John Cooper and Michael Kazin have been debating the wisdom of America entering WWI. In the latest round of argument, Kazin imagines what Germany winning might have meant:
Cooper is certainly correct about Woodrow Wilson’s motives for entering World War I. He did wager that the blood of American soldiers could make a “new world order” more likely. But if a triumphant Germany—no sure thing, even if the U.S. had stayed neutral—had been a pillar of that order, what’s the worst that would have happened? At least, it would have meant that Adolf Hitler would be remembered, if at all, as the recipient of two Iron Crosses who still failed to make it past the rank of lance corporal. It also might have given Germany’s socialist party (the SPD) – the largest in the world and one committed to democratic rule and cultural tolerance – an influential role in combatting attempts to suppress national minorities and reining in the militarist state.
But John Cooper insists that a German victory would have been disastrous:
Defeat in 1918 unquestionably poisoned the politics of the Weimar Republic, and I agree with Kazin that without it Hitler would probably never have risen from obscurity. But would either Germany or other nations have been immune to the viruses of fascism and racialist nationalism? Being on the winning side did not immunize Italy and Japan against those infections. One likely result of a German victory might have been the defeat of the Bolsheviks in Russia, but before we relish that possibility think about what a chilling effect that would have had on later anti-colonial movements. Or consider how in later decades Gandhi might have fared in a German-dominated India or Mandela in a German-reinforced Boer South Africa.
(Video: Hitch recites Wilfred Owen’s WWI poem Dulce et Decorum est.)
The Dish 