Top 5 Wars America Should Have Stayed Well Away From

3) The Great War (World War I)

The World War I (July 28, 1914 – November 11, 1918) was centered in Europe, with the US “watching, and profiting from, the slow incineration of European civilization between 1914 and 1917.”

© AP PHOTO Soldiers returned to the U.S. from France after the Great War march in a homecoming parade in Madison Square, New York City, 1918

When the European continent erupted in conflict in 1914, President Wilson declared America’s neutrality.
“German submarines and an ill-advised effort on the part of the German foreign service to enlist Mexico’s support in the war changed that position,” Farley says.

“In eighteen months of war (with the most intense fighting concentrated in the summer of 1918), 116,000 Americans died. Scholars still debate whether US intervention was decisive, but in the end the war resulted in the collapse of four empires (Germany, Russia, Ottoman, Austria-Hungary) and the aggrandizement of two others (Britain and France) without resolving any of the central issues of dispute.”