If Only The U.S. Had Stayed Out Of World War I

I'm pretty certain this belongs in a different forum, but it's 3am here in the UK, early saturday morning and waaaaay past my bedtime. If I have the wrong forum I apologise, buts it was the best 'fit' I could figure at this time. So my apologies, but please move mods if I have got it wrong.

OK.....outside the box, crying over spilt milk even maybe......but it makes a lot of sense to me.
Please visit the link for the full article as I can't post in it's entirety.
A touch of It's a Wonderful Life, and what if's?.......but aren't we supposed to learn from history?
I leave you to decide....

The first big wave of embracing a liberal international economic order - relatively free trade, rising international capital flows and rapidly growing global economic integration - resulted in something remarkable.

Between 1870 and 1914, there was a 45-year span of rising living standards, stable prices, massive capital investment and prolific technological progress. In terms of overall progress, these four-plus decades have never been equaled — either before or since.

Then came the Great War. It involved a scale of total industrial mobilization and financial mayhem that was unlike any that had gone before. In the case of Great Britain, for example, its national debt increased 14-fold.

In addition, England’s price level doubled, its capital stock was depleted, most offshore investments were liquidated and universal wartime conscription left it with a massive overhang of human and financial liabilities.

Despite all that, England still stood out as the least devastated of the major European countries.

With all that in mind, one important question only rises in importance: Was the United States’ intervention in April 1917 warranted or not?

And did it only end up prolonging the European slaughter?

Never mind that it resulted in a cockamamie peace, which gave rise to totalitarianism among the defeated powers. Even conventional historians like Niall Ferguson admit as much.

Had President Woodrow Wilson not misled the U.S. on a messianic crusade, Europe’s Great War would have ended in mutual exhaustion in 1917.

Both sides would have gone home battered and bankrupt — but would not have presented any danger to the rest of mankind.

Indeed, absent Wilson’s crusade, there would have been no allied victory, no punitive peace — and no war reparations. Nor would there have been a Leninist coup in Petrograd — or later on, the emergence of Stalin’s barbaric regime.

Altogether, in six short years from 1914 to 1920, $40 billion of U.S. GDP turned into $92 billion — a sizzling 15 percent annual rate of gain.

The depression that could have been avoided

Needless to say, these figures reflected an inflationary, war-swollen economy. After all, the U.S. had loaned the Allies massive amounts of money — all to purchase grain, pork, wool, steel, munitions and ships from the U.S.

This transfer amounted to nearly 15 percent of GDP, or an equivalent of $2 trillion in today’s economy. It also represented a form of vendor finance that was destined to vanish at war’s end. As it happened, the U.S. did experience a brief but deep recession in 1920. But it was not a thoroughgoing end-of-war one that would “detox” the economy.

The day of reckoning was merely postponed. It finally arrived in 1933 when the depression hit with full force. The U.S. economy was cratering — and Germany embarked on its disastrous “recovery” experience under the leadership of Adolf Hitler.

These two events — along with so many of the above-listed offenses later on — could have been avoided if only the U.S. had shown the wisdom of staying out of World War I.

Please read the whole article here....not just pass comments on snippets I have posted.....it's not a long article I promise. But it certainly should make politicians the world over stop and think about their actions.

www.zerohedge.com...

Thank you
Rainbows
Jane

This may seem like a simplistic reply. Follow the money. It is deep rabbit hole, but if you do your research, and there is much to be done, it will be easier to wrap your brain around it. WW2 was just a continuation of the first one. Ditto for the next big one.

a reply to: angelchemuel

You know how they have those statistics of who is getting richer now-a-days? Even though the economy as a whole is weak. What if we looked back at those four decades?

I am guessing we do not have similar statistics for those periods but I will venture a guess. Who was making money and more telling, who was not? World circumstances changed in order to re-direct revenue flow.

Yeah, tin foil hat-ish, but then again this is not an ESPN forum.

a reply to: angelchemuel

If you also want to discount the direct and indirect aid that the US supplied to GB beyond the troops, then without a doubt you would be speaking German from that era onward. Your view is very popular especially about WWII and rears its head time and time again here on ATS. Wishful thinking I would call it.

originally posted by: Aliensun
a reply to: angelchemuel

If you also want to discount the direct and indirect aid that the US supplied to GB beyond the troops, then without a doubt you would be speaking German from that era onward. Your view is very popular especially about WWII and rears its head time and time again here on ATS. Wishful thinking I would call it.

BS, Before the USA got involved the Germans wanted to end the war with Britain. A certain group of people told the Brits to keep fighting and with that they would lure the USA into the war also. Let's say a negotiation for Palestine was crafted and I'll let you do the rest.

Not looking at a financial standpoint, but on military strategy: if the US did not get involved most of Europe would be under German rule.

This is also the case for WW2. It isn't necessarily that America has such a better military than any other country, it's the fact that they came in after years of war when most soldiers were exhausted from fighting day in and day out.

originally posted by: ArnoldNonymous
Not looking at a financial standpoint, but on military strategy: if the US did not get involved most of Europe would be under German rule.

Germany wanted to end the war and to return to the way things were before the war started. That's a pretty nice deal considering Germany had whooped Britain and France... The reason why the war continued is because a group from within Germany betrayed them and then got the USA into the war also. The Balfour Declaration was the deal sealer and the people who gave that declaration to England were the traitors from Germany...

Germany had no ambition of taking over Europe.. That's just some Western propaganda bs to steer you off on the wrong track. Germany were forced to fight in the end whether they liked it or not, they had no avenue out of it and the same applied to Turkey also.

a reply to: DarknStormy

I'm not a huge ww1 history buff so I will have to look more into that. Of course they're not going to publicize this in history books in schools.

I do know the first Treaty of Versailles after the war was way too oppressive against Germany and it caused a massive depression in the country. It almost guaranteed ww2 would occur.

Thanks for your post, it's always nice to hear from people who know more about a specific topic.

It's possibly true, but the US really had no intention of getting involved militarily.

As in WW2, they offered financial and economic help but avoided military involvement till they couldn't avoid it any more.

British intelligence intercepted a telegram by Germany to the Mexican government asking them to invade the US; and they naturally passed this on to US intelligence.

Act of war!

In WW2 of course, Germany declared war on the US...otherwise Roosevelt would have continued dragging his feet.

originally posted by: ArnoldNonymous

I do know the first Treaty of Versailles after the war was way too oppressive against Germany and it caused a massive depression in the country. It almost guaranteed ww2 would occur.

Don't take my word for it but I'm pretty sure that the Treaty of Versailles is where Germany found out that the Zionists in their country had betrayed them. The Palestine issue came up and that's when Germany understood they had been had.

Thanks for your post, it's always nice to hear from people who know more about a specific topic.

I'm not saying I'm correct so don't take my word for it, look these things up yourself and convince yourself or debunk them