“but it’s a fool’s errand to believe they started the World Wars.”
No, it is a fools belief that foreign policy has no consequences that should be directly attributed to those policies.
Democrats are notoriously weak on foreign policy and get us into wars.
“...it is a fools belief that foreign policy has no consequences that should be directly attributed to those policies.
Democrats are notoriously weak on foreign policy...” [CodeToad, post 62]
Democrats (prior to 1972 at any rate) cannot be branded as that much less clued-in to the conduct of foreign understanding of foreign policy.
The words George Washington spoke in his Presidential farewell address are not Holy Writ. They do not appear in any Founding document nor have they been written into any Federal statute. Times have changed in the two-hundred-plus years that have passed since. His advice has never been Absolute Truth. Obeying such a diktat would not only be a bad idea, it would have been impossible then and is less possible now. Trading nations cannot cut themselves off from the rest of the world.
World Wars One and Two entangled every major US trade partner before American entry into either conflict. The notion that America could stay out was never realistic - even if the nation (having been blocked from trade with the Central Powers, and later with Nazi Germany, by British naval supremacy) had declined to trade with the Allies out of a sense of “justice.”