7 ms·

Should America Have Entered World War I?

23 points by okket 10y ago

patrickg_zill 10y ago
No. edit: What did it solve? Nothing, as proven by WW2. What did WW2 solve? Very little; see the Cold War that followed. Lindbergh's view that the Germans and Russians would exhaust themselves, was accurate. That Japan was goaded into war against the USA seems clear enough. Even worse, the "success" of WW2 justified the creation of a huge bureaucracy, the largest growth after the war up to now has been the size and scope of government, with all the interference in all our lives, that it entails.
thearn4 10y ago
Alternative outcomes of WW1 represent some of the most interesting "What if?"s of the history of the 20th century. It's a fascinating conflict to read about, since it seemingly could have gone either way up to nearly the end of the war. Compare that to WW2, where by late 1942 I think it was more or less clear that the axis powers would not be winning on the offensive, and it became more of a question of how absolute the end would be (armistice vs surrender). WW1 also lacks as clear of a "good" vs. "bad" narrative as the WW2 has, which makes it complex, and complex history is typically more interesting to me. Obligatory shout out to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast. It's not a perfect academic take on the topics he covers, but he weaves a good story.
soperj 10y ago
"Alone among the former belligerent nations, the United States observes a holiday on the anniversary of the Armistice" - Canada has Remembrance day on November 11th.
- sevensor 10y ago
  I think the point was that ours is "Veterans' Day", on which nobody mentions the events of 100 years ago, whereas "Remembrance Day" is actually about the Great War.
  - Normal_gaussian 10y ago
    http://www.legion.ca/honour-remember/remembrance-day-ceremony/ http://www.legion.ca/honour-remember/remembrance-day-ceremon... > Every year on November 11, millions gather to collectively stand in honour of all who have fallen in the service of their country. http://www.statutoryholidays.com/2017.php http://www.statutoryholidays.com/2017.php > Remembrance Day | November 11, Saturday | National except MB, ON, QC, NS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_Day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_Day > Remembrance Day (sometimes known informally as Poppy Day) is a memorial day observed in Commonwealth of Nations member states since the end of the First World War to remember the members of their armed forces who have died in the line of duty. --- Armistice day is November the 11th (1919) and can be commemorated every year. Remembrance day is every November the 11th. Remembrance Sunday is the second Sunday of every November. When someone observes Remembrance day, on the 11th or the second Sunday, they are Remembering those who have `fallen in the service of their nation`. Veterans Day is a day that honours those that have served in the US military. Also on November the 11th. They all share a common history (ie. Armistice day) however they are all subtley different days. Most Commonwealth nations have Remembrance Day observances, slightly fewer have Remembrance Sunday observances. Most central European nations observe a similar day in meaning (remembering the dead) but on different dates.
- goodcanadian 10y ago
  It appears that November 11 is widely observed especially in the Commonwealth, but often not as a public holiday. It is a statutory holiday in the majority of Canadian provinces and territories (but not all and not at the federal level). It appears that it is also, in fact, a public holiday in France and Belgium. Most of my information for this comment is from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_Day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_Day.
sevensor 10y ago
I've often thought the same thing. There wasn't anything about the Central Powers that made them uniquely bad at the time of the Great War, no great principle was at stake --- this was much more an imperial shoving match than a contest between freedom and authoritarianism. We basically dared the Germans to sink our civilian maritime traffic by sending arms to the U.K., and we had picked sides long before the Zimmermann telegram -- it's no wonder the Germans wanted Mexico to start a war with us. Who's to say what might have happened if we'd stayed out of it. The Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian empires almost certainly would have collapsed anyway. I suspect an exhausted Germany, with the Eastern front pacified and a stalemate on the Western front, would eventually have sued for peace with an equally exhausted France and Britain.
- sweetishfish 10y ago
  Worth noting that we were shipping supplies and arms to both sides up until the UK blockaded Germany with their first-rate Navy. After that, the only side left to ship to was the Allies. edit: changed 'embargoed' to 'blockaded'
- valuearb 10y ago
  I don't think the germans sue for peace without the US involved. The Russian army had been destroyed. They could devote nearly all their resources to the Western front. They probably can't win, but they also can't lose, so you either get years of stalemate or both sides grudgingly agree to peace.
  - sevensor 10y ago
    Agreed. One could envision an iron curtain falling across Europe decades earlier, dividing Europe along the Western Front. I'm not sure it would have been a better outcome; I'm not sure it's possible for the Great War to have had a good outcome. But it certainly would have been different without US involvement.
coltonv 10y ago
