The Other Great Game: Britain vs The United States, 1914-1922 (Documentary)

In 1914, Anglo-American relations were finally on a firm footing, as Britain began to accept the US as a Great Power in its own right. The First World War would see a revolution in the power dynamic between the two. Over the course of the conflict, Britain came to rely on the immense resources of the United States to fuel its war effort. The consequence was an enormous amount of borrowing from Wall Street, which would give the US President, Woodrow Wilson, a great amount of leverage in his aims to establish America as a global power.

This video aims to be a short documentary looking at Anglo-American relations from the start of the First World War to the Treaty of Washington.

#History, #BritishEmpire, #WW1,

[Henners]

People go on and on about German missteps in WW2 but, the more you look into it, WWI really takes the cake for... absolutely baffling behaviour.

[OldBritannia]

I hope you enjoy the next part in this series on Anglo-American relations. After making this, I can see why economic history tends to be avoided on YouTube - trying to find a way to visually represent economic statistics is not particularly easy. So apologies if the video pace seems a bit slower than normal this time.

Correction: The Lusitania was sunk in May 1915 rather than April. Apologies.

[big_]

This feels similar to Ottoman economic dependency on Germany during WW1. After the war and during the Turkish War of Independence Talat Pasha in exile mentioned in an interview that even if the Central Powers won the war the Empire would still in be tremendous debt to Germany, something that would be very hard to recover from, and Germany itself losing the war had been somewhat good for Turkey’s position.

[tomflynn]

As a British-born American I love anything that covers relations between the two countries. In many ways the US to the UK what Rome was to Greece.

[empireoffreedom]

I always love these videos! The maps and flags are gorgeous! And the study of the history of the British Empire is sadly mostly ignored in most of the world. Always interesting to see how these two powers who shaped the modern world interacted in different times.

[obiwankenobi]

“As always though, OHL could be relied upon to astonish the world with its almost mystical ability to always pick the completely wrong option” is such an unnecessarily protracted roast of German strategy that I love it

[realmrusirius]

Britain does love it's Great Games

[ante]

I am still amazed that this channel doesn't have more subscribers. You're probably in my top 3 channels right now and your uploads are always one of the first I click on when I have the time to watch. Keep up the amazing work!

[ethanwmonster]

I think you should continue this series after WW2 it get's interesting as USA fully replaces the British Empire but does global hegemony in a fundamentally different way.

[TimZandbergen]

Excellent video! It is exactly the 'non-obvious' mechanations behind the scenes that make these videos so rare, but so good!

[isaaclemmen]

Great video. Its hard not to see the ominous shadow of Bretton Woods in almost everything that happens as the American Financial system started to contrict around the British Empire.

[nickmacarius]

FANTASTIC! Thanks for the video. I would love to see a future video on the Paris Peace Conference! I read Paris 1919 by Margaret Macmillan several years ago. It provided very fascinating insight to the Peace Conference negotiations amongst the great powers.

[forthrightgambitia]

German naval policy in this war caused tensions with a number of other neutral states too. It is worth adding that the blockade also provoked diplomatic spats with the Netherlands also, for obvious reasons if one inspects the map. It is a measure of German diplomatic ineptitude that they were unable to exploit these tensions. If anything the Dutch were more inclined to fear a German invasion and so co-operated extensively with the Allied powers. And unrestricted submarine warfare also had a negative effect on Spanish shipping, that made the government there more inclined to allow the country to become a cheap sweatshop for the mass production of French armaments, equipment and ammunition.

2:56 I did not know about this forced purchase. I always assumed the death knell for Britain's 'informal empire' in Argentina, Uruguay and Chile was the Ottowa agreement in 1932 but this forced purchase must have had a dramatic impact long before that.

One thing I would say is that there seems to be this idea the European map was rewritten on the basis of Wilsonian idealism. Whilst a war up to maybe early 1916 could have reverted to a status quo ante the nationalist questions in France, Italy and Serbia would not have gone away and it seems they would have remained as a spark for another war. French irredentism towards Alsace and Lorraine was perhaps the mainspring of French political disputes from 1871 onwards. It was the coeur de cri of the French Catholic right such as Maurrais and played a key role in the great political dramas of the early Third Republic, such as the rise of Boulangisme and the Dreyfus affair. Europe had repeatedly been crossed with nationalist crises in the 19th century, from Greek independence, the Polish revolts, the Eastern Question, German and Italian Unification, the Hungarian compromise, the Balkan wars, even the independence of Norway in 1905. It was becoming increasingly clear that the suppression of nationalist feelings was becoming harder and harder (as suggested by both internal Ottoman and Austrian politics over the previous 50 years) and that nationalist movements were becoming increasing sources of tensions and flashpoints between countries, especially after the likes of Bismarck or Cavour had shown quite what a powerful tool it could be when used by a Machievallian statesman, or later as the century closed, by manipulative demagogues. Even with a status quo peace it seems hard to imagine, given the horrors of the Balkan wars in 1913, that these nationalist questions would not have eventually provoked the kind of orgy of violence later seen in the Second World War. It is a bitter pill to accept, but there is, to my mind, more than a degree of truth in the statement that the greatest architects of the post-1945 peace were Hitler and Stalin in using their wicked ethnic cleansing methods to create stable monoethnic states, far more than what was achieved at Versailles - although around that time the Greek-Turkish ethnic exchange perhaps suggested where this was all heading to.

