The United States looms large on the world stage, but it wasn’t always so important. President Donald Trump retrospectively applied America’s present role to yesterday’s world when he declared: “We won both [World] Wars, nobody was close to us in terms of strength, bravery, or military brilliance, but we never celebrate anything.” Henceforth, he wants to call Veteran’s Day “Victory Day for World War I.”
While the U.S. played a decisive role in that conflict, shifting the balance of power irreversibly against Imperial Germany after the other participants had exhausted themselves, Washington’s contribution remained much less than those of many allied belligerents. While U.S. soldiers were brave, their commanders were anything but brilliant, failing to learn from the allies and running up unnecessary casualties.
The most important contribution measure is the number of military personnel killed. American sacrificed 116,700 men in the war. That was a huge loss, to be sure, though less than a fifth of the number killed during the Civil War. However, America’s toll was small compared to that of the other allied combatants, with the U.S. ranking only number 8 on the allied side. Russia lost around two million men. (Most of the casualty figures for World War I are rough estimates.) France had 1.4 million deaths. Great Britain suffered almost 900,000. Estimates of Italy’s toll run as high as 700,000. Serbia lost in the range of 400,000 men. Romania endured around 300,000 deaths. British dominions and colonies—most importantly Australia, Canada, India, and New Zealand—collectively lost about 215,000. Washington was only ahead of Belgium, Greece, Montenegro, Portugal, and Japan.
There are much bigger problems with Trump’s claim, however. First, the U.S. had no reason to join Europe’s tragic murderfest. Second, the military triumph turned into a political fiasco, and just a couple decades later, a military disaster for the entire world. So bad were the consequences that by entering that conflict Woodrow Wilson staked his claim to being the country’s worst president.
Terry W. Hamby, chairman of the WWI Centennial Commission, dedicated a memorial to World War I, intoning: “The doughboys we are honoring today were the best of their generation. Their average age was 24.” Why were they sacrificed?
It surely wasn’t for America. None of the combatants threatened the U.S., for which the Atlantic acted as a vast moat. Although Anglo-Saxons, who originally populated the colonies, dominated U.S. politics and finance, that was no reason to go to war on Britain’s behalf. Indeed, German descendants were almost as populous. And still are. As of 2020, the number of Americans with British ancestry was 62 million. The number with German ancestry was 41 million. Nor was Washington’s entry into the war justified to ensure that financial interests got repaid on their generous loans to the Entente powers. Americans should not die to preserve lenders’ profits.
Finally, talk of a war for democracy, or to end war, or to destroy Prussian militarism, was just nonsense. The allies included an antisemitic despotism (Russia), a militant revanchist republic (France), the world’s leading colonial power (Great Britain), the globe’s cruelest colonial master (Belgium), a populist regime that chose war for territorial plunder (Italy), and a terrorist state that enabled the royal murder that triggered the conflict (Serbia). The so-called Central Powers were no friends of liberty, but they were generally evolving in a more liberal direction and likely would have continued to do so had war not intervened.
Unfortunately, America’s president at the time was the megalomaniac and sanctimonious Woodrow Wilson. A virulent racist, he also resisted women’s suffrage. He advocated imposing national conscription for the first time, proposed making it illegal to criticize him, and created what is widely recognized as the low point of American civil liberties.
Why did he decide on war? He was an Anglophile, who essentially believed that London could do no wrong. He wanted to transform the global order and recognized that he had to make the U.S. a belligerent to gain a “seat at the table” ending the war. Why worry about the many Americans who would needlessly die as a result?
The closest issue to a casus belli was the German U-boat (“unterseeboot” or submarine) campaign. Submarine warfare is terrible, but so was the British starvation blockade. It was illegal under international law and struck civilians as well as soldiers, killing several hundred thousand innocents by war’s end. The Germans began the war by having U-boats surface to seek the surrender of merchantmen, but the British armed civilian ships, designated them as reserve cruisers, and ordered them to ram any subs so foolish as to rise—prompting U-boats to remain submerged and sink vessels without mercy.