This article mentions that had the US not entered World War I the likelihood of World War II happening was much lower. I'd like to propose the idea that World War II, in all it's horrificness, saved us from much worse. In a rather bizarre and twisted sense, we may be very very lucky that WWII happened and that it happened at the exact time that it did: happening late enough that we saw how awful modern total war is, but not so late that we would have the weapons to truly eradicate ourselves.
- tbirrell 10y ago
  Unfortunately, I think you mean it was "recent enough" we were able to see how awful it was. Which means that if we give it a couple more generations to fade out of (some) living memory, we open up ourselves to another conflict, this time with the ability to eradicate ourselves. Which then raises the question, had WWII not happened, would we have gotten nuclear weapons when we did? And would the next "awful" conflict have been apocalyptically so. WWII ultimately jumpstarted so much of the scientific advancements we have made in the last 70 years that it is impossible to say that we would have been able to eradicate ourselves without a modern total war. IDK. I'm not disagreeing, just thinking aloud. You make an interesting point. And certainly one that is fun to hypothesize about.
  - nostrademons 10y ago
    We likely would not have gotten nuclear weapons when we did, but they would probably have happened by the 50s and 60s, as would rocketry. There was already research on nuclear fission happening in the 1930s (in Germany, of all places), and people had already speculated on its use as a weapon. The German nuclear weapons program had already begun when Germany invaded Poland. WW2 massively accelerated this research and let researchers get away with things they wouldn't otherwise have been able to do (like building a nuclear reactor under the bleachers of Stagg Field in Chicago). Given the scientific progress made in the 30s, though, it's likely that it would've happened anyway by the late 1950s. Interestingly, if WW2 had not happened, it's very likely Germany would've been the first country with nuclear weapons, and hence the world superpower now. Most of the original researchers on nuclear fission were German, and many of the key scientists on the Manhattan project emigrated from Germany or Nazi-controlled countries. The key uranium mines of the 1930s were in the Belgian Congo, and the ore that was eventually used for the Manhattan Project was sitting on the docks in Belgium when the Nazis invaded.
strictnein 10y ago
A lot of assumptions in this article with no reasoning behind them. tldr version: US not entering WW1 means the war would have ended anyways in a year or two and there would have been no WW2 and no military industrial complex. Seems like quite a stretch on many fronts.
- panzagl 10y ago
  If anything seems like those things would have come sooner, except Germans would have developed nukes first.
- pikzen 10y ago
  >US not entering WW1 means the war would have ended anyways in a year or two That is a fact. US contribution in WW1 was, while very much appreciated, extremely minimal and did not affect the balance of forces that much. The rest is up to debate.
  - strictnein 10y ago
    > That is a fact We have differing definitions of facts, I guess.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
- rossdavidh 10y ago
  I think not much of a stretch. All nations involved were having problems with mutiny and political turmoil by early 1917. The example of Russia coming apart and being taken over by Bolsheviks was there, and the winter of 1917 plus the Spanish Flu of 1918 made it rather unlikely there would have been a continuation of war in 1919. But, without the American involvement, the French and UK would not have been able to impose reparations, etc. That WWI and it's peace settlement were a major contributing factor to WWII seems pretty clearly established as well.
  - 10y ago
ancap 10y ago
America should have minded her own business and stayed out of the World War. If you hadn't entered the war the Allies would have made peace with Germany in the Spring of 1917. Had we made peace then there would have been no collapse in Russia followed by Communism, no breakdown in Italy followed by Fascism, and Germany would not have signed the Versailles Treaty, which has enthroned Nazism in Germany. If America had stayed out of the war, all these ‘isms' wouldn't to-day be sweeping the continent of Europe and breaking down parliamentary government, and if England had made peace early in 1917, it would have saved over one million British, French, American, and other lives. -Winston Churchill
- jandrese 10y ago
  The reasoning there is kind of hard to follow. Did the US add the War Guilt clause to a treaty that was otherwise going to be fairly neutral? In school we learned that it was England and France who pushed for the punitive version of the Treaty of Versailles, but I guess this could be my American textbooks whitewashing the world.
  - gozur88 10y ago
    The reasoning is without the US the powers were balanced enough that nobody would have been the clear victor. The Treaty of Versailles was punitive because the victors could dictate terms to the Germans instead of coming to an agreement entered into willingly on both sides.
  - tarlinian 10y ago
    I think the reasoning here is that without American intervention the Allied powers would not have been in a position to insist on a punitive armistice treaty.
  - ci5er 10y ago
