Robert Barnes has often spoken of how today’s perilous geopolitical situation is reminiscent of that on the eve of the Great War (World War I). Cloistered and insular political elites are displaying the same willful ignorance and haughty arrogance, the same incompetence and destructive disdain for future unintended consequences, as those earlier pompous leaders of Germany, Great Britain, Austria-Hungry, France, Italy, the Ottoman Empire, Czarist Russia, and the United States of America did then. Below are three famous observers lamenting on the Realpolitik consequences of this deadly folly:

Winston Churchill. statement to William Griffen, editor of the New York Enquirer in August of 1936

“America should have minded her own business and stayed out of the World War. If you hadn’t entered the war the Allies would have made peace with Germany in the Spring of 1917. Had we made peace then there would have been no collapse in Russia followed by Communism, no breakdown in Italy followed by Fascism, and Germany would not have signed the Versailles Treaty, which has enthroned Nazism in Germany. If America had stayed out of the war, all these ‘isms’ wouldn’t to-day be sweeping the continent of Europe and breaking down parliamentary government, and if England had made peace early in 1917, it would have saved over one million British, French, American, and other lives.”

America’s greatest journalist, H L Mencken on World War I

Baltimore Evening Sun, Nov. 11, 1931, “A Bad Guess,” H. L. Mencken

“Most of England’s appalling troubles today are due to a bad guess: she went into the war on the wrong side in 1914. The theory of her statesmen, in those days, was that, by joining France and Russia, she would give a death-blow to a dangerous rival, Germany, and so be free to run the world. But the scheme failed to work; moreover, it had unexpected and almost fatal results. Not only did Germany come out of the mess a dangerous rival still; France also became a rival, and a very formidable one. Worse, the United States was pumped up to immense proportions, and began to challenge England’s control of the world’s markets. The results are now visible: England has three competitors instead of one, and is steadily going downhill. If she had gone into the war on the German side she’d be in a much better situation today. The Germans would be grateful for the help and willing to pay for it (while the French are not); the French would be down and out, and hence unable to menace the peace of Europe; Germany would have Russia in Europe and there would be no Bolshevik [communist] nuisance; England would have all of Siberia and Central Asia, and there would be no Japanese threat and no Indian revolt; and the United States would still be a docile British colony, as it was in 1914. . . .

“The United States made a similar mistake in 1917. Our real interests at the time were on the side of the Germans, whose general attitude of mind is far more American than that of any other people. If we had gone in on their side, England would be moribund today, and the dreadful job of pulling her down, which will now take us forty or filthy years, would be over. We’d have a free hand in the Pacific, and Germany would be running the whole [European] Continent like a house of correction. In return for our connivance there she’d be glad to give us whatever we wanted elsewhere. There would be no Bolshevism [communism] in Russia and no Fascism in Italy. Our debtors would all be able to pay us. The Japs would be docile, and we’d be reorganizing Canada and probably also Australia. But we succumbed to a college professor [Wilson] who read Matthew Arnold, just as the English succumbed to a gay old dog who couldn’t bear to think of Prussian MP’s shutting down the Paris night-clubs.

“As for the mistake the Russians made, I leave it to history.”

And world-renowned economist and historian Murray N. Rothbard, in Wall Street Banks and American Foreign Policy:

“American entry into World War I in April 1917 prevented negotiated peace between the warring powers, and drove the Allies forward into a peace of unconditional surrender and dismemberment, a peace which, as we have seen, set the stage for World War II. American entry thus cost countless lives on both sides, caused chaos and disruption throughout central and eastern Europe at war’s end, and the consequent rise of Bolshevism, fascism, and Nazism to power in Europe. In this way, Woodrow Wilson’s decision to enter the war may have been the single most fateful action of the twentieth century, causing untold and unending misery and destruction. But Morgan profits were expanded and assured.”

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