“Back Door to War”
Yes - I’d even argue a good case could be made against our involvement in WWII. Pat Buchanan makes the conservative argument.
There is no question our entering WWI was a grave mistake which caused untold misery for hundreds of millions. Wilson was a evil man. FDR was bad, but Wilson was just plain evil.
Very pleased you kept that leg. You had me on pins and needles until the end there. Well written in that delightful but long lost Bill Maudlin GI voice. A gift.
I will send you the follow-on to that story in a minute.
You are certainly consistent in your beliefs! Going after Wilson for his decision to take up the fight against Germany is really novel (both of my grandfathers served during WWI).
The negatives against our fighting Germany were that we lost tens of thousands of men killed and wounded and we set ourselves up as an adversary of Germany. It is also likely that we were the locus and distributive agent of the "Spanish Flu" which killed ten of millions worldwide.
The positives were that we provided the final element that ended that bloodbath, we stopped Germany's atrocious occupation of Belgium and France and we emerged as a preeminent world power. That last part wasn't trivial, since it demonstrated to the world that the US wasn't to be ignored and we had finally become credible.
If we hadn't joined the fight against Germany, we would have developed a modern army far too late to be able to deal with the next set of threats in the forms of Europe dominated by Germany and a Bolshevist Russia.
Alternative history is fun stuff - but like imagining a successful Confederate government after the Civil War, the real history that followed would have been far worse for us and the world.