To be fair, France surrendered so quickly that time there wasn't much we could do. FDR did want to enter the war but really couldn't, absent Pearl Harbor.
It was WW1 we should have stayed out of, as had been the case with previous European wars including the Crimean one nearly a hundred years before. And, tying back to the modern day, that mistake of the feckless bigot democrat Wilson was partially driven by fears of the Russians. Which, oh btw, wound up helping to create the Soviet revolution:
An often forgotten history, imho.
It was WW1 we should have stayed out of, as had been the case with previous European wars including the Crimean one nearly a hundred years before. And, tying back to the modern day, that mistake of the feckless bigot democrat Wilson was partially driven by fears of the Russians. Which, oh btw, wound up helping to create the Soviet revolution:
Quote:
American entry in World War I helped produce another terrible consequence: the November 1917 Bolshevik coup in Russia. The country had been deteriorating ever since Czar Nicholas II entered the war in 1914. It led to millions of Russian casualties, drained the country's finances, generated devastating inflation, caused pervasive shortages, and discredited the government and the army.
France and Britain had to know they were playing with fire when they pressured the Russians to stay in the war so that German forces would continue to be tied up on the Eastern Front. The last thing France and Britain wanted was for Russia to make a separate peace with Germany and thereby enable the Germans to transfer forces to the Western Front. Allied pressure assured that the deterioration of Russia would continue or even accelerate.
Following the spontaneous revolution and abdication of the czar in March 1917, Wilson authorized David Francis, his ambassador to Russia, to offer the Provisional Government $325 million of credits equivalent to perhaps $3.9 billion today if Russia stayed in the war. The Provisional Government was broke, and it accepted Wilson's terms: "No fight, no loans."
Wilson was oblivious to the fact that ordinary Russians had nothing to gain from whatever happened on the Western Front, which was his sole concern. The Bolsheviks exploited deteriorating conditions brought on or aggravated by the war. They were the only ones on the Russian political scene who advocated withdrawal. Lenin's slogan was "Peace, land, and bread."
For a while, despite all of Russia's problems, the Bolsheviks weren't able to make much headway. In elections for the Constituent Assembly, they never received more than a quarter of the votes. Lenin failed three times to seize power during the summer of 1917. It wasn't until the fall of 1917, when the Russian army collapsed, that the Bolsheviks were able to seize power.
An often forgotten history, imho.