trading nation, just at the right moment to prosper in the Industrial Revolution, and contribute to the increase in production, and ease of difficulties of travel/transshipment that set the stage for the burgeoning of international trade during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
The First World War disrupted international trade, destroying three major empires (Imperial Russia, Ottoman Turkey, and Austria-Hungary) and imperiling every other country - except the United States.
America reaped ample profits from trade with the Allies, to which it had been more closely tied than any other nations before 1914. Yet instead of aiding the Allies in gratitude for good fortune, or in the service of strategic interest, the US did all it could to remain aloof, fostering a sense of privilege and predestination, and a self-congratulatory attitude that permitted the country to feel superior and condescend of the rest of the world.
The “Shining City on a Hill” myth seduces many Americans into feeling good about their mulish indifference, but is morally repugnant. It led to the edge of ruin in World War One; as a sentiment transmuted into a policy 20-odd years later, it flirted with disaster in World War Two. In 1939-1945, the Allies were saved only by the greatest luck, some very sordid shenanigans, stalwart resistance, and the inability of Nazi Germany to refrain from attacking the USSR.
Americans need to focus less on the state of their morality, and more on what strategies might salvage the remnants.