AtlAg05 said:
I think it was psychological, after seeing the Great War, I can't blame them for not wanting to get into another war. They convinced themselves they could prevent a massive loss of life and keep the piece.
This happens all the time in history. People today look back on Vietnam era foreign policy and ask, how could they not see how stupid they were being?
But people making important current decisions always have recent history drastically affecting their point of view. Vietnam era policy makers were a generation of men who had served in ww2 and everything about their experience taught them that you don't back down from a bully. Chamberlain let Hitler walk all over him at Munich and it led to war, therefore, we will not let anyone walk all over us in terms of foreign policy. By this logic, the domino theory makes sense, even if it seems absurd today with all the information we have.
Move to twenty years later, and the thinking is now the opposite. There were literal genocides taking place in Europe and Africa in the mid 1990s. If ever there was a humanitarian case for American intervention, that was it. But Bill Clinton wasn't going to do that with a gun to his head. His frame of reference was Vietnam, the idea that getting involved in an international hornets next that didn't directly affect America could lead to disaster. Again, recent history proving a major influence on how a current event was managed.
You're probably exactly right with your point here. ww1 was a catastrophe the likes of which the world hadn't seen before. The numbers of dead and injured in the great war were mind blowing to the people of that era, 100k in battle after battle. It decimated entire countries, wiped out a generation, and essentially restructured the world for decades to come. By the 1930s, the men who had been there were now the policy makers, and they probably saw any kind of compromise as preferable to another Armageddon.