    The idea is that if the US had not entered the war, then the UK and the continental powers would have worn themselves out (they were already pretty worn out by the time we joined) and have sued for peace (armistice) and hammered out an agreement. It wouldn't have been ended up being lop-sided, because there would have been no winner(s) dictating terms -- just a bunch of tired people agreeing to quit and not fight again. Who knows if this is true or not, but the Treaty of Versaille was negotiated between clear winners and clear losers - which was enabled by the US joining the war late on one side.
irrational 10y ago
No. Should America Have Entered World War II? Also no.
- noxToken 10y ago
  Go on. That flat answer adds nothing.
- thearn4 10y ago
  I'm curious, are you saying that America should not have responded militarily to the attack at Pearl Harbor, or to the declaration of war on it by Germany?
  - gozur88 10y ago
    The US was provoking both Germany and Japan. Presumably if we'd actually wanted to stay out of the war we would have stuck to our own knitting. The US was "lending" warships to the UK, and American destroyers were dropping depth charges on German submarines in an effort to get supplies the Germans were trying to choke off to the UK. In the North Atlantic we'd already joined the war, if unofficially and not wholeheartedly. This is one of the reasons Hitler decided to honor his ally's request to make it official. In the Pacific US forces were essentially blockading Japan's oil supplies in an effort to force the Japanese out of Manchuria. Japan had to go to war with the US or give up any imperial ambitions (and we knew that wasn't going to happen).
    - rhino369 10y ago
      The US embargo of Japan wasn't a blockade and wasn't really an aggressive move. It was a move to not participate in unchecked expansion of Japan by brutal means. Not giving into the whims of monsters isn't provoking them in the slightest.
  - soperj 10y ago
    That's just like saying that France and England started the war because they declared war on Germany when they invaded Poland.
tcopeland 10y ago
There's an interesting bit at the end of John Barry's "The Great Influenza" about how Wilson got the flu at Versailles. Barry suggests that Wilson was physically and mentally affected and thus gave in on terms around punishing Germany for the war. Apparently until he got the flu he'd been pushing back hard against anything like that.
- gunnyguy121 10y ago
  My European history teacher had the same theory. Although there was also some hubris involved as he didn't take any senators like he should have
smacktoward 10y ago
I don't get this assumption by Kazin in the piece: > How would the war have ended if America had not intervened? The carnage might have continued for another year or two until citizens in the warring nations, who were already protesting the endless sacrifices required, forced their leaders to reach a settlement. I don't see how any of the belligerent powers would have moved towards a negotiated settlement if they'd only bled a little more. By 1917 they'd already poured out absolutely staggering quantities of blood, buckets and buckets of it, and their positions had not softened in the least. If anything, they'd become stiffer -- negotiation became less and less feasible as the casualty figures increased, because it seemed to the both the public and the politicians to be a betrayal of the all the sacrifices that had been made. (People have always had a poor understanding of sunk costs.) Tossing even more sacrifices onto the pile wouldn't have changed that dynamic. What seems like a more likely outcome is what actually happened in Russia: the fighting rages pointlessly on, the situation locked in stasis, even more money and blood pouring down the hole, until the people back home literally can't afford bread anymore -- at which point there is some kind of social revolution that turns the existing order completely upside down. And this repeats itself until enough combatants on one side or the other have fallen into chaos that the side overall can't fight effectively anymore, at which point the other side becomes the "victor" more or less by default, simply by virtue of having collapsed slightly more slowly than everyone else. And what comes after that? It's hard to say, but a Europe where the Russian experience was repeated in several other major powers doesn't sound like the starting point of a notably happier timeline than the one we actually got.
alexhutcheson 10y ago
For those interested, this is covered with detail and nuance in the beginning of Adam Tooze's book "The Deluge" https://www.amazon.com/Deluge-America-Remaking-Global-1916-1931/dp/0143127977 https://www.amazon.com/Deluge-America-Remaking-Global-1916-1...
valuearb 10y ago
"How would the war have ended if America had not intervened? The carnage might have continued for another year or two until citizens in the warring nations, who were already protesting the endless sacrifices required, forced their leaders to reach a settlement." This is crazy talk. Germany was a de facto military dictatorship at the time. The legislature and citizens had no say. The only reason the war ended as quickly as it did is they realized the stream of fresh troops from the US doomed them. Like most military leaderships the Germans were delusional about their capabilities. It's amazing they surrendered when they did, instead of fighting the allies inch by inch in germany. Because they surrendered in a "moment of clarity" it created the whole "stab in the back" theory that Germany could have won victory but it was taken from them. If the US doesn't enter, the privations of Germany aren't as awful, and their delusions of victory would won out over pragmatism. The war could have lasted years longer.
- Arizhel 10y ago
  Maybe, but then the resulting peace treaty would likely have been non-punitive, and then the Nazis and Hitler would never have happened, along with WWII.

