That futile, bloody war could easily have been averted. Its aftermath led, a bit more than 20 years later, to an even wider World War II. In Russia, bled dry by the war, Bolshevism replaced shaky democratic governance.
A good case can be made that World Wars I and II were the same war. A punitive Treaty of Versailles, punishing Germany, gave rise to Nazism and the crazed leadership of Adolf Hitler. Early in the 20th century, major European and Asian powers vied for regional and colonial power. That contest was left unresolved in 1918. By the end of World War II, colonialism had ended. Profound peace movements, and anti-militarist feelings, have proved durable in the World War II aggressor nations of Germany and Japan. Nuclear weapons, used by the U.S. to force Japanese surrender in World War II, have now spread to many nations and, along with chemical and biological weapons, pose huge dangers to mankind.
I have always thought any American president should ask these questions before committing the United States to war:
- Is the cause sufficient that I would send my own children into danger?
- Does it justify changing the nature of our domestic society and spending huge resources, for an undetermined period, as war proceeds? (There are always unintended and unforeseen consequences.)
- Are our genuine national interests at stake, or is the situation marginal?
If those questions had been applied by prior presidents, the U.S. would have been at war less frequently than it has been. In fact, most of our involvements, after the fact, are hard to justify.
The United States would not exist without the Revolutionary War. Yet some historians would argue that, over time, the American colonies would have gotten independence without war. There was a tide in the affairs of men at the time, however, which would have been difficult to resist in 1776.
Historians have pointed to many instances where the Civil War might have been averted. Yet, just as the drive for independence seemed inescapably to lead to the Revolutionary War, so does the institution of slavery seem a reason that conflict between free and slave-holding states was destined to end as it did.
The Spanish-American War, promoted by William Randolph Hearst and political hawks, also was a war of conquest, although it was sold as liberating oppressed Cubans from Spanish tyranny. We got the Philippines as a colonial bonus.
President Woodrow Wilson pledged to keep us out of World War I. But skillful British propaganda and largely phony atrocity stories drew us into it anyway. Wilson's post-war proposals left us the heritage of a Wilsonian foreign policy — one leading often to self-righteous military interventions justified on moral grounds — which has gotten us involved, in the decades since, in conflicts where we had little directly at stake. Wilsonianism has been practiced by presidents of both political parties, most recently and damagingly in Iraq.
World War II, it can be argued, was inescapable for us — especially since Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany were more than just territorially ambitious nations. Their brutality and genocide had to be stopped. Yet the war did not flow unexpectedly from a Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. It could be seen coming for at least a decade, during which time we and other western nations chose to overlook the obvious. Hitler was waging war in Europe more than two years before we entered, Japan far earlier than that in Asia. Finally, a U.S. embargo of Japanese oil imports (thus choking the Japanese economy) brought Japan to its desperate gamble at Pearl Harbor. There were at least a dozen junctures during the 1930s where concerted, multilateral action might have stopped World War II. But financial/economic crisis in their home countries caused other national leaders to conveniently turn away.
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