| Chapter 1: | The Struggle For World Order |
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Chapter One
The Struggle for World Order
As the nations of Europe enthusiastically embarked upon the First World War, the Americans of the age might be pardoned for their reluctance to get enmeshed in “entangling alliances.” The United States in 1914, moreover, was thriving under its policy of isolationism. In the fifty years prior, its population had nearly doubled to a hundred million: only Russia, India, and China were larger. In addition, with manufacturing exports having increased fivefold in the previous twenty years, America was already well on the way to becoming the world’s leading industrial nation.1
Bismarck had predicted that “some damned foolish thing in the Balkans” would start the next war on the continent,2 and he was right. The immediate precipitating event, of course, was the assassination of an Austrian archduke, Francis Ferdinand, on June 28, 1914, in Sarajevo, Bosnia. The perpetrator was a member of the “Black Hand, ” a small group of Slavic nationalists, but the Austrians saw in the murder a larger threat—or opportunity—and threatened to invade Serbia.