23 points by okket 10y ago

No. edit: What did it solve? Nothing, as proven by WW2. What did WW2 solve? Very little; see the Cold War that followed. Lindbergh's view that the Germans and Russians would exhaust themselves, was accurate. That Japan was goaded into war against the USA seems clear enough. Even worse, the "success" of WW2 justified the creation of a huge bureaucracy, the largest growth after the war up to now has been the size and scope of government, with all the interference in all our lives, that it entails.

thearn4 10y ago

Alternative outcomes of WW1 represent some of the most interesting "What if?"s of the history of the 20th century. It's a fascinating conflict to read about, since it seemingly could have gone either way up to nearly the end of the war. Compare that to WW2, where by late 1942 I think it was more or less clear that the axis powers would not be winning on the offensive, and it became more of a question of how absolute the end would be (armistice vs surrender). WW1 also lacks as clear of a "good" vs. "bad" narrative as the WW2 has, which makes it complex, and complex history is typically more interesting to me. Obligatory shout out to Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast. It's not a perfect academic take on the topics he covers, but he weaves a good story.

soperj 10y ago

"Alone among the former belligerent nations, the United States observes a holiday on the anniversary of the Armistice" - Canada has Remembrance day on November 11th.

sevensor 10y ago
I think the point was that ours is "Veterans' Day", on which nobody mentions the events of 100 years ago, whereas "Remembrance Day" is actually about the Great War.
- Normal_gaussian 10y ago
  http://www.legion.ca/honour-remember/remembrance-day-ceremony/ http://www.legion.ca/honour-remember/remembrance-day-ceremon... > Every year on November 11, millions gather to collectively stand in honour of all who have fallen in the service of their country. http://www.statutoryholidays.com/2017.php http://www.statutoryholidays.com/2017.php > Remembrance Day | November 11, Saturday | National except MB, ON, QC, NS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_Day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_Day > Remembrance Day (sometimes known informally as Poppy Day) is a memorial day observed in Commonwealth of Nations member states since the end of the First World War to remember the members of their armed forces who have died in the line of duty. --- Armistice day is November the 11th (1919) and can be commemorated every year. Remembrance day is every November the 11th. Remembrance Sunday is the second Sunday of every November. When someone observes Remembrance day, on the 11th or the second Sunday, they are Remembering those who have `fallen in the service of their nation`. Veterans Day is a day that honours those that have served in the US military. Also on November the 11th. They all share a common history (ie. Armistice day) however they are all subtley different days. Most Commonwealth nations have Remembrance Day observances, slightly fewer have Remembrance Sunday observances. Most central European nations observe a similar day in meaning (remembering the dead) but on different dates.
goodcanadian 10y ago
It appears that November 11 is widely observed especially in the Commonwealth, but often not as a public holiday. It is a statutory holiday in the majority of Canadian provinces and territories (but not all and not at the federal level). It appears that it is also, in fact, a public holiday in France and Belgium. Most of my information for this comment is from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_Day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_Day.

sevensor 10y ago