I am skeptical about Wilson's supposed prime role in the outcome because whilst his loud promotion of the policy was highly symbolic in 1918, it seems to me that once the war reached a certain level of intensity this was almost an inevitability. His ideas were just grapsed onto by movements circiling like sharks long before the US was involved. Germany and Austro-Hungary in their creation of the puppet Kingdom of Poland and the various splinter states of the Russian Empire were already using nationalist projects for realpolitik aims by now. France had long succored Polish national ambitions as a means of weakening and distracting Prussia and later Germany and their military support for Polish actions in Silesia proved critical for the formation of the new Polish state. Italy's whole entry in 1915 was predicated on nationalist motives over various parts of the Austro-Hungarian empire as the culmination of their long unification wars. Britain and France had clearly already agreed to the dismantlement and partition of the Ottoman empire long before US involvement. The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire can be traced more forcifully to the British blockade and the economic paralysis of the empire by 1918 than to vague notions of self-determination and France had a clear interest in seeing the empire collapse and be replaced by a ring of friendly 'Little Entente' allies to keep Germany in check. The creation of Yugoslavia had little to do with self-determination (as the response of the Croats to the new state demonstrated) and a lot more to the kind of Greater Serbia nationalism that was one of the triggers of the war in the first place. Unshackled by the Ottoman structures Ataturk's nationalist movement was capable of achieving far more than the Young Turks could within the Ottoman system and saved the country to boot. Looking at it dispassionately, the peaces of 1919 owed far more to Entente realpolitik than they did to Wilsonian idealism, which played a form of window dressing that provided a justification for a very similar peace that the Germans had forced on Russia in Brest-Litovsk.

And a big reason for this was that Wilson was a terrible diplomat who found himself continuously isolated and outplayed at the conference, especially by the masterful Clemeanceau (who got the crippling reparations and the demilitarisation of the Rhine he sought), to the point that not only did Republicans in Congress consider the LoN a threat to US security but they considered the whole peace treaties as a betrayal of that which the what the US had entered the war originally. Wilson was derided for his weakness. Perhaps only the Italians among the Allies felt more deceived by the final outcome. And this naturally played a large part of the US's position towards Europe right up until 1941, a sense that the war which was unleashed in 1939 was at least in part due to British and French greed and ambitions from this conference, for which the US would not have anything more to do. It also explains why they were so quick to use their financial pressure to relieve Germany of much of its real reparation burden continuously during the 1920s - unfortunately also dangerously coupling the German financial system to the US one in the process, which was to prove disastrous after the crash of 1929.

[Brian-----]

🙂One great video after another here! Thank you

[gabedejongh]

Another amazing video, I’ve really been enjoying learning about the history of Anglo-American relations.

[chemicalman]

An excellent video. Perhaps the only critique I could offer would be the lack of any kind of summary or outro for this series. I understand ~1922 being the endpoint of knowledge you feel comfortable sharing. But even just 90 seconds summarizing how at the start there literally was conflict between Britain and United States and yet by the end both had shared interests and therefore allied and these shared interests continue today would have been nice.
If you ever do wish to go past 1922 do let me know. The Washington Naval Treaty in itself shows Britain as the hub in which all the other nations connected with.

[NGBRADLEY]

Really enjoyed this, would like to see another part covering 1922-1945 and then a final 1945 to 56 (Suez Crisis, the end more or less of Britain being a major power along with the US and Soviets)

[jackoofman]

One of my favorite YouTube channels ever. Keep up the great work!

[josephb]

Another fantastic upload! Quickly becoming one of my favourite channels.

[charliestoops]

As an American, I always appreciate any unfavorable portrayals of Woodrow Wilson. A self-righteous racist at home and an idealistic fool overseas.