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Anybody want to talk about World War I? This is culture war in the sense that the culture war led me here, and its application definitely seems to fall along tribal lines, even though this is all ancient history.
So on a recommendation on Twitter from MartyrMade, I've started reading Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War so I can figure out who the real villain was in WWII. But I guess we can't get there without discussing WWI, so that's where the book begins. A fundamental cause of the war, according to the author, is that Germany and England had conflicting views of security. In general, England's policy was to play European powers off each other, always supporting the second-strongest power against the strongest power to ensure that no one country would dominate the continent and thus be in a position to challenge Britain. In the early 1900s, that meant supporting France in opposition to Germany. Germany's idea of peace, on the other hand, was precisely to dominate and unify the continent under German rule, thus ensuring that they would have no problems on the continent.
As an uninformed person, I am struck by a similarity in current politices with America and Russia. It seems that America finds itself in the same position as Germany before WWI, seeking to unify as many countries as possible under NATO, effectively ensuring that America's vision dominates world politics. On the other hand, Russia's best available strategy is to weaken America wherever possible, by supporting America's most troublesome enemies, e.g. Iran.
The point of all this is I'm wondering whether there is any way to achieve Trump's goal in the Ukraine war, which is for "people to stop dying". America being dominant means they can't really allow Russia to challenge their world order by taking over Ukraine and stopping NATO expansion. But if Russia is going to be able to exert its will at all in the world, they can't really allow Ukraine to become just another part of the Western bloc.
Still, Trump says he'll solve the issue and the war will be over within 24 hours of becoming president. What do you think his plan is?
The bad guy in WWI was Woodrow Wilson. Stupid and incompetent all the way. When you are dealing with a power that needs to be contained after a flare you have two options - first bloody them and then offer them generous peace and allow them to save face or beat them up really badly and punish them with harsh punitive peace.
Due to Woodrow Wilson's influence - he was so stupid that thought that league of nations is a good and viable idea the winning powers took the worst of the two approaches - punitive peace with no real enforcement mechanism, a german state that was not weakened enough to not subvert them, leaving sizable German minorities in their neighboring countries, a huge internal vacuum because of the revolution and a huge vacuum in the east due to the collapse of the russian empire. It was a recipe for disaster.
You are projecting post-1945 American hegemony back into the past.
We can argue about whether or not Woodrow Wilson was bad, but he definitely wasn't "the" bad guy because he wasn't a first-tier player. The European Great Powers went to war with each other without taking American policy into account, because they thought the most likely scenario was a short war of maneuver and there was nothing the US could do to affect the results of one. Even had they expected a long war, they would have (correctly) assumed US neutrality absent an exceptionally stupid provocation by the Central Powers.
The first meaningful opportunity for the US to meddle in WW1 (apart from selling materiel to the Allies on normal commercial terms) is when Bethmann Hollweg asks Woodrow Wilson to convene an international peace conference on the basis of status quo ante in December 1916. By this point the bloodiest battles of WW1 (Verdun and the Somme) had already been fought. And Wilson doesn't take the bait at this point - he correctly realises that neither side wanted a status quo ante peace in 1916. (Bethmann Hollweg was trying to maneuver out of situation where German domestic politics would force the adoption of unrestricted submarine warfare, which he opposed on the mostly-correct basis that if it worked it would bring the US in).
The first time the US actually meddles in WW1 is the publication of the Fourteen Points, which happens after the February Revolution in Russia, at which point the messy collapse of Tsarist Russia is already priced and can be added to the "harms of WW1 definitely not Wilson's fault" pile.
I always like Clemenceau's (possibly fake) quip about Wilson's laundry list - "four more than God."
I so want it to be true. ;-)
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