11/11/13 – Jim Powell – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
Now Jim Powell is the author of FDR's Folly, The Triumph of Liberty, Bully Boy, The Truth About Theodore Roosevelt's Legacy, Greatest Emancipations, How the West Abolished Slavery, and my favorite, Wilson's War.
How Woodrow Wilson's great blunder led to Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and World War II.
He had to leave out all of the Cold War and the Terror War for brevity's sake.
Welcome back to the show, Jim.
How are you doing?
Glad to be back.
Thank you.
Very happy to have you here.
And, well, we were just talking with Adam Hochschild about the Battle of the Somme and the horror of the war and the way that it was carried out in Europe, and a bit of the background to it.
But now you have a different spin here on Wilson's War, and it's such an important lesson, I think.
I guess to set it up a little bit, basically, I think your thesis is, or your first part of it, is that by the time the Americans got involved in World War I in 1917, the thing was pretty much over.
If we had stayed out, the war would have come to an end in relatively short order.
Is that correct?
Well, the war had been stalemated for three years.
You had the early confrontation in northeastern France and Belgium, and then the trenches were dug, and that's basically where the war took place for three years.
Nobody was moving very far.
They just had more soldiers run out of the trenches into machine gun fire.
So they were stalemated, and the British had a very effective blockade of Germany, and the Germans were in bad shape because of the blockade.
They couldn't get access to essential supplies.
The Germans were outnumbered.
They seemed to have somewhat less reckless generals, however.
So it was a situation where neither side was able to impose its will on the other.
And when the United States got in, when Wilson got the United States into the war, all of a sudden the British and the French had a decisive advantage and were able to win and dictate terms to the Germans.
And first of all, the Germans had been completely delusional, like the other participants.
Everybody expected World War I to be quick, everybody expected to win it, and everybody expected to extract compensation from the losers.
So the Germans were told by their leaders that they were winning, so when it became clear that in fact they had lost and that they had no place at a negotiating table, there wasn't any negotiating table, the French and the British simply dictated terms to the Germans.
And, of course, that set up the nationalist backlash that generated a lot of political support for Hitler.
That's how he began to develop his following, capitalizing on the bitterness and disillusionment.
And the rest developed from there.
Hitler, of course, would have been nowhere without the ability to appeal to the disillusionment of the Germans, that they had been unjustly treated, that they were somehow or other going to repudiate the Versailles Treaty that contained all these onerous terms.
The French and the British, of course, claimed that the Germans were solely responsible for the war, which, of course, is nonsense.
Just about everybody who's written about the war in the last hundred years has come to that conclusion.
The British, for example, had a secret treaty to back up the French, to be in a lie with the French, to come into a war if the French got into the war.
But because it was a secret treaty, it had zero value as deterrence.
It didn't deter anybody, because nobody knew about it.
And all the parties were culpable to one degree or another.
But the main thing I focused on, as opposed to all the other books that are coming out now, for the centennial of World War I, they're all talking about, for the most part, they're all talking about how Europe stumbled into the war, what happened in the war.
Nobody wanted it, everybody thought it was quick, and so on.
My whole focus has been what were the consequences of the war, since none of them were anticipated.
Now, the other thing, aside from the effects in Germany, the bitterness and disillusionment that gave Hitler his political start, the other thing that few people seem to have remembered is that Wilson, when he came in, suddenly had an interest in what the Russians did.
Because the Russians were getting beaten by the Germans, and they were negotiating a treaty that was a very punitive treaty imposed by the Germans on Russia, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.
So the Russians were about to drop out of the war.
The war had been terrible for Russia.
They were unprepared for it when it happened.
They did not have enough rail capacity, both to move a million Russian soldiers to the front and to deliver food for the people of Russia.
So everything was dislocated from the very beginning.
They didn't have enough guns to give all the soldiers, so they sent soldiers to the front without guns, and they said, when your buddy is shot, you get his gun.
That's good.
That's what you got.
And, of course, Russian parents were outraged that their boys were being sent off to war with no guns, so it inflamed hostility to the regime, and the dislocations just multiplied.
The government was really collapsing because of the stress of the war.
The best thing for Russia would have been to get out of the war, but when Wilson came in, he was utterly opposed to Russia getting out of the war, because that would have meant that the Germans would have been able to send some of the German troops on the eastern front to the western front, where the French, the British, and the Americans were lining up to attack Germany.
And Wilson certainly didn't want more Germans to deal with on the western front, so he ended up trying to intimidate the Russian provisional government, and he ended up bribing them, sending them a good deal of money to stay in the war.
