100 Anniversary of US Entry into World War One

We are coming up on the 100th anniversary of the US entering WWI. There has not been much commemoration here in the US. World War One does not loom quite as large for us as World War II does, or as much as it still is a living presence in Europe.

But it got me thinking:

1. Should we have entered?
2. What would have happened in the war had we not entered
3. How would the world be different if we stayed out

 

So should we have entered?

Like most Americans my age, I was taught in school that American isolationism was a bad thing and it made victory of the Allies in both world wars more difficult. When I lived in London, British friends and coworkers would occasional berate me over the US staying out as long as we did. In fact at dinner last week with some British clients, they raised the issue of why the US took so long to get involved in the war.

Yet the older I get and the more of the world I see, the more non-interventionist I become. And when you look at the history, the US was not isolationist. Quite the opposite, we traded actively with everyone. Even in World War One, our armaments industry conducted a brisk trade mostly with the Allies.

So the non-interventionist side of me says of course we should have said out (and traded with anyone whose ships showed up with case to buy whatever -- which really meant the Allies).

In school we are taught that there were two reasons we entered the war -- the Zimmermann Telegram and the Germans engaging in unrestricted submarine warfare.

The Zimmermann Telegram was a joke. Mexico was in the middle of its own civil war at the time and was in no position to threaten the US. When Mexican forces under Pancho Villa attacked the US in 1916, he was badly mauled. While the US military that went after Villa never captured him, Villa and other Mexican forces were unable to stand against the relatively modest (about 10,000) US force sent into Mexico. Had the US mobilized and sent in a full Army, Mexican forces would have been destroyed.

Which really leaves with unrestricted submarine warfare. This really was the causus belli. US ships were getting torpedoed and US sailors were being held as prisoners of war. While part of me thinks that sailing into a war zone is a stupid thing to do, this was a different time, and the rules of commence raiding had yet to take submarines into account. But even today, that might lead to war. That was the reason Kuwaiti oil tankers were reflagged as US ships during the Iran - Iraq War -- the US flag made it less likely for the Iranians to sink the ship.

So while I still think we should have stayed out, the fact of unrestricted submarine warfare made it inevitable we would be dragged in.

As an aside, I read somewhere about a decade or so ago that the original reason many US owned ships fly the Panamanian flag was not due to cost issues or laxer safety rules (though that may be the reason today). Rather it was encouraged by the government before WWII. The thought was that Germans sinking a Panamanian flagged vessel (even though American owned) would be less of a political outrage than sinking a US flagged vessel.