It is indeed a large part of the rationale for the neoconservative worldview. There is also no doubt that Britain’s declaration of war on Germany, in response to the Nazi invasion of Poland, was justified, even if the debacle which ended at Dunkirk proved that the British military was ill-prepared to fight a land war in Europe. It is clear that war does not end war, and it would seem to be equally clear that it does not make the world safe for democracy. Despite winning the war, Wilson’s Democratic Party was crushed at the polls in both 1918 and 1920. In my opinion and very simply put (as I also know less about WW1 than WW2), every war the U.S. has ever entered was to make the world safe for democracy and the American Way of Life. But the cost was far higher than Americans anticipated. Many people celebrate this centenary of America’s emergence as a world power. Professor Deborah Blum, the author of The Poisoner's Handbook, noted that "an official sense of higher purpose kept the poisoning program in place.".
In addition, it is hard to believe that the US actually entered the war to make the world safe for democracy. World War One was ended by the Treaty of Versailles, which redrew European borders willy-nilly and imposed ruinous reparations on Germany. Harvard professor Irving Babbitt commented in 1924: "Wilson, in the pursuit of his scheme for world service, was led to make light of the constitutional checks on his authority and to reach out almost automatically for unlimited power."
Even if we do everything right, I fear that the Shire will always be under threat by one despot or another, always requiring “eternal vigilance”, though as a last resort, as you say. Find him on Twitter @JimBovard. The chaos and economic depression sowed by the war and the Treaty of Versailles helped open the door to some of the worst dictators in modern times, including Germany’s Adolf Hitler, Italy’s Benito Mussolini, and Vladimir Lenin–whom Wilson intensely disliked because "he felt the Bolshevik leader had stolen his ideas for world peace," as historian Thomas Fleming noted in his 2003 masterpiece, The Illusion of Victory: America in World War 1. Wilson had proclaimed 14 points to guide peace talks; instead, there were 14 separate small wars in Europe towards the end of his term–after peace had been proclaimed. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except for material where copyright is reserved by a party other than FEE. Look it up now! ", Wilson intensely disliked Vladimir Lenin because "he felt the Bolshevik leader had stolen his ideas for world peace.". Prohibition advocates "indignantly insisted that... any kind of opposition to prohibition was sinister and subversively pro-German," noted William Ross, author of World War 1 and the American Constitution. Wells with respect to World War One, the phrase “the war to end war” is indicative of the naiveté of Wells’ optimistic progressivism and the belief that mankind is somehow progressing beyond war towards a golden age of peace and prosperity, ushered in by technology and the triumph of science. ), Wisdom and Innocence: A Life of G.K. Chesterton, Further Up & Further In: Understanding Narnia, America Must Return to the Noble Traditions of Her Founders, Pietas and Fallen Cities: America and Vergil’s “Aeneid”, Catholic Claims and the Witness of Fr. This was not a war that was based on political ideology. Have today’s policymakers learned anything from the debacle a century ago? There is no doubt that the reincarnation of Prussian militarism under the Führer, the new Kaiser who saw himself as a new (and superior) Napoleon, needed to be resisted and contained. Will you help us remain a refreshing oasis in the increasingly contentious arena of modern discourse? Would we see the anti-Christian pogroms in Iraq and Syria if such wars had not stirred the hornets’ nest? This spurred perennial political discontent that helped lead to a federal takeover of agriculture by the Roosevelt administration in the 1930s.
But his administration speedily commenced demonizing the "Huns."