Since when did the Kaiser care about the Americas? The “Zimmerman Note” was more an attempt to keep the US neutral, rather than a signal of German intentions to dominate the Americas. They weren’t stupid.
So inciting Mexico to attack the USA was “neutral”? The Second Reich was quite imperialist.
Refusing to avenge the Lusitania is an act of weakness. George Washington warned us that the USA must be “at all times ready for war” when it comes knocking.
My grandfather was in the Secret Service until about 1919. He was sent to Mexico to investigate what was going on there because of the Zimmerman note. This was more than just an effort to keep America neutral. The Germans wanted Mexico to go to war and tie down US forces. It was a major factor in the declaration of war against Germany that followed a few months later.
As a pretext to go to war, it worked. The US declared war on the Central Powers (I find declarations of war really quaint). It seems as if a lot of people believe the sinking of the Lusitania was the cause, but that was in 1915, two full years earlier. Unrestricted German U-boat attacks on shipping had resumed in March 1916, hadn’t been enough on its own to stir the country into war, but the ZT was. The proposal in the telegram was, in the event that the US declared war on Germany, that Mexico would get German aid to fight the US in a land war. The US had been at war not very many years earlier, chasing down Pancho Villa, and btw, we should have built the damned border wall at that time. Patton got his first combat experience in that war, serving on the staff of Pershing.
Had the US’ diplomatic efforts started in earnest in 1915, the whole thing might have been simmered down, but I doubt it. New combatants kept joining up. the Ottoman Empire went to war against Russia over old territorial claims, and Montenegro for example had previously been occupied by the Turks, so they declared war on the Turks. By April 1915 the British (including troops drawn from India and other parts of the British empire) had landed at Gallipoli, a bloody corner of the war that went on a mere three weeks before an armistice was agreed to in order to bury the dead. When the fighting resumed, it wouldn’t end until August. The naval campaign to reopen the Dardenelles, which had started in February 1915, ended January 1916, a victory for the Ottoman Empire. There’s a huge British war memorial at Gallipoli, Michael Wood visited it when he shot that Trojan War documentary years ago.
Meanwhile, the British were organizing Arab revolts against the Turks, which started to show success later in 1916, and the British and French had defended the Suez Canal in 1915 and won.
http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/zimmermann-telegram-published-in-united-states
[snip] On this day in 1917, the text of the so-called Zimmermann Telegram, a message from the German foreign secretary, Arthur Zimmermann, to the German ambassador to Mexico proposing a Mexican-German alliance in the case of war between the United States and Germany, is published on the front pages of newspapers across America. In the telegram, intercepted and deciphered by British intelligence in January 1917, Zimmermann instructed the ambassador, Count Johann von Bernstorff, to offer significant financial aid to Mexico if it agreed to enter any future U.S-German conflict as a German ally. If victorious in the conflict, Germany also promised to restore to Mexico the lost territories of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. [/snip]