Johnnyreb wrote:WWI was not our business and Wilson made it our business against the people's will. But on the other hand, if we had stayed out of WWI... that would not have stopped the revolution in Russia, it would not have stopped Lenin or Stalin though a negotiated peace would certainly have prevented Hitler.
But had the Nazis never happened, a Weimar Republic sure as hell could not have stopped Stalin from taking all of Europe like he planned to start doing in 1943, except for Hitler pre-empting him.
And had we stayed out of WWI, our Army might well have continued to be more of a frontier constabulary of less than 100,000 troops, half or more of whom stayed in the Phillipines, with no gathering greater than 800 men in the US, than a bonafide military with a staff college and so forth.
And then, later, when Stalin was taking all of Europe, there would have been no US Army, and no Arsenal of Democracy, and likely no Atom Bomb standing in his way and persuading him not to just go for it once Hitler was dead.
If we did not get involved, the Kaiser is probably still the leader of Germany after the war, although most likely with less direct power (he was actually already constitutionally bound, which is something people tend to forget). The reason Wilson wanted to go to war when he did was that both the Brits and French were about at the end of their rope. Of course so were the Germans - it was more or less set up for a compromise peace and both the Germans and allies were talking about it. So what would that have looked like?
Of course we don't know for sure, but at least looking at what was contemplated by both sides, probably the Germans loose most or all of their overseas colonies to the French/British; western Europe probably stays more or less status quo ante bellum . The big looser would have been Russia, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was more or less in the books, the French/Brits probably would have pushed for Polish independence and probably gotten it although it would have been a bit of a rump state. Ukrainian independence was already covered but would have been ratified by the allies, most likely the Germans go ahead and annexed the Baltics as a condition for formally giving up most/all of their overseas colonies and recognizing Poland.
The Austro-Hungarian confederation still falls apart, but the Austrians probably still hold on to Bohemia and Moravia and possibly Croatia as well. Turkey is still screwed and probably does not end up much different than they did loosing all of their Arabian possessions. The Serbs end up loosing some territory at least because everyone hated them except the Russians and the Russians would be in no position to do anything about it.
So in the "new" 1919 Europe, Britain and France both gain net/net, German gains locally but looses overseas for probably a small net gain, Austro-Hungary is a slight looser but since they fall apart net/net weaker than before. The big looser is Russia which looses a bunch of very valuable territory and population.
No doubt the details would be different, but something along these lines. Russia still goes communist, but they would be "contained" by the Central Powers and do not have the same working relationship with France that they had going into WW1 (which is glossed over, but led to WW1 at least to close to as much as what the Germans and Austrians did).
So the question is would this be better or worse than what we got? This is obviously a value judgement, but I am going to say better because it is very unlikely the Nazis (or Communists) take a hold of Germany or anywhere else in Western Europe and thus a WW2 scenario becomes very unlikely.
As for the US, I actually think a lot of the fault lines that impact us today started with Wilson's WW1 power grab and it is much less likely that any of that happens. We still have the race issues coming down the pike, but of course Wilson made that worse too (segregating the civil service, etc...)