The political elite started WWI to protect their empires.
They set the stage for WW2 by crippling Germany so bad, there was only one way out.
The Muslims were hiding behind the curtain in both wars to get the West to fight each other.
We know for a fact that the Grand Mufti worked with Germany on the “Final Solution” to the “Jewish Problem”.
We don’t have a clear connection between Palestine and Stalin but we DO know Stalin had a Jewish eradication plan.
Woodrow Wilson: Proof that academics are unfit for public office.
Conventional wisdom is that the American refusal to take part in the League of Nations was a big mistake as if the League would have been effective with us in it. I never found that reasoning persuasive (like with the UN, the organization might be able to coerce small nations but the large countries do as they please). There was an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal several years ago arguing against the idea that the US failure to join the League of Nations was the reason why it was ineffective.
They packed the Lusitania with arms, then sent her into the very most dangerous place, then withdrew the cruisers.
They WANTED her to go down.
Powerful forces had struck a bargain to get the USA into a war that nearly ALL Americans were eager to totally avoid.
MOST of the time we fight a war, it is owing to lies and false flag ops.
The business of America is business and we cannot recreate the Mid-West in the Middle East.
It’s just NOT going to happen.
My hope is that in Hell, Hitler and Clemenceau are forever chained together to each other.
Wilson was truly a racist. He took blacks out of Civil Service. He resegregated the Navy. Daniels, his Secretary of the Navy, was responsible for the only successful coup d’etat in American history. He appointed FDR as his undersecretary
All in all, a despicable cast of characters.
Despite the widespread insistence that the Treaty of Versailles was inordinately harsh it isn't quite the case. Compare its terms with the treaty of Brest-Litovsk that Germany forced on a defeated Russia, for example. All they demanded was Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and most of Ukraine plus indemnities. Even the German negotiator was shocked. Or, going back only a little further, the transfer of Alsace-Lorraine to the victor, which was precisely what Germany had done after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. Now it was France's turn. Nothing really new there.
The real problem was that the indemnities had to be paid in gold, and Germany's domestic economy was already heavily damaged by the war. Whether the Germans deliberately attempted to inflate their way out of that or simply got caught in an inflationary spiral, the French demanded payment in kind, and when Germany defaulted, occupied the Rhineland, replacing German workers with French and taking the coal industry out of any potential economic recovery for a time, which compounded the difficulty of generating enough money to pay off war indemnities.
Those were some pretty wild times. Russia was in the midst of a five-year civil war, Poland had invaded Ukraine, the Red Army had invaded Poland in return and gotten soundly defeated at the Battle of Warsaw, Bolsheviks had made three attempts to overthrow the German government, the last of which had resulted in machine gun battles in Berlin and 1200 dead in the streets, the entire world had been hit with a massive influenza epidemic - it goes on and on. "Peace" it was not.
That was the environment which Wilson and his internationalist followers were going to mold into a utopia. HERE are the actual 14 points, one of which (point 6) was welcoming into the European community the Bolshevik government that was doing its utmost to subvert and destroy it. The points were actually formulated in January 1918, long before any military resolution of the war was in sight. This is the stuff of academic idealism, not practical diplomacy. IMHO, of course.