"Violence Doesn't Solve Anything"

[BaronVonBigmeat]

What discredits your "main point" is the 20/20 hindsight. Our involvement in WWI brought a stalemated war to an end, and at the time, it was thought it was "the war to end all wars." Only hindsight reveals that the aftermath sowed the seeds for the rise to power of fascism/Hitler.

No, my position does not require 20/20 hindsight. It requires common sense pragmatism, and for the government to abide by George Washington's advice of "peaceable relations with all, entangling alliances with none". We brought a stalemated war to a close, but that war was none of our concern to begin with.

Also, people knew immediately that the Versailles treaty was bad news. Future president Herbert Hoover walked out of the conference shocked at the badness of the policy. He bumped into John Maynard Keynes and they could only shake their heads at the foolishness they'd just witnessed. This is literally minutes after the treaty was signed. (Source is Wilson's War, by Jim Powell).

I am not a believer in the Roosevelt conspiracy stuff. While he antagonized Japan with embargoes, that has pretty much been our "weapon of choice" during peacetime against ANY Nation that is/was an aggressor. Japan's Asian conquests threatened US interests in the region, and the behavior of its army brutal in the extreme.

It's a weapon of choice which never really seems to stop aggressive countries from being aggressive. And it's a relatively recent 20th century development in america's foreign policy. We have no business defending an american company's property on the other side of the globe, and the brutality of one country to another on the other side of the world should not concern us. We are not the global police man, no matter how much the UN might like it (as long as we're under their control).

You oversimplify the politics that led to the US Civil War. "Yankee politicians" were not about to let the South go peacefully, and Southern politicians were not about to be dominated by policy that favored Northern industry to the detriment of Southern import/export.

Those Northern politicians were not controlled by pragmatism -- they were controlled by Northern industrialists. Southern politicians were controlled by wealthy planters. Neither was going to take a back seat to the other, and laws that favored industry hurt agricultural import/export, and vice-versa.

Add to the equation an idealist who believed the Union of States to be unassailable, and you inevitably have war.

So whenever bad government policy is made, we're just going to shrug our shoulders and accept their way as the best way? How about in 1994, saying: "Clinton is president and congress is run by the democrats, it's inevitable that we're getting euro-style socialism and 75% taxes"?