I don't get this assumption by Kazin in the piece:
> How would the war have ended if America had not intervened? The carnage might have continued for another year or two until citizens in the warring nations, who were already protesting the endless sacrifices required, forced their leaders to reach a settlement.
I don't see how any of the belligerent powers would have moved towards a negotiated settlement if they'd only bled a little more. By 1917 they'd already poured out absolutely staggering quantities of blood, buckets and buckets of it, and their positions had not softened in the least. If anything, they'd become stiffer -- negotiation became less and less feasible as the casualty figures increased, because it seemed to the both the public and the politicians to be a betrayal of the all the sacrifices that had been made. (People have always had a poor understanding of sunk costs.) Tossing even more sacrifices onto the pile wouldn't have changed that dynamic.
What seems like a more likely outcome is what actually happened in Russia: the fighting rages pointlessly on, the situation locked in stasis, even more money and blood pouring down the hole, until the people back home literally can't afford bread anymore -- at which point there is some kind of social revolution that turns the existing order completely upside down. And this repeats itself until enough combatants on one side or the other have fallen into chaos that the side overall can't fight effectively anymore, at which point the other side becomes the "victor" more or less by default, simply by virtue of having collapsed slightly more slowly than everyone else.
And what comes after that? It's hard to say, but a Europe where the Russian experience was repeated in several other major powers doesn't sound like the starting point of a notably happier timeline than the one we actually got.
> How would the war have ended if America had not intervened? The carnage might have continued for another year or two until citizens in the warring nations, who were already protesting the endless sacrifices required, forced their leaders to reach a settlement.
I don't see how any of the belligerent powers would have moved towards a negotiated settlement if they'd only bled a little more. By 1917 they'd already poured out absolutely staggering quantities of blood, buckets and buckets of it, and their positions had not softened in the least. If anything, they'd become stiffer -- negotiation became less and less feasible as the casualty figures increased, because it seemed to the both the public and the politicians to be a betrayal of the all the sacrifices that had been made. (People have always had a poor understanding of sunk costs.) Tossing even more sacrifices onto the pile wouldn't have changed that dynamic.
What seems like a more likely outcome is what actually happened in Russia: the fighting rages pointlessly on, the situation locked in stasis, even more money and blood pouring down the hole, until the people back home literally can't afford bread anymore -- at which point there is some kind of social revolution that turns the existing order completely upside down. And this repeats itself until enough combatants on one side or the other have fallen into chaos that the side overall can't fight effectively anymore, at which point the other side becomes the "victor" more or less by default, simply by virtue of having collapsed slightly more slowly than everyone else.
And what comes after that? It's hard to say, but a Europe where the Russian experience was repeated in several other major powers doesn't sound like the starting point of a notably happier timeline than the one we actually got.