Twentieth century world politics began with a world war triggered by a Balkan conflict and concluded with a Balkan war that had the United States, Britain, Germany, and Russia all (more or less) on the same side. Ironically, the U.S. and British involvement in Kosovo coincided with the publication of several books questioning the wisdom of U.S. or British intervention in World War I. In A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America's Destiny, Patrick Buchanan goes so far as to put the blame for the greatest horrors of this century on United States entry into World War I: "The War to make the world safe for democracy made the world safe for Bolshevism, fascism, and Nazism. Such were the fruits of U.S. intervention, victory and Versailles."

World War I revisionism has a long history both here and among our cousins across the Atlantic. Until the late 1930s, majorities of Americans told pollsters that U.S. participation in the Great War had been a mistake. Indeed, the moral case for World War I is somewhat difficult to make. World War II and the Cold War ( except to a small number of radical Leftists ) were melodramas, struggles between impure good and relatively pure evil. World War I has always seemed more like a tragedy. If Imperial Germany was somewhat less liberal than the British Empire or the United States, it was far more enlightened than Tsarist Russia. And in some areas of science and technology and education and welfare, Kaiser Wilhelm II's Germany was the world 's leading nation.

At the time, many German thinkers contended that their country's bid for European primacy and world power was in the interest of humanity at large. Thomas Mann, for example, argued that Germany represented mystical, intuitive, artistic Kultur-the mean between the extremes of decadent, overrefined, materialistic Zivilisation (symbolized by the U.S., Britain, France and/ or the Jews ) and the barbarism of Russia and the "Orient." Max Weber claimed that only a German victory could save the world from "Americanism."

Others offered a geopolitical justification of the War. Germany, it was said, would overthrow the global hegemony of the "Anglo-Saxons" to establish a multipolar global system, in which one pole would be a German-led Europe. As early as 1900, the influential National Liberal Friedrich Naumann had argued in the following vein: "If there is anything certain in the world, it is the future outbreak of a world war, i.e. a war fought by those who seek to deliver themselves from England."

Today power has diffused to East Asia and to Eurasia (in the botched form of Communist industrialization), so that a United Europe would be merely one of several great powers. That was not the case at the beginning of the century. In 1900, Europe as a whole accounted for 62 per cent of world manufacturing output, the United States only 23.6 per cent (the U.S. share is roughly the same at present as a century ago, 25.6 per cent, while the European Union [EU] percentage has declined to 26 per cent). Just as Prussia instantly became Europe's most powerful country when it united the non-Austrian German states in 1870, so a Germany that united Europe after 1914 would have become, at one blow, the world's dominant superpower.

"We were convinced that this was Germany's century," declares a character in Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus (1947). Had Germany triumphed in World War I, the 20th century, which Henry Luce called "the American Century," probably would have been the German century. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were monsters with congenital defects; ideology drove the one to military suicide and the other to economic suicide. A successful authoritarian Germany, by contrast, might have combined rational statecraft with a capitalist economic system. The Kaiser's European empire was dangerous precisely because, unlike the Nazi or Soviet empire, in the long term it might have worked.

Some regret that the Kaiserreich was not given a chance. In The Pity of War: Explaining World War I, Niall Ferguson muses: "Had Britain stood aside-even for a matter of weeks-continental Europe could have been transformed into something not wholly unlike the European Union we know today...." Not wholly unlike the European Union? The EU is a voluntary confederation; German Europe would have consisted of Germany and vassal states kept in their place by force. The EU is a community of liberal democracies; if Berlin won World War I, glory would have accrued to the generals and militarist politicians and their heel-clicking imitators in Germany's European satellite states.

Furthermore, the European Union is linked to ( and, though it is rude to say so, subordinate to) the United States, via NATO. Had Germany won World War I and consolidated its control over Europe's military-industrial base, a cold war with the U.S. for domination of the Atlantic and the non-European world would most likely have ensued. German submarine and surface fleets would have menaced the U.S. coastline; German agents would have connived with anti-American politicians and insurgents in the Caribbean, Mexico and Central America; and eventually Germany would have developed long-distance bombers and missiles capable of striking Washington, D.C., New York and other U.S. cities. One may be forgiven, therefore, for thinking that the differences between the European Union and a Europe ruled by the Kaiser would have been somewhat greater than Ferguson admits.

John Keegan, in The First World War, is equally guilty of anachronism. He writes that "The First World War is a mystery.... Why did a prosperous continent, at the height of its success as a source and agent of global wealth and power and at one of the peaks of its intellectual and cultural achievement, choose to risk all it had won for itself and all it offered to the world in the lottery of a vicious and local internecine conflict?" To speak of WorldWar I as a "local internecine conflict" within a single "European" entity is as absurd as describing World War II or the Cold War as tragic "civil wars" within a supposed community of the Northern Hemisphere. There was no "Europe" in 1914, only a number of countries, with several of them-Britain, Russia, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Portugal-serving as the headquarters of extra-European empires. Ironically, Ferguson and Keegan echo the propaganda of Imperial and Nazi Germany, which equated Germany's ambitions, or rather that of its elites, with the interest of "Europe."

