Catching Up... (+Q&A)

Hey guys. Appreciate you giving me a little time to rest after the release of the first episode of Enemy: The Germans’ War, but enough of that, let’s get back to it. Since the podcast series is about the Germans’ perspective of the war, I will be putting a lot of content regarding the other belligerents here on the Substack.

In the next post, we’ll discuss the mini-revolution underway in Washington, DC since President Trump took office, and I’ll answer subscribers’ questions. If you have any questions or comments about the first episode of the new series, this essay, or what’s happening in the White House, leave them in the comments and I’ll get to as many as I can.

Oh, and I know I owe you guys the audio version of the last installment of The Peculiar Institution. The next installment of that series is currently under construction, and I plan on releasing the entire thing as an e-book that will be free for all subscribers.

To all my unpaid subscribers (there are so many of you!), why not throw me $5 p/month or $50 p/year to see what you’re missing? Behind the paywall are dozens of essays, podcasts, interviews, and other content you can’t get anywhere else. Plus, you can participate in the Q&A!

---

One of the ironies of the early years of World War 2 is that Hitler expressed a desire, publicly and privately, to preserve the British Empire, while the Roosevelt administration was eager to use the crisis to put the British in their place and, ultimately, to tear the empire down. This is hard to understand in our day, since most people are used to thinking of Britain and the United States as speaking with one voice and sharing the same interests, but that is a postwar phenomenon. Before that, Britain was a rival.

By the First World War, American power outstripped any of the European empires, and American leaders resented the condescending attitude they perceived from their European counterparts. It is significant that the US entered World War 1 as an “associated power,” not as an ally of Britain and France. When the Great War ended in 1918, it immediately became apparent that we had not gone to war to end all wars, nor for the self-determination of peoples, but had merely thrown our weight behind one side of an old-school European imperial power struggle. No sooner had the shooting stopped than France and Britain, at least in the eyes of American leaders, seemed to forget who had stepped in to bail them out. Both countries owed enormous financial debts to the United States, not to mention a debt of honor for our having sent American boys to die on their behalf in a conflict in which we had no obvious part, but President Woodrow Wilson and his staff got little gratitude. In fact, Wilson’s futile protests against the imperial games being played after the war, and future President Herbert Hoover’s attempts to get food and medicine to starving people in Germany and neutral countries, were treated as an annoyance. The whole thing left such a sour taste in American mouths that the Senate refused to ratify the treaty establishing the League of Nations, which had been our idea in the first place. On a visit to London in 1919, President Wilson told his British hosts:

You must not speak of us who come over here as cousins, still less as brothers; we are neither. Neither must you think of us as Anglo-Saxons, for that term can no longer be rightly applied to the people of the US. Nor can too much importance in this connection be attached to the fact that English is our common language… No, there are only two things which can be established to maintain closer relations between your country and mine: they are community of ideals and interests.