I was watching a documentary on WWI and they noted that it was the Zimmerman Telegram that got us into that war. Given that it was kind of a hair-brained scheme to begin with, what would have happened if Zimmerman had realized that and not sent it? Would the US have found some other casus belli? I gather that Wilson wasn’t determined to go to war, but the telegram clinched it.
Rob
Sinking the Lusitania, unrestricted submarine warfare,etc. If it hadn’t been Zimmerman, it could have just as easily been something else.
We were already moving in that direction, so it was just a matter of time. If not this then something else would have done the trick, sooner or later. The real interesting question is, had the US not gotten into the war when we did but waited a year, would the allies have collapsed? By the time we got in pretty much everyone was on the brink of collapse. It was always going to boil down to who could last out the other side or would would collapse first.
Six months before the revelation of the Zimmerman Telegram, New York Harbor was rocked by a German saboteur’s bomb. The concussion is why the public can’t climb up to the torch on the Statue of Liberty. We were selling tons and tons of war materiel to the Entente, and there was no way that couldn’t eventually get us into the war.
Barbara Tuchman would not have written her book.