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Explain Why Did The Us Declare War In 1917

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The United States of America stayed out of World War One for three years, therefore why did we declare war in Germany in 1917? This war merely started out with Serbia and Austria-Hungary until the alliances of these countries and the alliances’ allies were pulled into it. Therefore why would we put ourselves in this messy war in Europe? To answer this we are going to look at three things of relative importance: German naval policy, allied propaganda, Woodrow Wilson’s idealism thoughts (who was our President at the time), American economic interests and America's claim to world power. The German naval policy enforced submarine attacks on any opponents in the war receiving import or exporting supplies, therefore preventing food and war supplies to reach Britain. Germany’s blockade against Britain caused exactly what they wanted; it caused severe shortages of food and materials, Kaiser Wilhelm, the leader of Russia and this country later became a part of the Soviet Union in 1922, instructed the submarines to go on unrestricted warfare which allowed them to attack all merchant shipping, no matter where it came from. This included America which infuriated exporters and made them report to the government repeatedly. It also included supplies which were going into the United States …show more content…
With other countries not wanting to risk their ships bring supplies and importing materials to us, we were losing economy and countries to trade with. We also had enormous economic interests with France and Britain. We had loaned them a large amount of money, near 2 billion dollars and only 27 million to Germany, and if France and Britain did not win the war they would not have the money to pay back their debt to us. The reason why their debt was so large was because of all the supplies and weapons they were buying from the United States of America on

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