Article by Ron Unz.
Excerpts:
The Germans had recently [in 1916] won several huge victories, inflicting enormous losses on the Allies in the Battle of the Somme and also completely knocking Rumania out of the war. So riding high on their military success, they emphasized that they were seeking peace on the basis of their strength rather than from any weakness. Unfortunately, the Allies flatly rejected this peace overture, declaring that that the offer proved Germany was close to defeat, so they were determined to hold out for complete victory with major territorial gains.
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If a negotiated peace had ended the wartime slaughter after just a couple of years, the impact upon the history of the world would obviously have been enormous, and not merely because more than half of the many millions of wartime deaths would have been avoided. All the European countries had originally marched off to battle in early August 1914 confident that the conflict would be a short one, probably ending in victory for one side or the other “before the leaves fell.” Instead, the accumulated changes in military technology and the evenly-balanced strength of the two rival alliances soon produced a gridlock of trench-warfare, especially in the West, with millions dying while almost no ground was gained or lost. If the fighting had stopped in 1916 without a victory by either side, such heavy losses in a totally pointless conflict surely would have sobered the postwar political leadership of all the major European states, greatly discouraging the brinksmanship that had originally led to the calamity let alone allowing any repeat. Many have pointed to 1914 as the optimistic high-water mark of Western Civilization, and with the sobering impact of two disastrous years of warfare and millions of unnecessary deaths, that peak might have been sustained indefinitely.
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The extent to which the seemingly undeniable facts of the 1916 peace proposal have disappeared from public discussion is really quite remarkable, and I gradually discovered that Hochschild was far from alone in providing no hint of the story.
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Obviously an early end to the Great War would have been an event of tremendous importance and the 1916 German efforts to secure peace were certainly treated as such in the news reports of the day. But Germany ultimately lost the war and the resulting official narrative blamed Europe’s catastrophe upon relentless German militarism, so that German peace proposal became a discordant element, raising troubling questions about the overall storyline. As a consequence, those facts were eventually flushed down the memory-hole for most of the next one hundred years, and if I hadn’t glanced at those original 1916 headlines, I certainly never would have discovered them.
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To my considerable surprise, I discovered that just last year an entire book had been published on the lost chances for peace in 1916, apparently the first and only English-language work ever devoted to that seemingly important topic. Moreover, the author of The Road Less Traveled was Philip Zelikow, best known for having served as executive director of the 9/11 Commission, and therefore someone entirely in the good graces of the mainstream establishment. Near the end of his Introduction, he explained that he had been working on the project off and on for more than a dozen years.
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So although the German government responded favorably to his offer of a peace conference in August 1916, Wilson failed to grasp the urgency of their request, and decided to take no action until after the November election. Meanwhile, within Germany, the military advocates of an unrestricted U-boat campaign against the American ships carrying Allied supplies were pressing very hard for their alternate strategy, which was sure to lead to a break in American relations.
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Despite the shifting positions of the British, Wilson returned to his peace efforts after his November 7th reelection, only to encounter strong opposition from House, his key advisor. Although Britain was already locked in a desperate struggle with Germany and totally dependent upon American supplies, House somehow became convinced that if America pressed too hard for peace, the British would declare war against our own country. Incredible as it might sound to us, House repeatedly argued to Wilson and others that a British army could sweep down from Canada while the Royal Navy would land hundreds of thousands of troops from their Japanese ally on our coasts, together seeking to conquer the United States. Although these bizarre concerns were rejected, they assisted the overwhelmingly pro-British State Department officials in delaying Wilson’s plans to launch his peace proposal.
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Growing desperate at the president’s endless delays, Germany and its allies eventually issued their own unconditional call for peace talks on December 12th, hoping that step would finally prompt Wilson to act by inviting participants to a peace conference at the Hague and offering himself up as the mediator. The German announcement captured the attention of the world and forced Wilson to respond lest he be eclipsed, and a week later he finally circulated his own peacemaking note, but as Zelikow explains, it constituted a “misfire,” lacking as it did any specifics let alone an invitation for the warring parties to attend an actual peace conference. So the Allies firmly rejected the German offer as a “trick” and were able to ignore Wilson’s statement since it required them to do nothing. Over the next few weeks, the opportunity for peace faded away, and in late January the Germans announced they would return to unrestrained submarine warfare, leading Wilson to break off relations and move towards war with Germany.
Although influential elements within the American government had sought this result from the beginning, Zelikow persuasively argues that the mistakes, errors, and misunderstandings by Wilson and the others also seeking a negotiated peace were probably more responsible for this outcome than the efforts by the individuals who actually intended it. His harsh historical verdict on the former hardly seems unfair:
In the failure to make peace at the most opportune moment, no one failed, and failed the world, more than President Wilson. His was the most consequential diplomatic failure in the history of the United States.
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Stoddard’s book [Present-Day Europe, 1917] had gone to press just weeks after the final rejection of the German peace offer, and he hardly let a failed diplomatic project well-known to all of his readers dominate his narrative. But although the author was unaware of the extensive backstory, he gave the peace efforts reasonable treatment in the chapters on Britain and Germany, adding interesting details missed by both Zelikow and Hochschild. For example, as early as June 1916 several prominent British political figures of very mainstream views had publicly called for peace negotiations, including in the pages of the Economist, and their declaration had been emphatically endorsed by the editor of that influential publication. But this high-profile ideological rebellion in the elite media was swiftly crushed, with the editor losing his job as a consequence. Stoddard later explained that the uncompromising Allied rejection of all German peace offers had by early 1917 “spurred the entire German people to desperate wrath.”
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So to a considerable extent, Germany and its allies were actually the “status quo powers,” reasonably satisfied with the existing arrangement of borders, a situation totally different from that of their Allied opponents. When one side in a conflict is determined to dismember and destroy the other, an early peace is difficult to arrange. Moreover, the German alliance faced an opposing coalition that was far superior in manpower, economic strength, and potential military resources, so it was fighting what it reasonably regarded as a purely defensive war. This clear situation at the time is exactly contrary to what has been implied or even explicitly stated in our basic History 101 textbooks for the last one hundred years.
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Although in today’s world, such a description [Unseen Empire, 1912] might seem insane or at least incendiary, Jordan presented it rather matter-of-factly without rancor, and indeed that particular claim didn’t even constitute the main theme of his analysis. The Stanford University President firmly regarded modern warfare as disastrous for a society, but also argued that wars had become so ruinously expensive that they could not last for long. Moreover, since the true financial owners of Europe believed that they were bad for business, no major wars would be permitted to break out.
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See how quickly propaganda worked even back then:
One of the worst horrors that the colonial Belgians had inflicted upon the Congolese was chopping off the hands of those Africans who failed to meet their work-quotas or otherwise disobeyed, and photographs of the atrocity victims had triggered outrage across the globe. But in August 1914, the German army invaded Belgium, and the Belgians were suddenly transformed from monsters to martyrs, with British propagandists soon falsely claiming that the Germans were chopping off the hands of disobedient Belgians. For many years, the story of the millions of Africans who died in the horrors of the Belgian Congo had been the world’s leading humanitarian issue, but Hochschild plausibly argues that the sudden wartime propaganda-elevation of Belgians to unrivaled global victimhood status probably explains why that earlier story so quickly faded from public awareness until being eventually revived a half-century later.
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A comment under the article by “Karl1906” quotes H.L. Mencken at length, from the Baltimore Evening Sun, Nov. 11, 1931, “A Bad Guess”:
“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.”