This is in 1917, and Russia did stay in the war, and by the summer of 1917, the Russian army was collapsing, because the soldiers were peasants.
They had heard that free land was being given away.
Peace land and bread was the communist slogan, and they didn't want to miss out on any of the free land, so there were desertions by the hundreds of thousands in the summer of 1917.
And what's really extraordinary is that during the summer of 1917, Lenin tried to seize power three times, and he failed.
The Russian army was collapsing, and so many soldiers were running to try to get free land, and despite that, Lenin was unable to seize power.
It wasn't until his fourth attempt in the fall of 1917, when the Russian army was almost completely collapsed, that the relatively few Bolsheviks were able to seize the key centers for the Russian government and the Russian economy.
So out of that, because of Wilson bringing the United States into the war, we got not only the beginnings of German Nazism, we also ended up with 70 years of Soviet communism, and all of that because Wilson got us into the war that was supposed to make the world safer democracy.
And today, we hear endlessly about how terrible isolationism is, where Americans hesitate to get involved in the Middle East, or isolationists.
All of that, of course, reflects the situation in the 1930s, where Hitler was stirring and Americans didn't want to get involved in it, a lot of Europeans didn't want to get involved in it.
But if you go back further and you ask, well, why didn't Americans want to get into another European war?
Why didn't the French and the British want to stand up against Hitler and get him while he could?
Well, the basic reason was that intervention in a foreign war was discredited, because Wilson was claiming that's the way to make peace, is to get involved in somebody else's war.
There was so much lying and misrepresentation about what the World War I was going to do, and all the good we could do, the peace, all that stuff is completely misrepresented.
And if you misrepresent things to people, they are naturally going to be suspicious and step back.
So the interventionists were responsible for that.
If a nation is attacked, everybody can understand what self-defense is all about.
The problem is explaining to people what are the benefits of us getting involved in somebody else's war, especially if it's a civil war.
And we're seeing a lot of civil wars today, failed states, chronic civil wars, and we're told we have to get in, we have to get in Syria, we have to get in these other places.
And I think the more one looks at conflicts like that, the harder it is to see what benefit is going to be gained by getting involved.
Nobody has a crystal ball.
Nobody can predict whether the guys who are out are going to be in next year.
Nobody can tell whether the people we think are good guys are really good guys, or whether they're something else.
There are a lot of friends we have who become enemies.
And the biggest of all the catastrophes, I think, goes back to Wilson, when you figure the casualties during the First World War, the casualties during the Second World War that came out of the First World War, the casualties under communism, not just in Russia, but in China, since the Chinese Chairman Mao had learned from the Soviet experience.
So there you have it.
Yeah, well then, of course, as a big part of the strategy for the American side of the Cold War was the support of the right-wing Muslim conservative religious alternatives to the nationalists and the socialists throughout the Arab world, and including the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, and the coup in Iran, and supporting Saddam Hussein against the blowback from that, and once we had to contain Saddam, our old friend there from Saudi Arabia, that's what angered our old friends, the Mujahideen from Afghanistan.
So all of this, that's what's got us into the excuse for the terror war expanded from there for the 21st century.
And all of this is still the same chain of dominoes.
And who knows what would have happened instead?
But it's hard to imagine that it could have been, possibly, could have been worse than Nazism and communism and the American empire in the last 80 years, 90 years, 100 years.
I think Iran is perhaps the clearest case of the fact that nobody has a crystal ball.
As you know, the United States basically helped the Shah of Iran establish himself in power, and the government in the United States was very appreciative of him for helping to keep the Soviets out of the Middle East during the 1950s, 60s.
But the Shah went on to establish an authoritarian and secular regime which offended the mullahs in Iran.
Ayatollah Khomeini became an enemy of the Shah's as early as the 1960s.
And then when there was the revolution in Iran in 1979, they are reacting both to the fact that we are supporting an authoritarian regime and a secular regime.
And as I think you noted, we capped that off by supporting Saddam Hussein's attack on Iran.
So we become, because we're the Shah's friend and the Shah made enemies, his enemies are now our enemies.
And then we double down by supporting the attacks against Iran during the 1980s by Saddam Hussein.
So now we're dealing with nuclear Iran, and the stakes are much higher.
So again, what it comes down to is nobody can predict, if you're going to have an effective interventionist policy, it really supposes that you have a crystal ball.
All right, now hold it right there, Jim.
I want to keep you for another segment here real quick, but we've got to take this break.
It's just a real short one, though.
We'll be right back with Jim Powell, senior fellow at Cato and author of Wilson's War.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
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All right.
We're talking with Jim Powell.
