“You have to ask also, ‘Why does this form of dispute resolution work? Why does killing hundreds of millions of people make an agreement possible where there was no agreement possible before?’ ”

“A victorious ending to the war was necessary for them because without victory, without spoils to divert those who had been loyal Germans-loyal to the old regime-they would face a revolution on the home front, and a revolution not unlike the one that the Russians had experienced,” explains Goemans. Meanwhile, the German ruling class, led by an alliance of aristocratic landowners and industrialists, was fighting for its very own survival, threatened by seismic social and political upheaval. They refused to learn the technical and strategic lessons learned at great cost by the French and British.” “The British were shot down in large numbers, the Americans made the same mistake.

“The British thought: ‘We fight the war by heroically stepping out of the trenches and locking arms and looking threateningly at the Germans and thereby defeat them,’ ” Goemans says. The Germans calculated correctly that it would take the Americans at least as long to get their troops across the sea and ready to fight. Goemans argues that the Germans had seen how long it had taken the British soldiers from the time they arrived in France until the time they were ready for a major offensive at the Somme. If they defeated the British, then they could prevent Americans from coming to the mainland and they would have a victorious end to the war.” “They thought the gamble would open up a window of opportunity in which they could defeat the British. “It was a gamble, which was very likely to hurt them in the long run,” explains Goemans. So why would the German leadership under Paul von Hindenburg take such a big risk? Indeed, Hindenburg explicitly admitted the day before ‘We count upon war with America.’” declaration of war was thus already taken into account when the final decision for unrestricted submarine warfare was made in January 1917. could not and would not accept unrestricted submarine warfare, but launched it anyway,” says Goemans. “The Germans were well aware that the U.S. (University images / Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation) Since then, he has also coauthored a book on leaders and war initiation, Leaders and International Conflict (Cambridge University Press, 2011).Ī special “War Issue” of the Campus Times from June 1918 shows the impact of the Great War on University life. declaration of war, in essence, was a recognition of the fact that Germany had chosen to impose a very risky gamble on the U.S.-risky for Germany, but the only way they thought they could obtain the victory they needed at home,” says University of Rochester associate professor of political science Hein Goemans.Ī specialist in international relations and conflict, Goemans is the author of War and Punishment: The Causes of War Termination and the First World War (Princeton University Press, 2000). merchant ships and civilian casualties rising, Wilson asked Congress for “a war to end all wars” that would “make the world safe for democracy.” A hundred years ago, on April 6, 1917, Congress thus voted to declare war on Germany, joining the bloody battle-then optimistically called the “Great War.”

In early April 1917, with the toll in sunken U.S. Tensions heightened as Germany tried to isolate Britain in 1915 and announced unrestricted attacks against all ships that entered the war zone around the British Isles. president pledged neutrality, in sync with prevailing American public opinion.īut while Wilson tried to avoid war for the next three years, favoring instead a negotiated collective approach to international stability, he was rapidly running out of options. When World War I erupted in Europe in 1914, the 28th U.S. Rochester political scientist Hein Goemans answers the question why Germany was willing to risk American entry into the war. Germany sank many American merchant ships around the British Isles which prompted the American entry into the war. The US entered World War I because Germany embarked on a deadly gamble.

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