The Eastern European community in Chicago cut a deal with Wilson ~ if they pacified their constituencies here to accept the WWI draft then Wilson would make sure their language compatriots back in the old country would get their own nationstates, to wit, Hungary, Austria, Serbia, Slovenia, Poland, etc.
In retrospect when it comes to the Middle East we were certainly ahead with the Ottomans running things ~ and they were quite willing to sell land to the Jews (starting with the Golan Heights themselves).
I try to take as an objective view of WWI as possible ~ and the British argument for our entry on their side still doesn't add up.
You mean the Central Powers. The Axis was an alliance created by a pact between Germany and Italy in 1936, which Japan joined in 1940.
However, I am in agreement with you on your main point. If the US had stayed out of WWI, the conflict would likely have been settled by the Europeans themselves, as they had settled similar conflicts in the past.
By the way, many Irish-Americans were also unenthusiastic about participating in a war on behalf of their English oppressors. And most Americans were unhappy with the fact that Britain, France, Italy, Japan, and Belgium helped themselves to Gemran, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman territory, engaging in the very "imperialism" of which they had accused Germany and its allies of practicing.
To address your off-topic digression, I don’t think the United States should have backed either side in the Great War. The Kaiser was not trying to conquer the world. That war was essentially a European civil war in which America had no investment in either side winning.
Indeed, if it had ended in stalemate, likely there would have been no punitive Versailles terms, no crippled Germany, no Adolph Hitler and no Second World War — at least not in Europe anyway. Perhaps then without that devastating war, Europe wouldn’t have ended up so freaking wimpy.
[We probably would have ended up fighting the Japanese regardless.]
Back on-topic, I knew that the 16th Amendment opened the door to massive federal spending and indebtedness — as well as intrusion into our personal finances. I wasn’t aware of how significant the 17th Amendment was in creating the hugely centralized and increasingly arbitrary federal gov’t under which we suffer today.