World War I is an incredibly difficult period for every country involved, the United States not being an exception to this observation. Being a member of the global community and having established contact with other states, the U.S. government faces a difficult choice. On the one hand, the political and economic challenges that have swept America at the turn of the century are draining the resources from the state, making the chances for survival minuscule if the U.S. entered the WWI battlefield. On the other hand, dismantling its relationships with Europe is not a wise decision, either, given the possibility of future cooperation and the impending doom that Germany’s victory and its allies entailed. Therefore, the U.S. government has to address a very complex dilemma.
In his speech to the Jury in 1918, Eugene Debs claims that war in any form is alien to the ideas of peace and the value of human life that American democracy promoted. In turn, Woodrow Wilson refers to contradictions associated with abstaining from the conflict and supporting the principles of political integrity. With Wilson’s final argument, the solution that the United States will choose in their attempt at supporting the allies, at the same time managing resources to handle their own crisis, is very difficult to make, yet the American government has little choice.
The American involvement in WWI is inevitable due to the stakes that it suggests and the threats that the defeat of the allies implies. However, the U.S. government makes a very sensible decision by abstaining from the conflict and utilizing its resources to manage the local issues while intervening when American citizens and state economy will face an immediate threat. Thus, the U.S. will manage to balance between the two options long enough until it accumulates the resources to support the allies.