United States' Involvement in the First World Essay

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United States' Involvement in the First World War

America's Involvement in the First World War

The president is well aware that Americans often face the temptation to disengage from the rest of the world, especially when the issue at hand has to do with military involvement. I, personally, expected Americans to recoil from President Wilson's proposal to join the European war and fight against Germany, first, because they usually "are skeptical about military adventures in general," (McManus, 2013) and secondly, because the United State's direct interest in this intervention was not clear. Could this issue have been more of a bona fide problem, rather than a forthright (direct) threat?

Let us first clear something up. President Wilson claimed that the leadership in Germany is self-centered, and completely insensitive of the interests of its people. That its warfare acts had to be stopped, because the peace and freedom of the world was at stake. But this was nothing new. The issue of threatened world peace had not just arisen. It had began back when Germany's government rejected the United States peace offers, and resumed its indiscriminate submarine attacks, leading to the collapse of the diplomatic negotiations between President Wilson and Germany's leadership (Doenecke, 2013).

This, coupled with Austria' failed attempts to restore the collapsed talks, ought to have been an early indication that President Wilson's attempts to arrange a peace statute would most likely be unsuccessful.

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If threatened world peace was the real motivation behind America's intention to get involved in the European war, then the intervention should have began at this point and not necessarily after the attacks, precisely, on American trading vessels.

President Wilson, in his declaration of war, claimed that there was need to protect the honor of the United States. Realists, however, held a contrary opinion. For instance, Kennan (as cited in Doenecke, 2013) is of the opinion that America's decision to join the war has little to do with guarding its honor. The overriding aim is to ensure that Germany did not defeat Britain. This is legitimate, given the strong cultural and business ties between the two nations. However, leveraging of human fear to facilitate the advancement of particular goals not only destabilizes people's ways of life, but also defies the basic principles of good public governance.

Is it possible that the president's decision to get America involved in the European war was power-driven? Save for the submarine attacks on American vessels, there had been no evidence of direct (immediate) threat. Smith (as cited in Doenecke, 2013) argues that President Wilson feared that the world's power-balance would be destroyed, if Germany emerged victorious. Are such power benefits supposed to override the core responsibility….....

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