The World: A Brief Introduction

by Richard Haass

  What brought the Americans into the war in April 1917 was the German decision to engage in unrestricted submarine warfare, in which Germany used submarines to target ships carrying American supplies to stop them from reaching Britain and France. Americans who were on board these ships lost their lives, and the public outcry in the United States was considerable. It is possible that the United States also entered the war in part owing to the publication in early 1917 of a secret diplomatic message (the so-called Zimmermann Telegram) in which Germany promised Mexico the territory of Texas and several other states in return for its entering an alliance with Germany should the United States enter the war on the other side. Whatever the explanation, the U.S. entry into the war was significant, because it was on the threshold of becoming a major power, one with a population of 100 million and a growing economy and military. U.S. involvement in the fighting helped to tip the scales against Germany and bring about an end to the war sooner than would have been the case had it remained on the sidelines.

  The war itself was the deadliest and most expensive conflict to date due to innovations such as modern railways, the telegraph, mass conscription, more powerful long-range weapons, and the use of airpower. Adding to the cost was the gradual ascendance of defense over offense; if there was an image of World War I, it was that of the trenches where so many fought and died. As many as 200,000 British forces were killed or wounded in a single campaign in which the British and their allies sought unsuccessfully to seize the Gallipoli peninsula from the Ottomans. (This campaign nearly ended the political career of a young government minister by the name of Winston Churchill.) The use of chemical weapons only added to the human cost of the war. The gap between the naive, even optimistic expectation of what war would bring and the horrific reality was and is breathtaking. The poetry of Wilfred Owen—“Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots, / But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; / Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots / Of gas-shells dropping softly behind”—captures this contrast as well as any history book.

  The war’s cost was immense and horrific: some nine million soldiers lost their lives. Another twenty-one million were wounded. Civilian deaths numbered in the millions or even tens of millions if those who succumbed to infectious disease made worse by the war are counted. All this was at a time when the world’s population was on the order of 1.5 billion, roughly one-fifth of what it is today. You would need to multiply each of these statistics by five in order to come up with a figure that would represent proportionate costs were an event of this magnitude to happen now.

  It was thus a war that was costly for combatants and civilians alike. Adding insult to injury, it was a war that resolved little. World War I and its aftermath sowed many of the seeds for the second great war of the century that came merely two decades later. It is one of history’s ironies and tragedies that “The Great War” and “The War to End All Wars,” as World War I was dubbed, turned out to be but a prelude to another, even greater war.

  THE END OF WAR AND THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH

  Interestingly, there was more than a little optimism in the wake of World War I, and diplomatic efforts to shape what was to be the postwar world began while fighting was still under way. Woodrow Wilson, the twenty-eighth president of the United States, prioritized the creation of a standing international organization (which became the League of Nations) that he believed would all but preclude such a war from ever happening again by eliminating what would cause countries to go to war. This was the last of his Fourteen Points, first articulated in a speech to Congress in January 1918.

  President Wilson’s points were for the most part generous and idealistic. He wanted all diplomatic agreements not just to be made public but also, when possible, to be negotiated in the open. There was to be freedom of navigation at sea at all times. Trade barriers were to come down. Armaments were to be collectively reduced through what we today would call arms control. Colonial arrangements would be adjusted so that the claims of the people being governed would be equal to the claims of the colonial government. (This principle of giving more voice to those governed grew into what became known as the right of self-determination.) Borders throughout Europe were to be adjusted to reflect national realities and to undo past acts of aggression.

  President Wilson’s belief that founding the League of Nations would be the best guarantee against future aggression by Germany—or anyone else—was not universally shared. In particular, France, led by Georges Clemenceau, the host of the Paris Peace Conference that was to bring a formal end to World War I, was preoccupied with ensuring that Germany would be sufficiently weakened so that it could not wage war again. What made the French particularly uneasy about the future was that Russia, its traditional ally in opposing Prussian and then German might, could not be counted on because it was in the throes of civil war, a development that led Russia to withdraw from the war effort. (Russia and Germany signed a separate treaty in 1918, one very much in Germany’s favor.)

  The revolution and subsequent Russian civil war, fought between militant Bolsheviks led by Vladimir Lenin and more moderate Mensheviks, was triggered by the cost of participation in World War I and by Russia’s own economic, political, and social shortcomings. Russia’s civil war would go on for years, ending in the victory of the Bolsheviks. By the end of 1922, this led to the founding of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.), or, as it was more widely known, the Soviet Union. It was a country nominally headed by a government but in practice dominated by its Communist Party. The Soviet Union would play a central role in two of the great struggles of the twentieth century, namely, World War II and the Cold War.

