A victorious Germany in WWI would have prevented the Nazis -- but may have been nearly as bad

Defeat in 1918 unquestionably poisoned the politics of the Weimar Republic, and I agree with Kazin that without it Hitler would probably never have risen from obscurity. But would either Germany or other nations have been immune to the viruses of fascism and racialist nationalism? Being on the winning side did not immunize Italy and Japan against those infections. One likely result of a German victory might have been the defeat of the Bolsheviks in Russia, but before we relish that possibility think about what a chilling effect that would have had on later anti-colonial movements. Or consider how in later decades Gandhi might have fared in a German-dominated India or Mandela in a German-reinforced Boer South Africa.

Finally, as a person of faith, Kazin lays down a luminous moral dictum—“to lead a bitterly divided nation into a war of choice is never a good idea.” Like most such maxims, this one tends to evaporate in the real world. This country has fought only two wars when it was not bitterly divided: In 1898 we had John Hay’s “splendid little war” against pushover Spain and after Pearl Harbor we fought our “good war”—which has misled us into expecting unanimity and bipartisanship as the norm.

Whether a war is one of choice or necessity depends mostly on who is interpreting it. Plenty of people in 1917 believed this was a war of necessity, and neutrality would have carried its own costs, such as almost certain curtailment of overseas shipping, attacks on our ships and citizens, and unappeased, raging wrath from war hawks in the Theodore Roosevelt camp. Our ideal standard, World War II, was not a war of choice in Europe because Hitler declared war on us after Pearl Harbor—but only after FDR had chosen to pursue a hostile course less and less short of war. In the Pacific, Pearl Harbor provided the perfect occasion to jump on the bandwagon, but the much-despised “revisionists” of that era were not wrong to point out that we had made hostile and provocative moves toward Japan. Unlike Kazin and like Wilson, I think moral maxims about wars of choice are like siren songs, seductive to the ear but muddling to the mind when making momentous decisions.