OPINION:
THE DELUGE: THE GREAT WAR, AMERICA AND THE REMAKING OF THE GLOBAL ORDER, 1916-1931
By Adam Tooze
Viking, $40, 627 pages
World War I swept away the old order like a deluge. The four-year conflict ushered in momentous political, economic and cultural changes. By the time the guns fell silent, the Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires were in ruins. Revolutions broke out all over Europe. China became embroiled in a civil war. Britain and France, although victorious at a great cost of blood and treasure and with substantial American financial and military help, emerged economically weakened. There was, however, one major beneficiary of the conflict — the United States. It attained for the first time the status of an undisputed global power.
Just how did the United States become a superpower after the Great War?
For one thing, none of the fighting took place on its territory, thus sparing the entire civilian population and the country’s infrastructure. By 1917, all of the participants were exhausted. America entered the conflict late and was ready to fight with a fresh force. It had a large population, a massive industrial base and booming commerce and agriculture.
Its economy was galvanized by heavy investments in arms and war material, and it had plenty of excess capital, lending hundreds of million dollars to its Allied partners whose economies badly needed the loans. It’s doubtful they could have successfully pressed on with the war without the United States.
Word War I was triggered by the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Habsburg throne, on June 28, 1914, in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, which was a recently acquired part of the empire. He was killed by a young Serbian nationalist. Ironically, Ferdinand favored providing wider political rights to the Slavs living in the Habsburg Monarchy. His assassination led to Austria-Hungary issuing an ultimatum against Serbia. The crisis quickly escalated into a general war.
Some historians claim that European leaders “sleepwalked” into the war — overtaken by events — without careful deliberation and miscalculating the results of their actions. Others primarily blame Germany and its junior partner, Austria-Hungary, for starting it by issuing a harsh ultimate that the kaiser backed with a “blank check.” Still others point the finger at the Russians for prematurely and provocatively mobilizing their troops. Who was responsible? The historic debate has been raging for a century.
The conflict pitted the Allies — Britain, France, the Russian Empire, Japan, Italy, Serbia and Romania — against the Central Powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria. In 1917, the United States joined the Allies following Germany’s unrestricted submarine warfare and its secret promise to Mexico of U.S. territories if it sided with the kaiser’s armies.
Ultimately, more than 70 million people were mobilized in the conflict that involved chemical weapons, aerial bombardments, trench warfare, hand-to-hand combat and economic blockades. About 16 million died, including nearly 7 million civilians. More than 20 million were wounded or died of illnesses.
Historian Adam Tooze writes in his massive, well-researched and eminently readable book that World War I had seen the first effort to put together a coalition of liberal powers to manage the unwieldy dynamics of the modern world. He notes that the Allied coalition was based on military power, political commitment and financial resources. But not necessarily on completely shared war aims.
“The Great War may have begun in the eyes of many participants as a clash of empires, a classic great power war, but it ended as something far more morally and politically charged — a crusading victory for a coalition that proclaimed itself the champion of a new world order,” Mr. Tooze writes.
Heading that coalition was President Woodrow Wilson who led his country into war in the face of initial public reluctance.
Wilson’s slogan for his 1916 White House re-election campaign was “He kept us out of war.” After the country entered the hostilities, the American president had lofty aims — to make the world safe for democracy, uphold international order and freedom of the seas, and to crush militarism and autocracy once and for all.
The peace talks were a bitter disappointment for Wilson.
“He came not to take sides but to make peace,” Mr. Tooze writes. “The first dramatic assertion of American leadership in the twentieth century was not directed toward ensuring that the ’right’ side won, but that no one did. … That meant that the war could have only one outcome: ’peace without victory.’”
Not long after the peace conference, the critically ill Wilson was gone. By the 1920s, the United States became increasingly inward-looking, still remaining a global power but one that virtually retreated from world affairs. The Treaty of Versailles formally ending the war eventually fell apart with the advent of fascism and Nazism.
In 1929, the Wall Street stock market crash ushered in the Great Depression. It quickly spread to become a global economic crisis. In 1932, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected president. FDR launched his New Deal program that relied on massive government public works projects to combat a staggering unemployment. “Domestic change was brought at the price of international withdrawal,” Mr. Tooze writes. “But as the international challenges of the 1930s intensified, Roosevelt’s administration did not stand aside. Out of the New Deal would emerge an American power state capable of exerting influence on a global stage in a far more positive, interventionist sense than anything seen in the aftermath of the first World War.”
Perhaps the greatest lesson the United States drew from the Great War was that battlefield victories are not always enough and that, at times, waging peace successfully can be more crucial in securing victory.
That lesson is as relevant today as it was in the last century.
• Frank T. Csongos is a former Washington bureau chief of United Press International and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
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