Wilson and the War

In Search of a Goldilocks American Government

While CNN has very few viewers in the U.S., it seems to be the major source for the rest of the world's insights into the policies and politics of the U.S..  Most of this is negative--at least since Obama has been gone. American efforts at stabilization, regime support and change, military action and the like have been presented in a particularly critical light. Quora, a site purporting to have a higher level of social intercourse, has very similar takes on American positions. Much of this is Monday morning grousing--the Americans do too much, or they do too little--and opinions of U.S. leadership swings from the overtly evil to the simply laughable.

In the spirit of such discussion, here is an interesting opinion from Henderson:

Imagine how different things might have been had President Woodrow Wilson not declared war on Germany and Austria in order to “make the world safe for democracy.” Without the U.S. government lending its mighty power to one side in the European war, Germany and Austria would likely have negotiated a peace with France, Britain, and Italy very different from the Versailles Treaty. In particular, Germany would not likely have been saddled with such huge reparations payments; therefore, Adolf Hitler would have had less support from the German people.
Consider, too, that in return for financial support of Russia’s Provisional Government that took over after the czar abdicated, President Wilson had insisted that the Russian government stay in the war. The war’s unpopularity with the Russian people was part of the reason that they supported, or at least did not strongly oppose, a communist revolution. Historian and diplomat George Kennan claimed that Allied pressure on Russia to stay in the war hastened the failure of the Provisional Government, which led to the takeover by the Bolsheviks.
In short, a reasonable case can be made that without Wilson’s intervention in World War I, there would have been no Soviet Union. So it’s arguable that without U.S. involvement in World War I, there would not have been a World War II and we would still be referring to World War I as the “Great War.”