WW I is much more interesting to study than WW II, I think. How it started and might have been prevented, for instance. Why the combatants kept going when it turned out to be much more horrible than they'd ever imagined. And especially, how it ended, and the Treaty of Versailles.
Yes, and the historiography of the causes of WWI is truly enormous. It started during the war years themselves, when document collections were assembled by the various foreign offices in order to support their various disclaimers of responsibility. Well, the War Guilt Clause purported to settle that phase of the argument, although its academic cousin continues on today. A lot of stuff was published around 2010-2014 in preparation for the centenary. I always recommend people check out Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers, because it's a really magnificent book. Maybe just a step below Richard Rhodes' The Making of the Atomic Bomb (in terms of just really truly great writing of history) but just as worthwhile to read.
I'm not sure WW1 could have been avoided. Once alliances started being formed most countries needed to join in, and naturally these consolidated into two camps.
Up to this point (over centuries) Europe had regularly been embroiled in local conflicts. War in Europe wasn't novel, and certainly peace was not the norm.
So you have these two very large alliances, both fully expecting the other to invade at some point. An arms race develops - both sides unwilling to be perceived as weaker. (And fueled somewhat by manufacturers manipulating public opinion.)
All it takes is a spark to set off a series of cascading events. History records it as the assassination of Price Ferdinand, but if it wasn't that it would have been something else.
After the assassination the Austrian emperor -might- have had a more measured response, but that's expecting a lot from the sort of person who is, well, an emperor.
Sure, he might have found a way out, but there would have been another spark sooner or later. There were just too many munitions around, and the profits of war too appealing to the manufacturers of the day.
In the end it's human greed that is the root of every aspect, and consequence of the war. And that never seems to go out of fashion.
The recent adventure in Afghanistan cost what, several trillions of $. That money flows to companies and ultimately people. There are lots of interests in keeping that tap turned on.
Perhaps a more effective tool in preventing that sort of fruitless combat is to report daily not on how many lives we're lost, but rather how much tax money today cost. The public cares a lot more about money spent than lives lost.
Isolationism always turns into imperialism in times of economic crisis, putting trade dependent nations on deaths ground. World Wars are a side effect of that reaction pathway.
Yes. And yet, the business being unfinished was very much Woodrow Wilson's fault.
OK, that's flame bait, for sure. I'm working (just mentally, so far) on a lengthy article on that. I was watching a series on Prime last night called "The Ultimate Guide to the US Presidents" or something like that, and it mentioned, for Wilson, that he expressed surprise and displeasure that so much of his second term had to be devoted to foreign policy, when ALL of his training was in domestic policy.
It showed. His astonishing naivete and pigheadedness along with the US's immense power and influence worked to end the war in the worst possible way.
Wilson had managed to wrangle the other Big Three into an agreement on an entirely new model of international relations, which he was in part responsible for coming up with, and which was actually somewhat popular. But he had to have the Senate ratify the damned thing. The Senate did not ratify it. That precluded our involvement in the whole business and effectively set us adrift from international concerns again. How it's Wilson's fault that he probably suffered a stroke during his address to the Senate arguing the case for ratification is beyond me.
He did not "wrangle the other Big Three into an agreement on an entirely new model of international relations" -- they only pretended to agree, to placate him and make him go away.
John Maynard Keynes' The Economic Consequences of the Peace gives a contemporary deconstruction of the disaster he made, when just leaving the Europeans alone to settle things in their time-honored way could not possibly have been any worse.
As for that villain "the Senate" : they do have a Constitutional role in ratifying treaties. Yet Wilson went to Paris taking along NO representatives of Congress, expecting them to just go along with his wisdom (hence my term "pigheaded"). And in Paris he got rolled. Besides setting up a treaty that brought Hitler to power, he caused lots of small nations to be created that had no chance of defending themselves.
> How it's Wilson's fault that he probably suffered a stroke during his address to the Senate arguing the case for ratification
He collapsed in Pueblo, CO, not in an address to the Senate. He'd had several strokes before, and suffered the Big One back at the White House.
> How it started and might have been prevented, for instance.
It does not seem likely that the war could have been prevented. Wilhelm II had surrounded himself with war inclined military advisers, had himself entered a very militant mood by then and was determined to go into the war to expand the German Empire.
Otto von Bismarck, who had worked hard in preceding decades to maintain the diplomatic balance and to stop the German Empire from entering a new war repeatedly warned the Kaiser (Wilhelm II) of a looming disaster if the Kaiser were to proceed with any war plans. Alas, Otto von Bismarck and Wilhelm II had a massive fallout, the Kaiser continued to crave more place under the sun for the empire, and, after the former chancellor resigned and retired, Otto von Bismarck's advice was all but quickly ignored.
There is an interesting telegram exchange[0] between the Russian and German emperors, Nicholas II and Wilhelm II, who were cousins and referred to each other as Nicky and Willy, known as «Willy–Nicky telegrams». They corresponded with each other in English. One telegram dated with the 29th July 1914 is particularly interesting as Nicholas II offered a reconcilliation chance to Wilhelm II after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand:
«Thanks for your telegram conciliatory and friendly. Whereas official message presented today by your ambassador to my minister was conveyed in a very different tone. Beg you to explain this divergency! It would be right to give over the Austro-servian [sic] problem to the Hague conference. Trust in your wisdom and friendship. Your loving Nicky»
Wilhelm II, being in a militant mood, was disinclined to consider the offer and both empires proceeded to their own ascencions to an impeding collapse a few years later with vastly different consequences for each empire.
Wilhelm's unreasonable stubborness and unwise decisions even led to Adolf Hitler scornfully dispising Wilhelm later and openly calling Wilhelm an idiot.
No, the pressing issue of the Willy-Nicky telegrams was that Russia had mobilised her troops against Germany. Speaking about the Hague conference while setting troops in motion is hypocritical: you should wait out lengthy proceedings while we are invading your country. In the telegrams, William II tried to convince Nicholas II to stop the mobilisation. But Sergey Sazonov shortly thereafter made Nicholas II restart and escalate the mobilisation. At that point, a major war was inevitable.
I do not have an answer to that question, unfortunately. Given choices A, B, C, D and Z, what motivates people to make the worst (short or long term) one out of all alternatives? There is no answer to that. Personally, I link it to the self-determination theory and the intrinsic motivation, yet neither can be rationalised nor yield a deterministic answer.
Hypothetically, if Kaiser Wilhelm II had access to a time machine and an opportunity to reflect on long term consequences of his own actions, would he have made the same choice to go to war, made a better choice, made a worse choice or anywhere in between? One can't know as human nature is an enigma to date.