I've often thought the same thing. There wasn't anything about the Central Powers that made them uniquely bad at the time of the Great War, no great principle was at stake --- this was much more an imperial shoving match than a contest between freedom and authoritarianism. We basically dared the Germans to sink our civilian maritime traffic by sending arms to the U.K., and we had picked sides long before the Zimmermann telegram -- it's no wonder the Germans wanted Mexico to start a war with us. Who's to say what might have happened if we'd stayed out of it. The Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian empires almost certainly would have collapsed anyway. I suspect an exhausted Germany, with the Eastern front pacified and a stalemate on the Western front, would eventually have sued for peace with an equally exhausted France and Britain.

sweetishfish 10y ago
Worth noting that we were shipping supplies and arms to both sides up until the UK blockaded Germany with their first-rate Navy. After that, the only side left to ship to was the Allies. edit: changed 'embargoed' to 'blockaded'
valuearb 10y ago
I don't think the germans sue for peace without the US involved. The Russian army had been destroyed. They could devote nearly all their resources to the Western front. They probably can't win, but they also can't lose, so you either get years of stalemate or both sides grudgingly agree to peace.
- sevensor 10y ago
  Agreed. One could envision an iron curtain falling across Europe decades earlier, dividing Europe along the Western Front. I'm not sure it would have been a better outcome; I'm not sure it's possible for the Great War to have had a good outcome. But it certainly would have been different without US involvement.

coltonv 10y ago

This article mentions that had the US not entered World War I the likelihood of World War II happening was much lower. I'd like to propose the idea that World War II, in all it's horrificness, saved us from much worse. In a rather bizarre and twisted sense, we may be very very lucky that WWII happened and that it happened at the exact time that it did: happening late enough that we saw how awful modern total war is, but not so late that we would have the weapons to truly eradicate ourselves.

tbirrell 10y ago
Unfortunately, I think you mean it was "recent enough" we were able to see how awful it was. Which means that if we give it a couple more generations to fade out of (some) living memory, we open up ourselves to another conflict, this time with the ability to eradicate ourselves. Which then raises the question, had WWII not happened, would we have gotten nuclear weapons when we did? And would the next "awful" conflict have been apocalyptically so. WWII ultimately jumpstarted so much of the scientific advancements we have made in the last 70 years that it is impossible to say that we would have been able to eradicate ourselves without a modern total war. IDK. I'm not disagreeing, just thinking aloud. You make an interesting point. And certainly one that is fun to hypothesize about.
- nostrademons 10y ago
  We likely would not have gotten nuclear weapons when we did, but they would probably have happened by the 50s and 60s, as would rocketry. There was already research on nuclear fission happening in the 1930s (in Germany, of all places), and people had already speculated on its use as a weapon. The German nuclear weapons program had already begun when Germany invaded Poland. WW2 massively accelerated this research and let researchers get away with things they wouldn't otherwise have been able to do (like building a nuclear reactor under the bleachers of Stagg Field in Chicago). Given the scientific progress made in the 30s, though, it's likely that it would've happened anyway by the late 1950s. Interestingly, if WW2 had not happened, it's very likely Germany would've been the first country with nuclear weapons, and hence the world superpower now. Most of the original researchers on nuclear fission were German, and many of the key scientists on the Manhattan project emigrated from Germany or Nazi-controlled countries. The key uranium mines of the 1930s were in the Belgian Congo, and the ore that was eventually used for the Manhattan Project was sitting on the docks in Belgium when the Nazis invaded.