  World War I ended in November 1918 after Germany, following a failed offensive during the spring of 1918, expressed its desire for peace and signed an armistice. Two months later delegates from all the protagonists (other than Germany and Russia) met in France, and by the end of June 1919 agreed to the Treaty of Versailles. Germany accepted blame for the war, agreed to pay costly financial penalties known as reparations to the governments of the countries it had fought against, and returned to France the territory of Alsace-Lorraine that it had annexed following the Franco-Prussian War half a century before. Germany also ceded smaller amounts of territory to Belgium and Poland, forfeited its overseas colonies, accepted sharp reductions in the size of its army and navy, agreed to a limited French military occupation, and ceded economic control of the coal and iron mines in its Saar region to France for fifteen years. The powers agreed to establish a League of Nations, which represented an embrace of idealism over realism, the latter holding that power considerations alone drive a country’s behavior. (This is something very different from “realism” as a foreign policy orientation that seeks to shape the external behavior of other countries rather than their internal nature.) For its part, the League rested on the idea of collective security, whereby all powers would uphold the status quo and work together to turn back any challenges, and the stronger powers would not use their might to make adjustments in their favor.

  A separate treaty parceled out significant parts of the Ottoman Empire to Greece, Italy, France, and Britain. A number of independent countries, including Czechoslovakia, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia, were established in Eastern Europe. The majority of the countries that make up today’s Middle East got their start when the Ottoman Empire collapsed in the wake of the war and the region’s map was redrawn by British and French officials more interested in dividing the spoils than in laying the foundation for regional stability. Self-determination was largely limited to Europe; the inhabitants of the Middle East, Asia, and Africa mostly lost out, part of the price Wilson paid to keep the major powers who wanted to maintain their colonial holdings supportive of the new League of Nations.

  World War I toppled four empires, and with President Wilson’s promotion of self-determination nationalism asserted itself throughout the world. Nationalism in its most basic form
has to do with populations in a particular area coming to see themselves as sharing a distinct identity, the result of a common history, language, religion, ethnicity, and/or set of political beliefs. Nationalism often gains momentum when people are ruled by those they consider outsiders. Frustrated with their status as subjects or a colony, populations desire to rule themselves, to be independent, to enjoy religious freedoms and speak in their native language and shape their own destiny.

  President Wilson returned home to the United States from France in mid-1919. He went on a whirlwind trip around the country in a futile effort to translate domestic political support for the League into persuading a majority of senators to vote for it. Working against Wilson were both isolationists, who did not want the United States involved in the world to any significant degree, and unilateralists, who wanted the United States to retain a free hand and not be constrained by commitments to the League. The exhausted president returned to Washington, only to suffer a stroke. Weeks later, in November 1919, the Senate defeated the proposed treaty that would have led to the United States becoming a founding member of the new organization.

  The League of Nations—which was created, in part, to peacefully settle disputes that might arise between countries—never recovered from the failure of the United States to join. It also suffered from a requirement for unanimity before collective action could be taken and an inability to enforce its decisions. The truth, though, is the League failed less because of its structural shortcomings than from the fundamental reality that the countries at its core, above all Britain and France, lacked the will and the means to act on behalf of its principles. At this moment in history, the United States, Great Britain, and France were more committed to pacifism than they were to building and maintaining an international order. The Europeans were depleted after World War I, while the United States was determined to avoid being embroiled in Europe’s conflicts.

  THE PATH TO WAR (AGAIN)

  Nothing captured the empty idealism of the age so much as the Kellogg-Briand Pact, which was initially signed by fifteen countries in 1928 and eventually included 62 signatories. The parties committed not to resort to war to settle disputes among them. It was less an act of serious foreign policy than an alternative to it—a high-minded statement without teeth. Interestingly, among the original signatories were Germany, Japan, and Italy, the three countries most responsible for triggering World War II a decade later.

  Meanwhile, the major countries were fast coming undone from within. Germany for its part established a parliamentary democracy (known as the Weimar Republic) in the aftermath of World War I. The country labored under the weight of a lack of democratic experience, reparations, and hyperinflation that destroyed the value of its currency and much of Germany’s middle class with it. Internal stability began to break down.

  Politics everywhere were affected by the Great Depression that began in 1929. A lack of prudent regulation and reckless speculation combined to bring about a stock market crash in the United States. The crash in turn left many individuals and businesses unable to pay their debts. American gross domestic product (GDP) fell sharply, unemployment soared, and banks failed. The Federal Reserve’s response was inadequate, as it did not take sufficient measures to stimulate the American economy. In addition, the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, which imposed tariffs to discourage imports, led other countries to retaliate in kind and is seen by many observers as having deepened the Depression everywhere by reducing international trade. One school of thought is that significant economic ties, known as economic interdependence, make war too disruptive and hence too costly to contemplate. By decreasing these economic linkages, protectionist trade policies reduced the cost of going to war and thereby increased its likelihood.