Moreover, even civilian liners, including the celebrated Lusitania, carried munitions through what amounted to a war zone. In the Lusitania’s case, the German embassy purchased ads warning Americans not to book passage on a legitimate military target. In May 1915 near Britain’s coast, it was sunk. Wilson bizarrely asserted that just one American baby on a commercial liner or cargo ship carrying bullets and bombs immunized its passage. This while the British navy was stopping even the ships of neutrals, like America, to prevent food from reaching the European continent. Wilson admitted that he was committed to London’s victory: “England is fighting our fight, and you may well understand that I shall not, in the present state of the world’s affairs, place obstacles in her way when she is fighting for her life—and the life of the world.” So much for his pretense of neutrality.
Germany restricted its U-boat operations until January 1917. Then, in a desperate move to win amid a two-front fight, it again targeted nominally civilian shipping. Wilson called for war, claiming “the recent course of the Imperial German Government to be in fact nothing less than war against the Government and people of the United States.” It was a lie, but one that conveniently advanced his desire to sit among the victors. Never were America or American interests threatened. Never was there anything at stake that warranted jumping into a merciless continental abattoir.
There was more movement on the eastern front, but it wasn’t until the first Russian revolution, in the February 1917 (March in the Western calendar), that victory there seemed possible for Germany, and even then, a compromise peace in the west was likely, given the allies’ advantages there. It was Washington’s entry that empowered the Entente to win, though not immediately. The conflict raged on, as the allies figured U.S. reinforcements would lead to victory while Germany gambled on another major offensive before American troops were ready for action. The offensive failed, so Germany finally yielded and sought an armistice, which took effect on November 11, 1918.
What might have been a compromise peace that preserved enough of the old world order to forestall revolutionary chaos and violence turned into a rout. The Austro-Hungarian, German, and Russian empires all collapsed, leading to authoritarian, and sometimes totalitarian systems. The Ottoman Empire’s disintegration yielded multiple rounds of conflict. Italy abandoned democracy and embraced the blustering dictatorship of Benito Mussolini. Communism, followed by fascism and, most virulently and aggressively, Nazism, reshaped Europe.
The Versailles Treaty with Germany (and related pacts with the other defeated Central Powers) rewarded the allies’ desire for vengeance and Wilson’s fantasy to transform the globe. The winners plundered the losers and traded peoples and lands as if playing a global game of Monopoly. The allies claimed to exalt self-determination. However, they forced disfavored minority groups, most notably Germans, to remain inside newly independent allied nations, particularly Czechoslovakia and Poland. Some Germans called these new nations Saisonstaaten, or “states for a season,” which provided the grievances used by Adolf Hitler and were soon swept away.
Alas, the resulting settlement failed in almost every particular. It treated Germany badly enough to create an enduring grievance against the allies and the post-World War I order they created. However, it was not truly “Carthaginian,” severe enough to prevent Germany, with its large population and significant industrial might, from reviving and seeking revenge. The allies tried appeasement too late. It could have prevented The Great War, but Hitler was the one political leader on the European continent who could not be appeased, having an agenda that could be achieved only through war.
It took just 20 years for the next conflict to arise. World War II caused even greater material destruction, loss of life, political disintegration, and future threats. That fight had barely ended after Germany’s surrender when the Cold War emerged. Although the U.S. and Soviet Union avoided open conflict, there were numerous limited but costly battles and proxy wars involving allied states. Only in the early 1990s, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, end of the Warsaw Pact, democratization of the former Eastern bloc, and collapse of the Soviet Union, did the world return to the age before, in which Germany’s short-lived Brest-Litovsk Treaty proved to be a lot more realistic than the Versailles debacle.
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None of this looks very much like a “victory” for the U.S. Trump should drop his embarrassing triumphalism which denigrates Europe’s contribution to both World War I and World War II. Even more, he should stop calling what was a political disaster an American achievement. Instead, he should reiterate his message that Americans should not get involved in endless wars around the globe.
That certainly is what the Founders would do. In his famous Farewell Address George Washington warned Americans against undertaking “projects of pride, ambition, and other sinister and pernicious motives.” This foreign policy approach “gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation), facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity; guiding, with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation.” Sounds like the U.S. today.
Instead, America’s first president urged his fellow citizens to have with other nations “as little political connection as possible,” and not to “entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils” of other states’ “ambition, rivalship, interest, humor or caprice.” Had past presidents followed this approach, imagine the lives that would have been saved and wealth that would have been preserved. And imagine what Americans can achieve in the future if President Trump adopts that approach today.
