THE LOSING OF WWI:

Aside from the general exhaustion of the warring nations, a major development was occurring to the east. The war had caused great hardship in Russia. Food was in short supply. Workers went on strike, and housewives marched in protest. Army regiments mutinied. In March 1917, Czar Nicholas II abdicated, and when his brother refused the throne, a provisional, social democratic government was set up in Russia. As historian E. H. Carr wrote, "The revolutionary parties played no direct part in the making of the revolution."

Despite the people's revulsion, Alexander Kerensky's provisional government stayed in the war at the insistence of the Allies and Wilson, who by then had sent American boys to Europe. When Lenin returned to Russia from Zurich, he made his Bolsheviks the one antiwar party in the country. This gave Lenin the opportunity to become the world's first communist dictator. An earlier negotiated settlement would have eased the Russians' misery and probably averted the second revolution. Lenin immediately accepted Germany's peace terms, including territorial concessions, and left the war. (Toward the end of the war, the Allies invaded the new Soviet Union, ostensibly to safeguard war materiel. The invasion created long-lasting distrust of the West.)

Thus, the first likely consequence of U.S. prolongation of the war was the Bolshevik Revolution (and the Cold War). Communism -- its threat of worldwide revolution and its wholesale slaughter -- was a key factor in the rise of the European despotism that sparked World War II. (Had the Bolsheviks come to power anyway and Germany had won the war, Germany would have thrown the communists out.)

Entry of fresh American power gave the advantage to the Allies, and Germany signed the armistice in November 1918. Before allowing that, Wilson, in the name of spreading democracy, demanded that the Kaiser go. The president thus was responsible for the removal of what would have likely been an important institutional obstacle to Hitler and his aggressive ambitions.

The armistice set the stage for the Paris Peace Conference and the Treaty of Versailles. Article 231 of that Treaty -- the infamous war guilt clause -- said:

The Allied and Associated Governments affirm and Germany accepts the responsibility of Germany and her allies for causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed upon them by the aggression of Germany and her allies.

Germany was to become an outcast nation on the basis of its war guilt. The problem was that Germany was not uniquely guilty. World War I was the product of a complex political dynamic in which nations other than Germany -- Russia and France, for example -- played important roles. Nevertheless, Germany was branded as the perpetrator.

The victors imposed crushing reparations on Germany for the cost of the war. That was contrary to Wilson's original, nonpunitive program (The Fourteen Points) and to the prearmistice agreement with Germany. But at the peace conference, he acquiesced to England and France in order to achieve his dream of a League of Nations. 

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