Jack Beatty: What did the Great War accomplish?
History can hinge on sequence. Germany’s announcement of unrestricted submarine warfare on January 31, 1917, making targets of U.S. merchant vessels, caused Wilson to break diplomatic relations with Germany in February and eventuated in the mayhem he described in his address to Congress:"Vessels of every kind, whatever their flag, their character, their cargo, their destination, their errand, have been ruthlessly sent to the bottom without warning and without thought of help or mercy for those on board…. Even hospital ships…have been sunk with the same reckless lack of compassion or of principle…." The sinking of three American ships in that spree of destruction provoked the United States to abandon the neutrality it had observed since August 1914 and take what Wilson presciently termed"the tragical step" of joining the Allies in the war against Germany. But suppose, Winston Churchill hypothesized in The World Crisis 1916-1918, the first Russian Revolution—the one that overthrew the Tsar—had occurred in January, 1917 instead of in March: then Germany might not have unleashed its submarines against neutral shipping and the United States not have gone to war."Had we been able to foresee in Germany the Russian revolution," Alfred von Tirpitz, the German admiral who built up the Kriegsmarine, wrote in his memoirs,"we should perhaps not have needed to regard the submarine campaign of 1917 as a last resort. But in January, 1917 there was no visible sign of the revolution." Revolution brought about Russia’s withdrawal from the Tsarist war, which meant Germany could transfer divisions from the Russian to the Western Front, where their added weight might achieve the same result as the submarine campaign—"break the Allied backbone"—without its potentially fatal risk, U.S. intervention.
"If the Allies had been left to face the collapse of Russia without being sustained by the United States," Churchill further contended,"it seems certain that France could not have survived the year, and the war would have ended in a peace by negotiation." Writing in 1927, the man who had been First Lord of the Admiralty during the first year of the war labeled such a peace"a German victory." But from our contemporary perspective, what would have occurred without U.S. intervention looks more like a peace of exhaustion, a peace without victory, perhaps mediated by a neutral United States.
Our view of peace in 1917 depends on knowledge then unavailable to Churchill—the consequences of the victory without peace wrought by the punitive Versailles Treaty of 1919. By 1936, Churchill had a more somber sense of these consequences. Instead of bad luck for Germany, he had come to see Wilson’s"tragical step" as a world-historical catastrophe."America should have minded her own business and stayed out of the World War," he said in an interview that year with the New York Enquirer.
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 today 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.
Reflecting the hopes of the liberal peace movement that had taken on mass dimensions since 1914, the philosopher John Dewey wrote that U.S. intervention in the war would open a rare moment of"plasticity" in human affairs, one moldable to the"liberal internationalist" vision of peace through a League of Nations spelled out in Wilson’s famous"Fourteen Points" of 1918. But, addressing"war to end war" liberals like Dewey, the radical essayist Randolph Bourne asked,"If the war is too strong for you to prevent, how is it going to be weak enough for you to control and mould to your liberal purposes?" The war proved too strong for liberal hopes and Wilson’s intentions....