Causes of World War One and America's Entry Into the War

The Scale and Immediate Causes of World War One

World War One ultimately killed 35 million people — this alone might have merited its being called "The Great War," although to a large degree it was the astonishing way in which the deaths happened. On the first day of the Battle of the Somme alone, Britain suffered almost sixty thousand casualties. The ten-month stalemate of the Battle of Verdun resulted in 700,000 dead, with no discernible tactical advance made by either side (Tuchman 174).

The immediate causes of World War One were complicated but fairly straightforward. Many of the long-standing political institutions of Europe were badly outmoded, in particular two of the oldest: the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire. Each was the inheritor of a previous large-scale imperial institution — the Holy Roman Empire and the Byzantine Empire, respectively — dating back nearly a thousand years, and each was failing badly. By the time war broke out, for example, the Ottoman Empire had for decades been referred to as "the sick man of Europe," owing to its territorial losses in various smaller conflicts, its failing infrastructure, and its growing financial indebtedness to the larger European powers (Tuchman 141).

Ethnic Nationalism and the Powder Keg of Europe

Meanwhile, ethnic conflict and agitation within the various populations contained within these political institutions — covering the whole of eastern Europe — had led to internal political instability. Into this powder keg of long-term difficulties, the tiny spark of a political assassination performed by a fringe political group was enough to set off a vast explosion. A teenaged anarchist university student, Gavrilo Princip, shot the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Archduke Franz Ferdinand. His motive was separatism for one of the smaller ethnic and political units contained within the Empire (Tuchman 71). Eventually this led to a declaration of war, but a system of secret alliances between the European powers ultimately involved virtually every nation in Europe, and the conflict would extend almost worldwide.

Nineteenth-Century Imperialism and the Scramble for Territory

To this political situation, we must add the larger world picture, summed up by the general current of nineteenth-century imperialism. Great Britain — a small island in the north Atlantic — had managed to amass a commercial empire that spanned the globe. The scramble for commercially exploitable colonial territories had already led to threats and armed conflicts elsewhere. In Great Britain's case, there was saber-rattling from American President Grover Cleveland during the Venezuela border dispute of 1897, and open warfare in Africa during the Boer War of 1899–1902 (Tuchman 10).

In this scramble for territories, Germany — which, due to the political order initially imposed in the wake of religious conflict, was extremely late in becoming a single unified state — had to a certain degree lost out. German expansion therefore found a push into surrounding European territory easier than establishing a serious colonial presence on other continents, although the Germans did manage to take territory in Africa, not difficult when even Belgium could manage to do so (Tuchman 30). Even America had entered the free-for-all in the last years of the nineteenth century, annexing the Philippines after a brief war with Spain (Karp 110).

America's Delayed Entry and Wilson's Motivations

America's entry into the war was long delayed. It is worth noting that Woodrow Wilson, the U.S. president who would ultimately bring the country into the war during his second term, had won re-election in 1916 with the slogan "He Kept Us Out Of War" (Karp 332). Wilson's entry into the war was, to a large extent, prompted by America's own global ambitions rather than by any clear reason for direct involvement.

Although German submarine attacks in the Atlantic against otherwise neutral vessels had claimed American lives — in particular the 1915 sinking of the steamship Lusitania — these hardly presented an obvious casus belli, and there is some indication that America had known in advance of the Lusitania attack. The more immediate cause of American entry was the discovery of the Zimmermann telegram — a top-secret German diplomatic offer to assist Mexico in a war against the United States (Tuchman xvi).

Discussions of the Zimmermann telegram seldom mention that Wilson had already been engaged in military hostilities — though without a formal declaration of war by Congress — against Mexico, including an invasion of Veracruz and skirmishes fought against the revolutionary Pancho Villa. Indeed, the same American soldier, "Black Jack" Pershing, would fight in Mexico before leading American troops after the official entry into the European conflict. However, the larger reasons for American entry hinged mostly on Wilson himself: his Anglophilia was stimulated by the British desire for American assistance, and he sought a larger American role in world affairs (Karp 350). This was accomplished when Wilson was able to take part in the postwar settlement conferences.

Works Cited

Karp, Walter. The Politics of War: The Story of Two Wars Which Altered Forever the Political Life of the American Republic. New York: Franklin Square Press, 2010. Print.

Tuchman, Barbara. The Guns of August. New York: Ballantine, 1962. Print.