
Should America Have Entered World War I? - okket
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/06/opinion/should-america-have-entered-world-war-i.html
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coltonv
This article mentions that had the US not entered World War I the likelihood
of World War II happening was much lower.

I'd like to propose the idea that World War II, in all it's horrificness,
saved us from much worse.

In a rather bizarre and twisted sense, we may be very very lucky that WWII
happened and that it happened at the exact time that it did: happening late
enough that we saw how awful modern total war is, but not so late that we
would have the weapons to truly eradicate ourselves.

~~~
tbirrell
Unfortunately, I think you mean it was "recent enough" we were able to see how
awful it was. Which means that if we give it a couple more generations to fade
out of (some) living memory, we open up ourselves to another conflict, this
time with the ability to eradicate ourselves.

Which then raises the question, had WWII not happened, would we have gotten
nuclear weapons when we did? And would the next "awful" conflict have been
apocalyptically so.

WWII ultimately jumpstarted so much of the scientific advancements we have
made in the last 70 years that it is impossible to say that we would have been
able to eradicate ourselves without a modern total war.

IDK. I'm not disagreeing, just thinking aloud. You make an interesting point.
And certainly one that is fun to hypothesize about.

~~~
nostrademons
We likely would not have gotten nuclear weapons when we did, but they would
probably have happened by the 50s and 60s, as would rocketry. There was
already research on nuclear fission happening in the 1930s (in Germany, of all
places), and people had already speculated on its use as a weapon. The German
nuclear weapons program had already begun when Germany invaded Poland. WW2
massively accelerated this research and let researchers get away with things
they wouldn't otherwise have been able to do (like building a nuclear reactor
under the bleachers of Stagg Field in Chicago). Given the scientific progress
made in the 30s, though, it's likely that it would've happened anyway by the
late 1950s.

Interestingly, if WW2 had not happened, it's very likely Germany would've been
the first country with nuclear weapons, and hence the world superpower now.
Most of the original researchers on nuclear fission were German, and many of
the key scientists on the Manhattan project emigrated from Germany or Nazi-
controlled countries. The key uranium mines of the 1930s were in the Belgian
Congo, and the ore that was eventually used for the Manhattan Project was
sitting on the docks in Belgium when the Nazis invaded.

------
thearn4
Alternative outcomes of WW1 represent some of the most interesting "What if?"s
of the history of the 20th century.

It's a fascinating conflict to read about, since it seemingly could have gone
either way up to nearly the end of the war. Compare that to WW2, where by late
1942 I think it was more or less clear that the axis powers would not be
winning on the offensive, and it became more of a question of how absolute the
end would be (armistice vs surrender).

WW1 also lacks as clear of a "good" vs. "bad" narrative as the WW2 has, which
makes it complex, and complex history is typically more interesting to me.

Obligatory shout out to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast. It's not a
perfect academic take on the topics he covers, but he weaves a good story.

------
ancap
_America should have minded her own business and stayed out of the World War.
If you hadn 't entered the war the Allies would have made peace with Germany
in the Spring of 1917. Had we made peace then there would have been no
collapse in Russia followed by Communism, no breakdown in Italy followed by
Fascism, and Germany would not have signed the Versailles Treaty, which has
enthroned Nazism in Germany. If America had stayed out of the war, all these
‘isms' wouldn't to-day be sweeping the continent of Europe and breaking down
parliamentary government, and if England had made peace early in 1917, it
would have saved over one million British, French, American, and other lives._

-Winston Churchill

~~~
jandrese
The reasoning there is kind of hard to follow. Did the US add the War Guilt
clause to a treaty that was otherwise going to be fairly neutral?

In school we learned that it was England and France who pushed for the
punitive version of the Treaty of Versailles, but I guess this could be my
American textbooks whitewashing the world.

~~~
ci5er
The idea is that if the US had not entered the war, then the UK and the
continental powers would have worn themselves out (they were already pretty
worn out by the time we joined) and have sued for peace (armistice) and
hammered out an agreement. It wouldn't have been ended up being lop-sided,
because there would have been no winner(s) dictating terms -- just a bunch of
tired people agreeing to quit and not fight again. Who knows if this is true
or not, but the Treaty of Versaille was negotiated between clear winners and
clear losers - which was enabled by the US joining the war late on one side.

~~~
jandrese
The confusing part is, if the war was ended indecisively then how is that
going to prevent future wars? Brush fire wars plagued Europe for centuries
until WWII came about and everybody realized that war was too dangerous to toy
with anymore.

The people might have been different, but I don't see how an indecisive WWI
prevents another border skirmish from getting out of hand 20 years later.
Maybe it would have been better for the Jews, but even that's iffy given the
generally hostile attitudes of continental Europeans to Jews and Gypsies.

