"...why World War I started — the world war nobody talks about — and to remember the facts long enough to pass an exam.
In a nutshell, some archduke got shot in Serbia, and the next thing you knew the French and Germans were slaughtering each other. The English jumped in on the French side. So did the Russians.
Americans wanted no part of this, until Woodrow Wilson decided that although war was bad, a “war to end all war” and “to make the world safe for democracy” would be okay. So the United States got a piece of the action and Germany was defeated. Wilson went to Europe to seal the victory and ensure democracy and self-determination for all nations, some of which had to be invented for the purpose. So the map of Europe was redrawn. Seemed like a good idea at the time.
But out of the rubble crawled new leaders like Hitler and Lenin, and the Versailles settlement didn’t hold. The new Europe soon became something nobody had imagined, and another world war, even worse than the first, was the result.
It started when Hitler’s Germany and Lenin’s Russia, now owned by Joe Stalin, invaded Poland. Right-thinking people declared war on Germany, but not on Russia, and when the shooting finally stopped, they awarded Poland to Stalin. Seemed like a good idea at the time. Franklin Roosevelt, Wilson’s disciple, thought the United States and Russia could jointly ensure a just and lasting peace. That peace lasted a few minutes. The United States faced a greater danger from a nuclear-armed Russia than it had ever faced from Germany (or Japan).
Once again, the postwar world was something nobody predicted, because, as before, nobody could even have imagined it.
History is a lot like the toy kaleidoscopes we used to buy at the dime store. Shake it a little, and you get a new pattern — nothing mysterious, but impossible to predict. In retrospect it always seems clear, but nobody knows what the next pattern will be."
Wilson, Bush, and History, Joseph Sobran
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