The Roots of World War II
7th June 2015
Counterfactual history is a risky endeavor. But the events that followed America’s entry into World War I strongly suggest that had President Woodrow Wilson permanently “kept us out of war,” as his 1916 presidential campaign slogan boasted, the conditions that produced World War II would not have been sown.
The Great War began in August 1914. America did not enter the war until April 1917. By that time both sides were exhausted from years of grinding warfare. There is ample reason to believe that had nothing new been added to the equation, the belligerents would have agreed to a negotiated settlement. No victors, no vindictiveness.
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Thus, the first likely consequence of U.S. prolongation of the war was the Bolshevik Revolution (and the Cold War). Communism — its threat of worldwide revolution and its wholesale slaughter — was a key factor in the rise of the European despotism that sparked World War II. (Had the Bolsheviks come to power anyway and Germany had won the war, Germany would have thrown the communists out.)
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The second likely consequence, then, of U.S. prolongation of the war was the rise of Nazi Germany.