In 1914 - 1915, Russian forces devastated two of the most fertile regions in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Galicia and Bukovina (parts of modern-day Poland and Ukraine). Conscription removed skilled laborers from their farms and placed agricultural production in less capable hands. Yet, a great deal of suffering afflicted cities and towns across Central Europe throughout the war. The horrors of WWI are usually encapsulated by the bloody stalemate that gripped the Western Front. Ending hostilities with one adversary would release resources for use against remaining opponents. Indeed, the Central Powers showed interest in a separate peace with a member of the Entente, namely Tsarist Russia, for strategic reasons. Unwillingness to negotiate a general peace based on the prewar status quo was another mode of expression. The greed displayed in the memo was one means by which policymakers in Berlin expressed their anxieties about Germany’s, as well as Austria-Hungary’s, precarious geopolitical situation. Russia’s domination of the “non-Russian vassal peoples” of Eastern Europe would be broken. The “general aim of the war” was “security for the German Reich in west and east for all imaginable time.” France would pay a war indemnity “high enough to prevent her from spending any considerable sums on armaments in the next 15 – 20 years.” Belgium would be “reduced to a vassal state” whose occupied ports would become bases for the German Navy. Indeed, on September 9, 1914, Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg approved a secret memorandum concerning Germany’s war objectives. This was not a goal that statesmen in Berlin and Vienna were going to abandon lightly. “British leaders did consider an American-mediated compromise peace in early 1916,” but chose to keep fighting.Īlso, consider why Germany and Austria-Hungary started the war: Victory would break their encirclement by the Triple Entente. Tsarist Russia refused a separate peace with Germany and Austria-Hungary on three occasions in 1915. France repeatedly insisted that its peace terms began with its recovery of the “lost provinces” of Alsace-Lorraine from Germany. For reasons of national interest(s), one or more belligerents were unwilling to return to status quo antebellum or something resembling it. He erred in how he conceptualized and prosecuted the conflict.Īs Alexander Watson details in his brilliant book, Ring of Steel: Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War I, total wars do not lend themselves to negotiated settlements. Third, Germany’s use of unrestricted submarine warfare gave Wilson a casus belli. The genocidal ideas and policies that disfigured Central and Eastern Europe in the 1930s and 1940s were first domestic reactions to the stresses of WWI. Second, the seeds of totalitarianism were sown during the war, not in 1919. First, intervention did not prevent the belligerents from reaching a “negotiated settlement.” Massive losses in blood and treasure made many European statesmen unwilling to end hostilities absent material gain. Instead, it disputes the idea that the act of intervention in WWI by the United States led to the tragedies that followed the Great War.
This article does not seek to defend Wilson’s record on civil liberties, economics, race relations, or many other issues. In brief, Wilson’s failures led to a second, far more destructive, global war.
His calls for national self-determination did not liberate the oppressed peoples of Central and Eastern Europe, but inflamed ethnic hatreds.
American intervention did not bring about “peace without victors,” but the harsh Treaty of Versailles. However, the speech has earned everlasting infamy for eight words “the world must be made safe for democracy.” The gulf between those words and what followed World War I is the source of much of the animosity that conservatives and libertarians harbor towards Wilson.
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