Seen in its proper perspective, World War I was not a Balkan conflict that tragically spun out of control because of folly on all sides, but rather what the German historian Max Lenz in The Great Powers (1900) described as "the War of the English Succession." Of the four great powers in a position to benefit from Britain 's relative decline-the United States, Germany, Russia, and Japan-the U.S. clearly should have been voted "most likely to succeed." Japan, like Britain, was an island state that had difficulty maintaining an oceanic empire. As land powers, Germany and Russia could defend themselves more easily; each, though, was weak in one dimension of power. Germany had advanced industry, but lacked population, space and resources. Russia had population, space and resources, but lacked advanced industry.

The United States had it all. Thanks to 19th-century expansion at the expense of Mexico and Native Americans, its territory was comparable to Russia 's. True, after 1898 the U.S. had a minuscule oceanic empire, but the Philippines and Cuba and Puerto Rico drained rather than augmented its wealth, unlike the internal empire of the American South and West. To make matters worse, from the point of view of its rivals, the U.S. had a scientific and technological base equal to, if not superior to, that of Britain and Germany.

What is more, European immigration and an already high birthrate gave the U.S. one of the largest populations in the world. With the exception of African Americans, Native Indians, a small number of Hispanics, and the Southerners defeated in the Civil War, Americans were the descendants of voluntary immigrants-not resentful subjects, like the Indians and Africans ruled by Britain or the Central Asians ruled by the Russians. The importance of this cannot be exaggerated. The U.S. was the only 2Oth-century great power whose military strength was based almost entirely on efficient use of its own territory, resources and people, rather than on rule over other nations. Minus Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines, Hawaii and Guam it would still have been a superpower. By contrast, Britain without its empire became a mere regional power, as did Germany without a Fortress Europe, Russia without the Warsaw Pact, and Japan without Manchuria, China and Southeast Asia.

Thus the United States was the country to defeat in the 20th century, if any other country or combination of countries was to dominate the world-or even hold out against American influence and power. Although the Kaiser's regime was quite different from Hitler's, many of its policymakers and thinkers shared Hitler's assumption that a German-led Europe, after defeating Russia, would come into inevitable conflict with the U.S. or an Anglo-American alliance. It is therefore simply false to claim that America's entering World War I tragically turned a minor Balkan or European conflict into a world war. Even before the U. S. move, the ultimate issue of the struggle was whether the world in the 20th century and beyond would be dominated by Germany or the United States.

Neither the origin of World War I-the ambition of Germany's leaders to turn their medium-sized nation into a superpower-nor the reason for its outcome-the superior resources of the existing American superpower-is a mystery. The only mystery is why the United States did not translate its economic potential into military might and intervene in European power politics before 1917.

In his story "The Canterville Ghost," Oscar Wilde has an English phantom reply to an American tourist's complaint about his country's lack of ruins and curiosities. "'No ruins! No curiosities!' replied the Ghost; 'you have your navy and your manners."' The military weakness of the United States between the two World Wars is often exaggerated, but the U.S. between the Civil War and World War I does resemble the caricature of anti-isolationist historians. In 1870-72, the U.S. had a Gross Domestic Product (GDP) equal to that of the British Empire, but slightly more than half the military potential. In the same period, Russia, with less GDP than the U.S., had almost twice as much military power, while Prussia/Germany, with less than half of America's economy, had an equally powerful military.

The gap between American industry and military strength grew ever greater as the decades passed. As Fareed Zakaria points out in From Wealth to Power, in 1885 the U.S. surpassed Britain as the country with the largest percentage of world manufacturing capability. The U.S. had 13 times the industrial capacity of Italy, but the Italian Army was eight times as big as America's. In 1890, the U.S. Army, in terms of size, was 14th in the world-after Bulgaria's.

Whatever the cultural and political causes of America 's failure to convert its economic predominance into primacy in the arena of global power politics, the effects were unmistakable-and disastrous. Had the United States emerged as the world's leading military power by 1900, the difficulty of prevailing against an American-led alliance might have convinced the German elite to abandon their ambitions and accept a role for their country like that of today's Federal Republic: as the leading European nation in a world order based on American power. There would have been no Hitler and no Lenin-not because the U.S. and/or Britain had ceded the world's most important industrial region to Prussian field marshals, but because Germany would have been deterred from trying to become a superpower by conquering its neighbors.

The genuine lesson of World War l and the succeeding global conflicts is, in short, the opposite of the one offered by Buchanan, Ferguson and other World War I revisionists. The greatest threats to world peace and liberal civilization have occurred in response, not to American military intervention, but to American absence. The failure of the U.S. to fill the power vacuum left by British decline tempted others-Germans, Japanese, Soviets-who could be defeated only at enormous cost to the U.S. and its allies.

It follows that the best way to prolong the period of peace among the great powers that began in the 1990s is to prolong the condition on which that peace is founded-the overwhelming military superiority of the U.S. and its strategic partners. In the early 21st century, as in the early 20th, no potential rivals will be able to match American power the American way-by developing their own internal resources. China, for instance, will not become a leading scientific-industrial power for generations, if ever. Hostile great powers can only hope to equal the U.S. in military and diplomatic influence by mobilizing the resources of other countries in their regions, either by the unlikely route of conquest or the far more promising strategy of military intimidation. To elites reminiscent of Imperial Germany's that aspire to larger global roles than the resources of their own countries justify, the U.S. must send the message that American leaders a century ago neglected to send to the Kaiser and his ministers: Don't even think it. >