The Great War was the Great Tragedy of Western European civilization. All of the major European actors bore some portion of the blame.
Before and after the Armistice, Wilson’s poisonous Progressive ideology helped advance Bolshevism and nationalism out of an undeserved spirit of moral superiority and Puritan/Quaker/Universalist mission.
This is the totalitarian germ of American-style socialism.
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With regard to Zbig’s second-hand rehash of Haushofer and Mackinder, I recommend the emetic of Gyorgy’s “Geopolitics: The New German Science”.
WWI was all about Empires colliding - that of England, Austria, Turkey, Germany and perhaps Russia as well. I actually don’t think Wilson had much of a role to play in setting off the conflagration that was WWI. I think his ideas that became mainstream in 1918 and 1919 were certainly in retrospect, and possibly at the time very dangerous.
I don’t really know how you avoid WWI - sure there were miscalculations, misread bluffs, various Bismarckian mutual assistance guarantees - but fundamentally I suspect there was an air of inevitability about the whole thing.
Post WWI - that’s another matter entirely - and I do agree that Wilson’s ideology was poisonous as I have previously argued.