He's a senior fellow from Cato, and he's the author of a whole bunch of great books, including two different ones about two different horrible Roosevelt's, which you ought to read, and Wilson's War, who might as well have been a Roosevelt.
Wilson's War, how Woodrow Wilson's great blunder led to Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, and World War II.
And this is so important.
It's not just that World War I led to Hitler and Stalin and World War II and all of the rest of this.
It's how American intervention ended up screwing up everything that was already horrible and made it that much worse.
And he just explained how Wilson had helped prolong Russian participation in the war, so that even after the czar was gone, the communists had four tries after months and months to finally seize power in Moscow because the army was out of town, dying at the front and sapping support for the interim Kerensky government.
And then, of course, all of the talking points that the Nazis could have ever needed were handed to them by the situation as set up by Woodrow Wilson at the end of the war.
And one of the things that is maybe seems like a minor footnote, but is important to me, I think, Jim, is something you point out in the book, and I think you point this out in your Lew Rockwell article as well, that Wilson insisted that he would not accept the surrender from the German militarists because they were just such dirty hounds, I guess, like Dick Cheney.
He wouldn't grace them with his wonderful democratic presence.
So he would only accept surrender from the German Democrats who had actually been outside of power and had been anti-war, or as anti-war as they could be, and made them accept the surrender.
So when Hitler went around denouncing the traitors of 1918 who sold us out and got us into this terrible mess, he was pointing his fingers at the kind of people who Americans, you would think, would have wanted to have leading Germany in the future.
Yeah, that's right.
Again, this illustrates the crucial lack of a crystal ball.
Wilson thought that he was doing something principled to agree to meet only with German civilians.
It never seems to have occurred to him to wonder how were the Germans likely to view civilians who essentially validated or carried out the humiliating surrender, particularly humiliating since they had been told for four years that they were ahead, everything was going fine.
That, I might say, is something that comes up again and again and again.
Governments can tax whatever they want.
They can do whatever they want.
We often can't stop them.
But the one thing they can't do, and they certainly can't predict it, is how people react to what they do.
In Wilson's case, he was clueless about a number of things.
One of them, when he decided to get us into the war, he was completely clueless about what motivated our allies, the British and the French.
He was completely clueless.
The French, especially, were determined to get revenge, because most of the war, most of the destruction of farmland, most of the killing occurred on French soil.
They were determined to avenge Clemenceau, the Prime Minister of France, was especially determined to get even, come what may.
Whenever he had a chance, that was what he was going to do.
And Wilson, when he got into the war, he really had no understanding for what his allies, the French and the British, were going to do.
He just got in, and he thought there was going to be a congenial meeting of heads of state, and they were going to decide what to do.
I guess he basically, by getting in the war, taking the pressure off the French, especially in the British, he thought he was going to be in control.
But of course, as soon as our boys began landing in France, there was a big fight over where they were going to go.
And all Clemenceau, the French political leader, all he wanted to do was to throw more American boys through, you know, have Americans be the ones that are thrown in the trenches in order to run into German machine gun fire.
They wanted American soldiers to serve under the same idiotic French generals that had contributed so much to the slaughter.
So there was a big fight back and forth, and of course the eventual decision was to step back a bit and have Americans fight as the expeditionary force separate from the French and English forces.
But our friends, they just wanted to throw our guys after the same strategies that had failed before.
But the war, the generals, especially the French and the English, didn't seem to grasp that a soldier wearing a cloth uniform was more than a little vulnerable to machine gun fire.
That's what we were just talking about with Hochschild.
Now here's the thing, though, that I think you're missing.
We're almost out of time here, but you got to address this, Jim, you know, the positive that came out of the First World War is that Woodrow Wilson got to be a player on the world stage.
And isn't that what really counts at the end of the day?
Well, that's certainly, yeah, he...
To him, I mean.
Isn't that what counted to him at the end of the day?
Well, he thought that he was going to be the leader, but again, he completely misunderstood what was going to happen, and they ran circles around him, and he had no idea what he was doing.
It wasn't as bad as Obama did when Obama was going against Putin recently.
Yeah, so he had no idea what his allies, what was motivating his allies and what they were going to do as a result of American entry in the war.
And of course, he had even less conception of what was going on, especially in Germany, but also in the other countries.
You know, after the war, the political parties in Europe, in Poland, in Hungary, Germany, all those European, Central European, Eastern European countries, the political spectrum ran from socialism, communism, fascism...
Right.
I'm sorry, we're all out of time, Jim.
We got to go.
Jim Powell, everybody.
Wilson's war.
Thanks very much.
You bet.
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