  In Germany, the Depression was the final nail in the coffin of the Weimar Republic. Germany needed loans to pay its reparations, but once the Depression hit, its funding dried up and hyperinflation ensued as the government printed more money in a desperate effort to come up with the funds to repay what it owed. The collapse of the Weimar Republic was a textbook case of what happens when democracy and capitalism fail; angry, desperate people became willing to go along with a suspension of the most basic civil liberties in the hope that order and prosperity would be restored. Parties and politicians embracing fascism—a philosophy animated by extreme nationalism that called for government control of virtually all aspects of political and economic life—gained ground in Germany, Italy, Austria, and Japan. By 1932, the Nazi Party had become the largest party in the German parliament; a year later, Adolf Hitler became chancellor. He quickly consolidated power, dismantled democratic protections, formalized harsh discrimination against Jews and others, and began rearming Germany. Hitler broke through the military constraints set by the Versailles Treaty. The absence of a French or British response taught Hitler the dangerous lesson that he could assert German rights as he saw them with little to fear.

  The Soviet Union by the late 1920s and early 1930s was well on its way to being transformed into a Communist country, with a centralized government that possessed even more power than a traditional authoritarian system. It controlled most facets of people’s lives and oversaw most aspects of the economy. Joseph Stalin succeeded Lenin in 1924 and instituted a series of five-year plans to transform the country. Peasants were conscripted to work as free markets were abolished. Millions died of hunger as a result of the imposition of terrible policies, and millions more were imprisoned and, in many cases, executed during Stalin’s effort to consolidate political control.

  History was unfolding in Asia as well as Europe. In China, popular protests against the Qing dynasty, which had failed to modernize China or push back against foreign encroachments on Chinese sovereignty, led to its toppling in 1912, ending some two thousand years of imperial rule. Chinese Nationalists (a non-Communist movement inclined toward authoritarianism) gained control of important parts of the country. But in the early 1930s, Japan, then led by an extreme right-wing nationalist government, attacked and began to control parts of China, setting up a pro-Japan puppet state in Manchuria and in 1937 seizing Shanghai.

  Preoccupied with their domestic challenges associated with the Great Depression, world leaders had little bandwidth for dealing with international challenges. In 1935, Italy’s fascist leader, Benito Mussolini, invaded Abyssinia (Ethiopia). The emperor there appealed to the League of Nations for help. With no serious help forthcoming, Italy readily conquered the country. The League proved feckless, instituting some weak economic sanctions against Italy that were rolled back less than a year later. This demonstrated to other nations that aggression could succeed with little or no cost.

  The world’s willingness to accept aggression, initially in China and Ethiopia and subsequently in Europe, came to be known as appeasement. It is best understood as adopting a policy of granting concessions to an ambitious, aggressive country in the hopes its appetite can be satiated and it will then cease to be aggressive. It was subsequently adopted with respect to Germany by most members of the League of Nations and above all by successive British governments, who totally misread the nature of Hitler and the threat he posed to Europe.

  Appeasement reached its height (or, some might say, depth) in Europe in the late 1930s. Hitler sought to gain living space (lebensraum) for “Aryan” Germans of European or Indo-European descent who would assert their “mastery” over “inferior” races. Breaking out of constraints imposed by the Versailles Treaty, Germany withdrew from the League of Nations in 1933, took back the Saarland in 1935, marched into the demilitarized Rhineland in 1936 (the same year it entered into alliances with Japan and Italy), and annexed Austria in early 1938. That September, at a diplomatic conference in Munich, Hitler demanded that Germany be given the Sudetenland, the part of Czechoslovakia that was home to ethnic Germans. Practicing appeasement, the British and French prime ministers went along with this demand in exchange for a pledge from Hitler that he would respect
the independence of what remained of Czechoslovakia. A year later, Hitler went back on his cynical pledge and invaded Czechoslovakia, after which Britain and France extended military commitments to several still independent European countries, including Poland. On September 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland, and what would become World War II was under way.

  Not surprisingly, these events discredited those associated with appeasement, leading to Winston Churchill’s forming a new British government in May 1940 predicated on fighting Germany. On the same day that Churchill became prime minister, Germany invaded Belgium, the Netherlands, and France. By June, France was under German control. Germany followed up by launching an air campaign against Great Britain but eventually called off the operation when British resistance proved effective.

  The United States stayed aloof from the fighting in Europe and Asia but tilted in the direction of the Allies and against Germany, introducing the “lend-lease” program that made war material available to the Allies in late 1940. The American president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, tried to navigate a middle course of doing enough to keep Great Britain in the war and Germany from prevailing but not so much that he would encounter massive resistance from isolationists at home, who argued the country could and should resist involvement in Europe’s conflicts. Meanwhile, the United States instituted a selective embargo against Japan in order to deny it raw materials it needed for continuing its military buildup.

  Russia pursued its own path. In August 1939, the Soviet Union and Germany concluded a nonaggression pact, which among other things gave the Soviet Union pieces of Poland and the Baltic states but also bought it time to prepare for what Stalin judged to be an inevitable war with Hitler. Hitler sought the agreement so he would be free to focus his energies on conquering large areas of Europe and not have to worry about fighting a two-front war. When he had accomplished much of what he set out to do in the west, Hitler turned on the Soviet Union, invading it in June 1941. Much as Napoleon learned a century and a half before, war with a country of the Soviet Union’s size was easier to begin than to win. Indeed, Hitler’s strategic decision weakened Germany significantly and contributed meaningfully to the war’s ultimate outcome.