Supposedly, Wilson was induced to declare war on Germany by British representations that their enemy was near collapse and that the US needed to join the war if it wanted to help craft the peace. Wilson, the pacifist, was thereby inveigled to declare war in order to shape the peace. In truth, Britain, France, and her allies were in desperate circumstances and needed immediate American entry into the war.
As it was, American financial support and supplies were of rapid benefit, but troops in the field took longer due to our dismal military readiness. To Pershing's enduring credit, he insisted that the American Army would participate only as organized units under American command and not as small scale and individual replacements to fill gaps in the Allied trench works. And then the Americans arrived, first as Marines in the crucial stand of the Third Battle of the Marne, then as trained Army units itching to go on the offensive.
Able to do the math and project rising American troop levels, Germany's strategists knew that civilian hunger, revolutionary agitation, faltering munitions production, and a renewed Allied offensive could not be resisted. Wilson got his peace settlement, thereby letting loose upon the world an idealism about war and foreign relations that has often animated American counsels toward phenomenally destructive decisions and effects.
Trump, to his credit, has little in the way of Wilsonian fantasies about the tractability of the world to armed idealism. War is to be avoided when possible, and the American military is needed to defend America's honor and interests by fending off or crushing our enemies when the need arises. The Washington-Jackson schools of American foreign policy are back in charge, just as we need against the menaces of the era.
“I am confident of what I read even though it is not at hand...Wilson was induced to declare war on Germany by British representations that their enemy was near collapse...was thereby inveigled to declare war in order to shape the peace. In truth, Britain, France, and her allies were in desperate circumstances...American financial support and supplies were of rapid benefit...Germany’s strategists knew...a renewed Allied offensive could not be resisted. Wilson got his peace settlement, thereby letting loose upon the world an idealism about war and foreign relations that has often animated American counsels toward phenomenally destructive decisions and effects...” [Rockingham, post 52]
The verbal exchange between then-Deputy State Secretary for Foreign Affairs Arthur Zimmermann and Ambassador James W Gerard is recorded on page 237 of Gerard’s book, _My Four Years in Germany_ (New York: Doran, 1917). Recheck sources, then proclaim confidence.
Are you asserting that in 1917 Americans were so naïve and unschooled in geopolitics that one politician (admittedly, a vaunted Progressive of national repute) was able to bamboozle the public and both houses of the US national legislature in declaring war by stating falsehoods and non-germane trivia? And that the aftermath has warped and skewed US policies toward unhappy goals, to the exclusion of all else, ever since?
To claim such is to elevate propaganda, emotionalism, puerile idealism, pop-culture revisionism, and conspiratorialism above hard-headed reasoning and acknowledgement of facts.
The Allies were near collapse. American industrial firms, financial interests, and many other sectors of the national economy were heavily involved; if the Central Powers had been victorious, it’s most unlikely that the United States could have survived the conflict without severe damage. Complete collapse was not out of the question.
At this late date, asserting that American businesses should have steered clear is meaningless: by the end of 1916, 2 and 1/2 years in, it was too late. Standing aside while invoking a concern for morals and philosophical rectitude, and other vaporous whims might have pleased prissier souls, but would not have improved things. Unless, of course, one believes that being “moral” is preferable to getting livable results.
Here is a generality to toy with: the USA was founded as a trading nation. Trading nations cannot be isolationist.