Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of maps
- List of tables
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Birth of a modern army
- 2 World war and American preparedness
- 3 Coercive power and Wilsonian diplomacy
- 4 “You’re in the army now”
- 5 US army doctrine and industrialized trench warfare
- 6 Over where?
- 7 American Expeditionary Force organization, overseas training, and deployment
- 8 Will the Americans arrive in time?
- 9 Failed expectations: “the military establishment of the United States has fallen down”
- 10 Atlantic ferry
- 11 Neck of the bottle
- 12 Uncertain times
- 13 Cantigny
- 14 Into the breach
- 15 American soldiers in north Russia and Siberia
- 16 The beginning of the end
- 17 Establishment of the American First Army and Saint-Mihiel
- 18 Meuse-Argonne, September 26–October 31
- 19 Breakout, November 1–11
- 20 Epilogue
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - Coercive power and Wilsonian diplomacy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 July 2014
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of maps
- List of tables
- Preface
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction
- 1 Birth of a modern army
- 2 World war and American preparedness
- 3 Coercive power and Wilsonian diplomacy
- 4 “You’re in the army now”
- 5 US army doctrine and industrialized trench warfare
- 6 Over where?
- 7 American Expeditionary Force organization, overseas training, and deployment
- 8 Will the Americans arrive in time?
- 9 Failed expectations: “the military establishment of the United States has fallen down”
- 10 Atlantic ferry
- 11 Neck of the bottle
- 12 Uncertain times
- 13 Cantigny
- 14 Into the breach
- 15 American soldiers in north Russia and Siberia
- 16 The beginning of the end
- 17 Establishment of the American First Army and Saint-Mihiel
- 18 Meuse-Argonne, September 26–October 31
- 19 Breakout, November 1–11
- 20 Epilogue
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Despite public displays of outrage over the loss of American lives to German torpedoes, the great majority of Americans continued to oppose going to war to protect their country’s neutral rights. So did Wilson, although he continued to warn Berlin that he was prepared to hold Germany to strict accountability. At the same time, he refused to equate the defense of American national interests with an interventionist military policy. When he talked of strengthening America’s army and navy in November 1915, he stressed that he was thinking only of defense. He had a very practical reason for holding an olive branch rather than sword. As he told Edward House on December 15, 1915, “if the Allies were not able to defeat Germany alone, they could scarcely do so with the help of the United States because it would take too long for us to get in a state of preparedness. It would therefore be a useless sacrifice on our part to go in.”
House offered a policy that was amenable to Wilson’s idealism: an interventionist political policy as the mediator of a compromise peace between the belligerents. Encouraged by both House and the British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey, Wilson hoped to exploit what he assumed was America’s superior moral position to achieve a negotiated peace followed by general disarmament and a league of nations.
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- Information
- The American Army and the First World War , pp. 34 - 48Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2014