The German Empire didn’t even want to destroy France. They wanted to be the dominant land power in Europe. They would have been happy with a return to the status quo. Their whole reason for war was to protect Austro-Hungary & fear of Imperial Russia. The nations that wanted war were Austro-Hungary, Serbia & France in that order.
Austro-Hungary - Serbia went to war because there was always “Some damn fool thing in the Balkans”.
France - revenge for the loss of Alsace-Loraine. Treaty with Russia gave them an excuse.
Russia - protect their Slav brothers\co-religionists from the mean old Germans both the North ones (Imperial Germany) & the South ones (Austro-Hungary)!
British Empire - Protect Belgium, fear of the German High Seas Fleet, outdated policy of maintaining (somehow!) a balance of power on the continent - dates back to Marlborough.
If Russia & GB had stayed out of it, it would have been another Balkan shoot’em up. No WWI, no communism, no Nazism, no WWII, world would have been a better place.
WWI truly the greatest man-made disaster of modern times.
Wilhelm’s Germany was not Bismark’s Germany.
Read up.
September program.
1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk
Fritz Fischee
“If Russia & GB had stayed out of it, it would have been another Balkan shoot’em up. No WWI, no communism, no Nazism, no WWII, world would have been a better place.’”
Love those Germans ...
Communism would have happened anyway - the czars and Russian nobility were mostly idiots that grossly mistreated their people and long before 1914 they were having severe internal problems. See what happened to the Russian Second Pacific Squadron on their way to the Battle of Tsushima.
Some historians have posited that all WW1 did in this respect was bring the inevitable revolution forward a bit, and not by much.
I wholeheartedly agree and it is a shame my countrymen (Canada) were sucked into THAT war. Part of the reason to this day I have little trust for Serbia, that made out like a bandit after WWI, tripling the size of its empire. Wilson lied and Americans died. Britain’s motivations were indeed far from pure.
The Brits could have sat it out - their empire would have lasted longer