~~~
ci5er
Counter-factual hypotheticals are tough. I think it intriguing to consider
that the US staying out would have prevented the rise of the Nazis and
Soviets, but I'm not in a position to run the experiment.

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strictnein
A lot of assumptions in this article with no reasoning behind them.

tldr version: US not entering WW1 means the war would have ended anyways in a
year or two and there would have been no WW2 and no military industrial
complex.

Seems like quite a stretch on many fronts.

~~~
pikzen
>US not entering WW1 means the war would have ended anyways in a year or two

That is a fact. US contribution in WW1 was, while very much appreciated,
extremely minimal and did not affect the balance of forces that much.

The rest is up to debate.

~~~
strictnein
> That is a fact

We have differing definitions of facts, I guess.

------
smacktoward
I don't get this assumption by Kazin in the piece:

 _> How would the war have ended if America had not intervened? The carnage
might have continued for another year or two until citizens in the warring
nations, who were already protesting the endless sacrifices required, forced
their leaders to reach a settlement._

I don't see how any of the belligerent powers would have moved towards a
negotiated settlement if they'd only bled a little more. By 1917 they'd
already poured out absolutely staggering quantities of blood, buckets and
buckets of it, and their positions had not softened in the least. If anything,
they'd become _stiffer_ \-- negotiation became less and less feasible as the
casualty figures increased, because it seemed to the both the public and the
politicians to be a betrayal of the all the sacrifices that had been made.
(People have always had a poor understanding of sunk costs.) Tossing even more
sacrifices onto the pile wouldn't have changed that dynamic.

What seems like a more likely outcome is what actually happened in Russia: the
fighting rages pointlessly on, the situation locked in stasis, even more money
and blood pouring down the hole, until the people back home literally can't
afford bread anymore -- at which point there is some kind of social revolution
that turns the existing order completely upside down. And this repeats itself
until enough combatants on one side or the other have fallen into chaos that
the side overall can't fight effectively anymore, at which point the other
side becomes the "victor" more or less by default, simply by virtue of having
collapsed slightly more slowly than everyone else.

And what comes after that? It's hard to say, but a Europe where the Russian
experience was repeated in several other major powers doesn't sound like the
starting point of a notably happier timeline than the one we actually got.

------
sevensor
I've often thought the same thing. There wasn't anything about the Central
Powers that made them uniquely bad at the time of the Great War, no great
principle was at stake --- this was much more an imperial shoving match than a
contest between freedom and authoritarianism. We basically dared the Germans
to sink our civilian maritime traffic by sending arms to the U.K., and we had
picked sides long before the Zimmermann telegram -- it's no wonder the Germans
wanted Mexico to start a war with us.

Who's to say what might have happened if we'd stayed out of it. The Ottoman,
Austro-Hungarian, and Russian empires almost certainly would have collapsed
anyway. I suspect an exhausted Germany, with the Eastern front pacified and a
stalemate on the Western front, would eventually have sued for peace with an
equally exhausted France and Britain.

~~~
valuearb
I don't think the germans sue for peace without the US involved. The Russian
army had been destroyed. They could devote nearly all their resources to the
Western front. They probably can't win, but they also can't lose, so you
either get years of stalemate or both sides grudgingly agree to peace.

~~~
sevensor
Agreed. One could envision an iron curtain falling across Europe decades
earlier, dividing Europe along the Western Front. I'm not sure it would have
been a better outcome; I'm not sure it's possible for the Great War to have
had a good outcome. But it certainly would have been different without US
involvement.

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tcopeland
There's an interesting bit at the end of John Barry's "The Great Influenza"
about how Wilson got the flu at Versailles. Barry suggests that Wilson was
physically and mentally affected and thus gave in on terms around punishing
Germany for the war. Apparently until he got the flu he'd been pushing back
hard against anything like that.

~~~
gunnyguy121
My European history teacher had the same theory. Although there was also some
hubris involved as he didn't take any senators like he should have

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soperj
"Alone among the former belligerent nations, the United States observes a
holiday on the anniversary of the Armistice" \- Canada has Remembrance day on
November 11th.

