“...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.
(1) Suppose if, instead of a declaration of war that was weakened by lack of military preparedness, the US had prepared for the possibility of war beginning in say, early 1915. We would then have had the muscle to back up our demands as a neutral.
Of course, that would more or less require that the GOP had been in power instead of Wilson and his Progressives. So I am more or less arguing that the country and the world would have been better off without Wilson as President.
(2) In the event, suppose if, instead of the lengthy, remake-the-world Versailles Treaty as it was, we had instead a traditional, less ambitious European peace treaty. Reparations from Germany, but no insulting war guilt clause, and no lack of genuine negotiations with the German delegation. No requirement for the radical downsizing of the German Army that unleashed millions of unemployed, demobilized veterans to make trouble. And no French occupation of the Rhineland.
Such a treaty at Versailles, backed by a traditional great power Concert of Europe approach to enforcement and new issues, might well have removed the tinder that led to World War II. Again, this would mostly require that Wilson not have a major role in the peace treaty, agreeing to bad provisions for the sake of founding the League of Nations. And the simplest ways to such an alternative outcome would be that the GOP have the Presidency and pursued traditional GOP foreign policy animated by realism and restraint, or that Wilson's VP Thomas R. Marshall have succeeded him and followed the same approach.
As that formula suggests, I am not an isolationist but am an advocate for realism and restraint. Sometimes that means staying out of fights that can be avoided so that one does not assume the costs and burdens of being a combatant. Our current era though is a departure from history in that the US has obligations as a superpower that require a large military establishment and interventions around the world.
So, no, I am not an isolationist, but I am an advocate in this era for the US to carry out its superpower obligations and get the benefits of being the global superpower. Simply put, we do not want to live in a world with China in charge or that suffers the turmoil of ambitious regional powers preying on their neighbors.
In practice, this means having the world's largest fleets of aircraft carriers and nuclear missiles and submarines, lots of bombers, fighters, and drones, and the ability to deploy ground forces around the globe. These keep the world mostly at peace as America holds the worst nogoodniks in check. In return, American dollars are highly prized as the world's trade and reserve currency, the world finances our out of balance Medicare and other social welfare programs, and Americans are usually safe and welcomed around the world.
Call me a braggart, but that seems like a remarkable position for a relatively young country that owes its formation to angry farmers with muskets.