AMERICA’S ENTRY INTO WORLD WAR ONE 2

America’s Entry Into World War One

In 1916 US presidential election, Democrat Woodrow Wilson won a narrow victory
against Charles Evans Hughes, his Republican opponent (Thompson, 2018). In an ironic twist,
President Wilson, having been re-elected on the slogan of ‘He kept us out of war’, entered the
First World War barely five months after re-election. This change of heart was and still remains
controversial. Wilson argued that Germany’s aggressive wartime activities had such a great
negative effect on the USA that he was left with no option but reverse his neutrality stance and
enter the war against Germany (Thompson, 2018). The action that has often been cited as
marking a turning point in Wilson’s foreign policy is Germany’s announcement in early 1917 that
it would start a policy of unrestricted submarine warfare. Under this policy Germany would
attack both Allied and non-allied shipping vessels. The policy, therefore, posed grave danger to
America’s commercial shipping (Thompson, 2018). Wilson perceived the threat to be so grave
that it justified America’s entry into the war. Looking back, even though I believe that the official
reasons for entering the war were not strong enough, the decision was the right now. It led to a
speedy ending of the war and, therefore, saved millions of lives that would have been lost had
the war gone on for years.

Like Wilson, President Obama too faced a similar dilemma in 2013 on whether to enter
the Syrian Civil War against President Bashar al-Assad after it was alleged that he had used
chemical weapons on civilians. Unlike Wilson, however, he decided not to enter the war but
have the Syrian regime hand over its stockpiles of chemical weapons (Anderson, 2016). The
lesson Obama learnt from Wilson is that the USA should enter war only when its vital interests

AMERICA’S ENTRY INTO WORLD WAR ONE 3
are at stake. information outdated thus the need for nurses to always be on the look out for the
latest information in their field.

References

Anderson, T. (2016). The Dirty War on Syria. Ottawa: Global Research.

Thompson, J. A. (2018). Woodrow Wilson and Peace without Victory: Interpreting the Reversal
of 1917. Fed. Hist., 10, 9.