strictnein 10y ago

A lot of assumptions in this article with no reasoning behind them. tldr version: US not entering WW1 means the war would have ended anyways in a year or two and there would have been no WW2 and no military industrial complex. Seems like quite a stretch on many fronts.

panzagl 10y ago
If anything seems like those things would have come sooner, except Germans would have developed nukes first.
pikzen 10y ago
>US not entering WW1 means the war would have ended anyways in a year or two That is a fact. US contribution in WW1 was, while very much appreciated, extremely minimal and did not affect the balance of forces that much. The rest is up to debate.
- strictnein 10y ago
  > That is a fact We have differing definitions of facts, I guess.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
rossdavidh 10y ago
I think not much of a stretch. All nations involved were having problems with mutiny and political turmoil by early 1917. The example of Russia coming apart and being taken over by Bolsheviks was there, and the winter of 1917 plus the Spanish Flu of 1918 made it rather unlikely there would have been a continuation of war in 1919. But, without the American involvement, the French and UK would not have been able to impose reparations, etc. That WWI and it's peace settlement were a major contributing factor to WWII seems pretty clearly established as well.
- 10y ago

ancap 10y ago

America should have minded her own business and stayed out of the World War. If you hadn't entered the war the Allies would have made peace with Germany in the Spring of 1917. Had we made peace then there would have been no collapse in Russia followed by Communism, no breakdown in Italy followed by Fascism, and Germany would not have signed the Versailles Treaty, which has enthroned Nazism in Germany. If America had stayed out of the war, all these ‘isms' wouldn't to-day be sweeping the continent of Europe and breaking down parliamentary government, and if England had made peace early in 1917, it would have saved over one million British, French, American, and other lives. -Winston Churchill

jandrese 10y ago
The reasoning there is kind of hard to follow. Did the US add the War Guilt clause to a treaty that was otherwise going to be fairly neutral? In school we learned that it was England and France who pushed for the punitive version of the Treaty of Versailles, but I guess this could be my American textbooks whitewashing the world.
- gozur88 10y ago
  The reasoning is without the US the powers were balanced enough that nobody would have been the clear victor. The Treaty of Versailles was punitive because the victors could dictate terms to the Germans instead of coming to an agreement entered into willingly on both sides.
- tarlinian 10y ago
  I think the reasoning here is that without American intervention the Allied powers would not have been in a position to insist on a punitive armistice treaty.
- ci5er 10y ago
  The idea is that if the US had not entered the war, then the UK and the continental powers would have worn themselves out (they were already pretty worn out by the time we joined) and have sued for peace (armistice) and hammered out an agreement. It wouldn't have been ended up being lop-sided, because there would have been no winner(s) dictating terms -- just a bunch of tired people agreeing to quit and not fight again. Who knows if this is true or not, but the Treaty of Versaille was negotiated between clear winners and clear losers - which was enabled by the US joining the war late on one side.

irrational 10y ago

No. Should America Have Entered World War II? Also no.

