The factors leading to US entry into WW I were numerous and mutually reinforcing: the Zimmerman telegram; Allied propaganda; the sinking of the Lusitania; unrestricted submarine warfare; the provocations like Black Tom that German subversion and sabotage in the US served up; and yes, our predominant trade and financial ties to the Allies. Yet I do not see American nonintervention as risking the dire effects that you do.
Germany's high command realized that America was poised to enter the war but judged that Germany nevertheless had an opportunity to win decisively on the Western Front in 1917 using new weapons and tactics and formations released due to victories in the East. In the event, Germany cam close, but American intervention saved the Allies and put Wilson and the US in a position to impose terms.
Sadly, instead of trying to stitch a badly wounded Europe back together, the resulting Versailles Treaty contained an unworkable mixture of revenge and idealism. This set the stage for another, more destructive world war. The UN and other post-WW II international institutions were designed as a second try by Wilson's intellectual and political heirs.
Judged by aspirations, the UN and other such organizations are failures. Slyly, the most successful American leaders like Eisenhower and Reagan have used them as camouflage for American power. Less successful leaders like Jimmy Carter thought that we should defer to the UN instead of exercising American power, and the inept George W. Bush got the exercise of American power in war wrong.
On the whole, I tend to think that America and the world would do better with less Wilsonian idealism but closer attention to the elements of national power, to history, to how wars are won and lost -- and better yet, avoided when possible. I think Trump is of a similar mind, or at least that is what is implied by his statement that killing Soleimani is intended to prevent a war, not start one.
“...I do not see American nonintervention as risking the dire effects that you do.
Germany’s high command realized that America was poised to enter the war but judged that Germany nevertheless had an opportunity to win decisively on the Western Front in 1917...
...the resulting Versailles Treaty contained an unworkable mixture of revenge and idealism. This set the stage for another, more destructive world war. The UN and other post-WW II international institutions were designed as a second try by Wilson’s intellectual and political heirs.
Judged by aspirations, the UN and other such organizations are failures...
On the whole, I tend to think that America and the world would do better with less Wilsonian idealism but closer attention to the elements of national power, to history, to how wars are won and lost — and better yet, avoided when possible...” [Rockingham, post 65]
There were many more American lives lost than just the 130 or so who died when RMS Lusitania was attacked, a couple miles off Ireland’s coast. More indicative of a pattern of behavior by Imperial Germans, not a fluke nor an isolated incident. The US government protested formally, more than once.
Britain’s situation was more serious than propaganda admitted to, more serious than the UK public understood. Days after the United States declared war in 1917, RADM William S Sims, USN, sat down for his first meeting with ADM John Jellicoe, then First Sea Lord. Sims was told that only six months’ supply of wheat was in country. The Admiralty estimated that the British would have to capitulate by 1 November. King George V agreed with this assessment; Prime Minister David Lloyd George was more optimistic.
Nobody really in the know had confidence that any response would be successful.
The Imperial German government was not unanimous on unrestricted submarine warfare; Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg argued against it, predicting it would provoke American entry on the Allied side; ultimately, Paul von Hindenburg & Erich Ludendorff decided to go ahead with it (Kaiser William - officially Supreme War Lord and commander of all Imperial German armed forces - was himself ambivalent, but had by this point been reduced to a figurehead).
Can’t disagree on the flaws of T Woodrow Wilson, a man of outsize ego, unrealistic in his idealistic notions, and (worst of all) his infatuation with Progressivism. But none of that can inform us as to the strategic utility of this or that action on the world stage, nor of the usefulness in general of supranational organizations. Measurement of these proceeds along different axes. An assertion after the fact that course-of-action “X” was tougher than we expected, therefore we never should have tried in the first place, is puerile.
Railing against the 1919 Treaty of Versailles is empty noise. From the beginning of European history, warring nations concluded treaties that fixed blame and assessed reparations; the one that formally ended World War One was nothing unusual in either respect. Germans claiming otherwise were merely playing the victim card. The Allies were not at fault for being “mean” to them, but for not convincing them they had been defeated. Subsequent Allied weakness and irresolution convinced them they could get away with bad behavior if they tried a second time.