"All isolationism got us was a Second World War"

Resposta (Jim Powell):

"Presumably you're referring to the unwillingness of Britain, France and the United States to do stop Hitler when he might have been easily stopped during the 1930s.

Why do you suppose Britain, France and the United States didn't want to fight?

Because millions of lives had been squandered by reckless generals and politicians in a stupid war from 1914 to 1918, and these countries understandably weren't in a hurry to get into another war.

Britain's General Douglas Haig was responsible for nearly 20,000 deaths in a single day during the Battle of the Somme (altogether 95,675 dead British soldiers and 420,000 total British casualties in that battle). A reported 50,729 French soldiers were killed, too. Then there were the battles of the Marne (1914, 270,000 French and British soldiers killed), Artois (1915, 100,000 French soldiers killed), Ypres (Second Battle, 1915, 70,000 French soldiers killed), Gallipoli (1915, 50,000 British, Australian, and New Zealand soldiers killed), Verdun (1916, 315,000 French soldiers killed), Arras (1916, 160,000 British soldiers killed) and Passchendaele (1917, 310,000 British soldiers killed). The United States lost about 116,000 soldiers in the war.

The United States couldn't prevent other countries from fighting, but we could have stayed out of the war, and that would have prevented the British and French from winning the decisive victory that put them in a position to dictate vindictive surrender terms.

By forcing a representative of the new and fragile Germany democracy to sign the humiliating armistice -- that, among other things provided for a continuation of the British navy's "hunger blockade" against Germany, even though Germany had stopped fighting -- Wilson, Clemenceau and Lloyd George immediately discredited German democracy. They further discredited German democracy by requiring that its representatives sign the vindictive Treaty of Versailles.

Hitler would have been much less likely to gain power if the Allies hadn't humiliated the Germans, demanded ruinous reparations and the rest, since he skillfully exploited the bitter nationalist response in Germany.

(...) If the United States were unable to assure a magnanimous treaty with better prospects of avoiding bitterness, dictators and another war, then what was the point of entering the war and sacrificing 116,000 American lives?

Even if Wilson had been competent, I doubt a vindictive treaty could have been avoided, because of all the slaughter, destruction and bitterness that resulted from the war. Whoever won a decisive victory was going to take it out on the losers.

The key mistake was entering the war and enabling one side to win a decisive victory. The Germans were unlikely to win a decisive victory. Even before American soldiers arrrived at the front in appreciable numbers, the German 1917 offensive was running out of steam. German soldiers had advanced far from their supply lines. German soldiers were weary. The army was putting down mutinies. Military production as well as the general economy continued to suffer the effects of the British naval blockade.

Even if Germany had won, it would have been surrounded by hostile guerrilla fighting, in France, the Balkans and the territories acquired from Russia. World War I had started amidst the nationality conflicts in the Balkans, and the hatreds were as intense as ever.

If America had remained a true neutral ("isolationist") during World War I, probably Hitler would never have come to power, and the Holocaust wouldn't have happened.

(...)For instance, Russian expert and Pulitzer Prize winning historian George F. Kennan observed with characteristic understatement, “it may be questioned whether the United States government, in company with other western Allies, did not actually hasten and facilitate the failure of the Provisional Government by insisting that Russia should continue the war effort, and by making this demand the criterion for its support. In asking the leaders of the Provisional Government simultaneously to consolidate their political power and to revive and continue participation in the war, the Allies were asking the impossible.” [George F. Kennan, Russia Leaves the War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956), p. 23]

(...) Biographer Robert Service observed that “Lenin had been given his chance because of the wartime economic dislocation, administrative breakdown and political disarray.” Clearly, this meant the longer Russia disintegrated, the more likely Lenin would be able to seize power. [Robert Service, Lenin, a Biography (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 369]

(...) The arrogant Woodrow Wilson was playing an international war game even though he knew little about it. Richard Pipes, the distinguished historian of the Russian Revolution, observed that “Woodrow Wilson seems to have believed that the Bolsheviks truly spoke for the Russian people and formed a detachment of that grand international army that he imagined advancing toward universal democracy and eternal peace…Every message which the U.S. government transmitted to the Bolshevik authorities in the early months of 1918 conveyed the sense that Washington took at face value the Bolsheviks’ professions of democratic and peaceful intentions and ignored their calls for world revolution.” [Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1990), pp. 600, 601, 602]

By pressuring and bribing the Russian Provisional Government to stay in World War I, Wilson along with the French and British helped accelerate the disintegration of the Russian army until there was hardly any army left to resist Lenin's fourth coup attempt in 1917.

(...) During the Russian Revolution, Lenin was the only political leader speaking out for peace -- his slogan was "Peace, Land and Bread." Of course, Lenin wanted totalitarian power, not peace, but by pressuring and bribing the Russian Provisional Government to stay in the war, as I make clear in WILSON'S WAR, Woodrow Wilson played into Lenin's hands. Russia stayed in the war, there was another humiliating defeat during the summer of 1917, and Russian soldiers deserted the army by the hundreds of thousands.

Increasingly, Lenin appeared to be the only alternative to the disastrous war policy.By the fall of 1917, the Russian army had virtually collapsed, and Lenin seized power on his fourth coup attempt. Lenin recognized that if Russia didn't withdraw from the war, he would be overthrown, so he pushed to accept the draconian German settlement terms (give up large chunks of Russian territory populated by non-Russian peoples).Meanwhile, Lenin established his secret police, concentration camps and a reign of terror, starting a civil war aimed at expanding Bolshevik control over the entire country. Some 5 million people were killed.Wilson didn't intend to play into Lenin's hands, but he knew wars are unpredictable, and entering wars unrelated to national defense is asking for trouble. If he didn't know this, he had no business playing an international war game."