noxToken 10y ago
Go on. That flat answer adds nothing.
thearn4 10y ago
I'm curious, are you saying that America should not have responded militarily to the attack at Pearl Harbor, or to the declaration of war on it by Germany?
- gozur88 10y ago
  The US was provoking both Germany and Japan. Presumably if we'd actually wanted to stay out of the war we would have stuck to our own knitting. The US was "lending" warships to the UK, and American destroyers were dropping depth charges on German submarines in an effort to get supplies the Germans were trying to choke off to the UK. In the North Atlantic we'd already joined the war, if unofficially and not wholeheartedly. This is one of the reasons Hitler decided to honor his ally's request to make it official. In the Pacific US forces were essentially blockading Japan's oil supplies in an effort to force the Japanese out of Manchuria. Japan had to go to war with the US or give up any imperial ambitions (and we knew that wasn't going to happen).
  - rhino369 10y ago
    The US embargo of Japan wasn't a blockade and wasn't really an aggressive move. It was a move to not participate in unchecked expansion of Japan by brutal means. Not giving into the whims of monsters isn't provoking them in the slightest.
- soperj 10y ago
  That's just like saying that France and England started the war because they declared war on Germany when they invaded Poland.

tcopeland 10y ago

There's an interesting bit at the end of John Barry's "The Great Influenza" about how Wilson got the flu at Versailles. Barry suggests that Wilson was physically and mentally affected and thus gave in on terms around punishing Germany for the war. Apparently until he got the flu he'd been pushing back hard against anything like that.

gunnyguy121 10y ago
My European history teacher had the same theory. Although there was also some hubris involved as he didn't take any senators like he should have

smacktoward 10y ago

I don't get this assumption by Kazin in the piece: > How would the war have ended if America had not intervened? The carnage might have continued for another year or two until citizens in the warring nations, who were already protesting the endless sacrifices required, forced their leaders to reach a settlement. I don't see how any of the belligerent powers would have moved towards a negotiated settlement if they'd only bled a little more. By 1917 they'd already poured out absolutely staggering quantities of blood, buckets and buckets of it, and their positions had not softened in the least. If anything, they'd become stiffer -- negotiation became less and less feasible as the casualty figures increased, because it seemed to the both the public and the politicians to be a betrayal of the all the sacrifices that had been made. (People have always had a poor understanding of sunk costs.) Tossing even more sacrifices onto the pile wouldn't have changed that dynamic. What seems like a more likely outcome is what actually happened in Russia: the fighting rages pointlessly on, the situation locked in stasis, even more money and blood pouring down the hole, until the people back home literally can't afford bread anymore -- at which point there is some kind of social revolution that turns the existing order completely upside down. And this repeats itself until enough combatants on one side or the other have fallen into chaos that the side overall can't fight effectively anymore, at which point the other side becomes the "victor" more or less by default, simply by virtue of having collapsed slightly more slowly than everyone else. And what comes after that? It's hard to say, but a Europe where the Russian experience was repeated in several other major powers doesn't sound like the starting point of a notably happier timeline than the one we actually got.

alexhutcheson 10y ago

For those interested, this is covered with detail and nuance in the beginning of Adam Tooze's book "The Deluge" https://www.amazon.com/Deluge-America-Remaking-Global-1916-1931/dp/0143127977 https://www.amazon.com/Deluge-America-Remaking-Global-1916-1...

valuearb 10y ago

"How would the war have ended if America had not intervened? The carnage might have continued for another year or two until citizens in the warring nations, who were already protesting the endless sacrifices required, forced their leaders to reach a settlement." This is crazy talk. Germany was a de facto military dictatorship at the time. The legislature and citizens had no say. The only reason the war ended as quickly as it did is they realized the stream of fresh troops from the US doomed them. Like most military leaderships the Germans were delusional about their capabilities. It's amazing they surrendered when they did, instead of fighting the allies inch by inch in germany. Because they surrendered in a "moment of clarity" it created the whole "stab in the back" theory that Germany could have won victory but it was taken from them. If the US doesn't enter, the privations of Germany aren't as awful, and their delusions of victory would won out over pragmatism. The war could have lasted years longer.

Arizhel 10y ago
Maybe, but then the resulting peace treaty would likely have been non-punitive, and then the Nazis and Hitler would never have happened, along with WWII.