In a post at the Atlantic Council Paul D. Miller beats around the bush a good deal without coming to terms with the reality that the U. S. entry into World War I was unjust. Here’s his conclusion:
If the Great War teaches us anything, it is that wars must be fought for a morally-defensible purpose—or not fought at all—and that once a war is won, its moral purpose must continue to animate our postwar efforts to build peace. To do anything less is to cheapen and trivialize the lives of those who fight the nation’s wars.
I think the jury is still out on whether democracies go to war with one another. It may depend on the operative definition of “democracy”. Is, say, Egypt a democracy? Is Russia? For that matter are we? I don’t think the lines are quite that bright.
Our complaint against the Central Powers was that their navy was sinking American ships that were carrying munitions to the Allies. The Germans held the moral high ground, not we. It’s no wonder that we lost interest in the war after the armistice was signed. We didn’t have any interest in it to begin with.
High moral purpose sounds nice and all but we should actually have a just cause before going to war. Promoting our own values at the expense of the other guy’s is not a just cause. And wars should never be elective. You should only go to war when you have no alternative.
We went to war because Germany resumed unrestricted submarine warfare, i.e. blowing up merchant ships without warning and without provision for the safety of innocent civilians. The Germans knew this would cause America to declare war, but felt the moment of maximum pressure had arrived, and sought an alliance with Mexico in that event. This is certainly just cause, and well within American tradition of demanding freedom of the seas.
And the Zimmerman telegram.
I disagree that the Central powers held the high ground. The Kaiser and Prussian military elite were choir boys compared to the Nazi regime; but they were still a nasty regime.
Look at Brest Litvorsk; which was a foreshadow of Hitlers plan for Eastern Europe. Then the release of Lenin into Russia.
With regards to the US, the Germans bear more of the responsibility. They had agreed to restrict their U-boat activities in exchange for formal American neutrality – and then they abandoned their pledge in an attempt to knock the U.K. out since they were slowly losing. Then there was the Zimmermann telegram.
Which is not to say entering the war was the correct decision for the US. The Europeans may have managed the aftermath of their own civil war better if Americans had left them alone – just as the U.K. had stayed out of the American civil war.
@Curious, one doesn’t need to demonize the Germans, but their actions revealed their intentions to expand, annex and dominate Europe on a Napoleonic scale. Germany started the war by violating Belgium neutrality, describing the treaty obligations as a mere scrap of paper. And while it may have been one thing to pass through Belgium to attack France, they began an occupation under military rule, and what people say about the Rape of Belgium, well some of it is true. The pattern continued through Brest Litvorsk. Germany was not fighting some defensive war to protect Austro-Hungary, it was utilizing its relative power to redraw the map of Europe.
American interest could have been achieved by not rushing young men to the front in order to achieve glory and a seat at the table. Many died from Spanish flu and their military contributions are debatable. What was important was the idea of American support, and they could have been sent methodically for training and some incorporation into existing units. Granted the military would have objected to American troops serving under foreign command, so the last part is probably a non-starter.
The U.S. was not going to be of much help in enforcing any peace terms in Europe. The peace needed to be secured by the UK, which was more interested in resurrecting its role as offshore balancer, but that Europe no longer existed.
AS I recall, the Germans had been trying to foment war between the US and Mexico even before the Zimmerman telegram. I dont see the Germans as being on such a moral high ground here. Plenty of fault to go around.
Steve
The German Empire had the moral high ground in the Great War? Har-de-har-har. Where shall we begin? The violation of Belgian neutrality and the war crimes that followed? The shelling of Sevastopol by Goeben while flying a Turkish flag (a noncombatant nation at the time) at the direct orders of the German Admiralty? First use of Poison gas? Unrestricted submarine warfare? Zeppelin bombings of civilian targets? The shelling of Paris by Big Bertha and her sisters? And I won’t even get into the horrific results of their shipping Lenin and his merry band of future mass murderers to Petrograd, although Ludendorff & Co couldn’t have possibly imagined what ol’ VI and his successors would do to poor Russia over the next several decades (although they should have had a glimmering considering what the Paris Commune did in the short time they were in power).
The French and especially the British did their share of nasty underhanded things during the run-up to American entry to the war (shipping munitions on the Lusitania comes to mind) but their deeds pale in both size and number compared to the ends-justify-the-means Germans.
With respect to the U. S. only. We began shipping munitions and supplies to the Allies long before any aggression by the Germans against us. That made our ships legitimate targets of war for the Germans.
So, for exammple, we now have documentary evidence that the Lusitania was carrying munitions. WWI was a war of choice for us. The Germans’ unrestricted submarine warfare began in 1915. We had started supplying munitions shortly after the war broke out. Our hands are not clean on this.
We had already committed acts of war by that time and routinely violated our neutrality.
Whatever. In 1944/45, my father fought over much the same French countryside as my grandfather did in 1917/18.
If we had let the Euros bleed each other white, we might not have had Hitler, or the even worse Stalin and Mao.
I think it would be valuable to re-examine your knowledge of this history.