~~~
sevensor
I think the point was that ours is "Veterans' Day", on which nobody mentions
the events of 100 years ago, whereas "Remembrance Day" is actually about the
Great War.

~~~
Normal_gaussian
[http://www.legion.ca/honour-remember/remembrance-day-
ceremon...](http://www.legion.ca/honour-remember/remembrance-day-ceremony/)

> Every year on November 11, millions gather to collectively stand in honour
> of all who have fallen in the service of their country.

[http://www.statutoryholidays.com/2017.php](http://www.statutoryholidays.com/2017.php)

> Remembrance Day | November 11, Saturday | National except MB, ON, QC, NS

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_Day](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_Day)

> Remembrance Day (sometimes known informally as Poppy Day) is a memorial day
> observed in Commonwealth of Nations member states since the end of the First
> World War to remember the members of their armed forces who have died in the
> line of duty.

\---

Armistice day is November the 11th (1919) and can be commemorated every year.
Remembrance day is every November the 11th. Remembrance Sunday is the second
Sunday of every November.

When someone observes Remembrance day, on the 11th or the second Sunday, they
are Remembering those who have `fallen in the service of their nation`.

Veterans Day is a day that honours those that have served in the US military.
Also on November the 11th.

They all share a common history (ie. Armistice day) however they are all
subtley different days.

Most Commonwealth nations have Remembrance Day observances, slightly fewer
have Remembrance Sunday observances.

Most central European nations observe a similar day in meaning (remembering
the dead) but on different dates.

------
alexhutcheson
For those interested, this is covered with detail and nuance in the beginning
of Adam Tooze's book "The Deluge"

[https://www.amazon.com/Deluge-America-Remaking-
Global-1916-1...](https://www.amazon.com/Deluge-America-Remaking-
Global-1916-1931/dp/0143127977)

------
valuearb
"How would the war have ended if America had not intervened? The carnage might
have continued for another year or two until citizens in the warring nations,
who were already protesting the endless sacrifices required, forced their
leaders to reach a settlement."

This is crazy talk. Germany was a de facto military dictatorship at the time.
The legislature and citizens had no say. The only reason the war ended as
quickly as it did is they realized the stream of fresh troops from the US
doomed them.

Like most military leaderships the Germans were delusional about their
capabilities. It's amazing they surrendered when they did, instead of fighting
the allies inch by inch in germany. Because they surrendered in a "moment of
clarity" it created the whole "stab in the back" theory that Germany could
have won victory but it was taken from them.

If the US doesn't enter, the privations of Germany aren't as awful, and their
delusions of victory would won out over pragmatism. The war could have lasted
years longer.

~~~
Arizhel
Maybe, but then the resulting peace treaty would likely have been non-
punitive, and then the Nazis and Hitler would never have happened, along with
WWII.

------
irrational
No. Should America Have Entered World War II? Also no.

~~~
thearn4
I'm curious, are you saying that America should not have responded militarily
to the attack at Pearl Harbor, or to the declaration of war on it by Germany?

~~~
gozur88
The US was provoking both Germany and Japan. Presumably if we'd actually
wanted to stay out of the war we would have stuck to our own knitting.

The US was "lending" warships to the UK, and American destroyers were dropping
depth charges on German submarines in an effort to get supplies the Germans
were trying to choke off to the UK. In the North Atlantic we'd already joined
the war, if unofficially and not wholeheartedly. This is one of the reasons
Hitler decided to honor his ally's request to make it official.

In the Pacific US forces were essentially blockading Japan's oil supplies in
an effort to force the Japanese out of Manchuria. Japan _had_ to go to war
with the US or give up any imperial ambitions (and we knew that wasn't going
to happen).

~~~
rhino369
The US embargo of Japan wasn't a blockade and wasn't really an aggressive
move. It was a move to not participate in unchecked expansion of Japan by
brutal means. Not giving into the whims of monsters isn't provoking them in
the slightest.

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patrickg_zill
No.

edit: What did it solve? Nothing, as proven by WW2.

What did WW2 solve? Very little; see the Cold War that followed.

Lindbergh's view that the Germans and Russians would exhaust themselves, was
accurate. That Japan was goaded into war against the USA seems clear enough.

Even worse, the "success" of WW2 justified the creation of a huge bureaucracy,
the largest growth after the war up to now has been the size and scope of
government, with all the interference in all our lives, that it entails.

