I'm not so convinced WWI was inevitable from purely political causes in a geopolitical or cultural sense. I see it more the result of bad ideas as much as by bad politics. Sure the alignments dragged one into the other, and the German inferiority complex led the Kaiser into this stupid proof of superiority. But discontent fueled the period as much as anything else, and as far as I can tell discontent sparked the war, or made it inevitable. Europe of 1913 was fraught with stupidities.
In Berlin in 1910, the socialists held the plurality. In France, it was one extreme to the other, and labor and anarchists held the nation to the floor. Even in Britain the PM's windows were knocked by raging suffragists, which could only mean that those of even greater discontent had even great means and ends. Anarchists struck the UK, too, especially Latvians and other eastern euros.
I don't believe the US was immune to it. I see Forgiven_Sinner disagrees that national socialism might have taken in the U.S. I'd recommend another read of Roosevelt's "New Nationalism" speech: it was all about business by, of, and for the government. Think it through and apply the logical conclusions to his arguments. It would have gone waay beyond the New Deal, or what we have today.
He failed because there was a concerted effort against him, as Forgiven_Sinner points out. Correction, though: it was 1912, not 1916, that 3-way contest. The 1916 contest was all about staying out of the war, the promise upon which Wilson squeaked by.
x, speaking of "what ifs," what would have happened had the U.S. been serious about defending the White Russians?
As for your bonus question:
if war harms liberty and encourages statism, and there is no long war, but the more statist side wins, is that a victory for liberty or for statism?You're just tryng to bring Abe Lincoln into it, aren't you? LOL!
I don't think we'd have had any staying power in Russia during the revolution, but a Russian writer did speculate that if the Crimean peninsula south of Ukraine had been an island, a free Russian "Taiwan" could have developed under the protection of the British fleet.
As to the bonus question, I wasn't thinking so much of Lincoln, though it does fit and raise interesting possiblities.
Hayek and others who lived through both world wars attacked Germany, even the Germany of 1914, for being the statist and repressive power. Today, Taki, Paul Gottfried and others think a victory for Wilhelm's Germany would have been a victory for freedom.
Maybe, given all we know about what happened after imperial Germany didn't win ... but ideas of free speech, representative government, and above all free trade were closely tied to Britain. Had Germany won, managed trade of the sort that developed in the thirties would likely have become the rule. And this would have really agitated some who speculate on the question. It would also have been a victory for Hegel over John Stuart Mill, and for repression and vote manipulation over a more disinterested attitude of "fair play" for all.
I can admire these Rockwell types for asking interesting questions, but the answers simply seem to be, "whatever happened was wrong." The reasoning seems to be A) This side won a war, B) The powers of the state grew after the war and personal liberties shrank, C) Therefore if the other side won the war, the powers of the state would not have grown and individual liberties would not have been curtailed or reduced. The other alternatives are that things would have been much the same, or that more freedom would have been lost. As with the American Civil War, the Rockwellites don't see that the losing side may have had its own imperialism, militarism and statism.
In 1914 Germany was the rising power looking to change European affairs. They were more than willing to apply in Western Europe lessons learned and repressive tactics used in the colonies and in Eastern Europe. They favored extending and expanding the statist and managerial ideas that they had already developed and applied at home. The Germans of 1914 were not above using relativistic, might makes right arguments to justify their actions. England and France had also advanced along the same path, but nowhere near as far as Germany did. Under the influence of war they continued on that road, but once again, Germany went further.
Had there been no war, we probably wouldn't have seen the very ugliest side of statism, and anything that would have prevented the rise of Hitler and Stalin would have been a good thing. But that doesn't mean that every possible German victory would have been superior to every conceivable alternative.
In regard to TR: Without Lenin or Stalin, socialism wouldn't have been discredited as much as it was. And TR was ready to go some distance on a socialist road had he won. But under our system it takes some crisis or breakthrough for a President to overcome congressional opposition to his plans. In the long run, the war and all its consequences went a long way to making socialism less attractive. In the short run, though, Wilson, like other political leaders used the war to get more statist or socialistic measures through, some temporary, some more permanent.