For me, World War I was the most tragic 20th Century conflict. It was triggered by Serbia and Austro-Hungary. After Russia and France began gearing for war, Germany was dragged into the conflict by the doomsday machine of troop mobilization schedules. Britain could have halted the war, or let the continental powers fight until they came to a truce. But Churchill and his fellow imperialists determined to destroy Germany, a new rival to Britain’s wealth and power.
World War I should have ended in 1917 when both sides were exhausted and stalemated. America’s entry into the war resulted in Germany’s defeat and ensuing postwar suffering. The German, Habsburg, and Ottoman Empires were torn apart by the lupine victors and reduced to ruin, creating today’s unstable Balkans and Mideast.
Had Germany and its allies not been defeated, had a Carthaginian Peace not been imposed upon them at Versailles and Trianon, there might never have been a Hitler, Communist Russia or World War II. Europe’s Jews may have escaped destruction.
Churchill made the fatal error in World War II of backing Poland’s hold on Danzig even though Britain could do nothing to defend Poland, Yugoslavia, or Czechoslovakia from Hitler’s attempts to reunite million of Germans stranded in these new nations by the dreadful Versailles Treaty. Britain’s declaration of war on Germany over Poland led to a general European war. After suffering 5.6 million dead, Poland ended up occupied by the Soviet Union.
My thinking is that had the US not entered World War I, we might very well have been spared the rise of Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler and the German National Soclialists (Nazis), WWII, all the various other wars we have been involved in (all undeclared, starting with Korea) , and there would have been no nuclear arms race, among others. But Woodrow Wilson (under whom Franklin Roosevelt served as assistant Secretary of the Navy) was jonesing to get us dragged into a European war. I have grown to consider him a war criminal.
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