I guess the author of the video looks at the history from a US point of view. He could just as well have used the history of the EU. The “father of the European Union”, Jean Monnet, was very anti-democratic and pro-managerial. He meant that the WWI was due to the popular forces in Europe pre-WWI, and therefore to avoid a repetition the major countries, or Europe in its entirety, would have to be ruled by professional bureaucrats. This is why - according to my view - the EU can never be reformed. It is built on a very anti-democratic base.
One does not have to know that much history to see how weird Monnet’s world view was. Prior to WWI how much power did the parliamentary parties in Austria, Russia, Germany wield? Even Britain entered the war without even a single debate in the House of Commons. No, the one primal catastrophe of the Western world, WWI, was not due to popular demand (although once the war was declared there were initially some patriotic demonstrations in most of the involved countries), but to inept handling of a political crisis by the people in power.
To understand how much the shadow of WWI still affects Europe one only needs to look at the constitution of the European Union. To a very large extent it is a copy of the League of Nations(!!). Not that many Europeans have any inkling of that.
Also, the first industrialised war made it necessary to shape the managerial states, given that during 4 years so much of the production had to be run in a way to keep the war effort going. And once the bureaucracies had been formed those who ran them were never letting go after the war. That is unfortunately the inheritance we still live with.
Am i to understand that a premise is that totalitarian nations would not arise seek to dominate and expand unless deterred by a superior (in terms of government and power) nation? That hyper-isolationism is rational?