Follow the Footnotes: History, Theory, and the Case of U.S.
Intervention in the First World War
Galen Jackson
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Political Science
University of California, Los Angeles
August 28, 2014
Introduction
One of the key criticisms historians and qualitative methods specialists advance against many
political scientists is that the latter oftentimes fail to utilize historical evidence adequately when
making claims about the dynamics of international relations. At best, and with few exceptions,
these critics assert, political scientists rely heavily on secondary accounts, rather than on archival
and primary source research, to support their theories about world politics.1 More alarmingly,
proponents of historical methodology observe, political scientists too frequently refer to those
accounts that tend to support their theories, while ignoring scholars whose findings do not
comport with their predictions, or utilize sources that do not in fact support their arguments about
specific historical cases that they themselves have cited as evidence. In such instances the
theoretical argument being advanced is especially weak, since scholars ought to at least be able
to buttress the particular cases they have selected for analysis with sufficient evidentiary backing.
The case of American intervention in the First World War represents an important case in
this regard. One of the most prominent explanations offered by Realist scholars for why the U.S.
entered the war is the idea that the administration of President Woodrow Wilson, concerned
about the implications for American national security of a total German victory in Europe, chose
to intervene in order to prevent an Allied collapse in the spring of 1917. According to this line of
reasoning, a decisive victory for the Germans would have upset the European balance of power
by allowing Berlin to subjugate the rest of the continent and provided it with the wherewithal to
1
For a stimulating exchange between the disciplines of diplomatic history and political science, see the symposium
on the subject in the 1997 issue of International Security, vol. 22, no. 1. Historical methodologists are also quick to
point out that political scientists who study international politics too often base their conclusions on flawed data sets.
For an excellent example of this type of critique and the political scientists’ response, see the exchange between
Scott D. Sagan, Francis J. Gavin, Matthew Fuhrman, Todd S. Sechser, Matthew Kroenig, Hal Brands, Erik Gartzke,
and Vipin Narang about the impact of nuclear weapons on world politics in H-Diplo/ISSF Forum, no. 2 (2014): 297. See also Francis J. Gavin, “What We Do, and Why it Matters: A Response to FKS,” H-Diplo/ISSF Forum, no. 2
(2014): 1-10; Marc Trachtenberg, “A Response to H-Diplo/ISSF Forum on ‘What We Talk About When We Talk
About Nuclear Weapons,’” 18 June 2014.
1 threaten directly the United States across the Atlantic.2 One of the most clearly articulated and
seemingly plausible strands of this explanation is the argument advanced by John Mearsheimer
that the desperate plight of the Allies in the spring of 1917 necessitated the entry of the United
States into the war—without the support of the Americans, he argues, Germany was going to
defeat its enemies, and probably fairly quickly. Mearsheimer’s argument, on the face of it,
appears plausible, especially since he provides a number of citations as evidence in support of his
claims.
Still, one cannot simply accept this explanation as valid without examining it in light of
the historical evidence. To the contrary, anyone who is familiar with Mearsheimer’s work ought
to know that he interprets world politics throughout a particular theoretical lens, namely, that
defined by what he terms “offensive realism.” More importantly, theory can never be sufficient
on its own when studying diplomatic history. As Marc Trachtenberg points out, theory “is not a
substitute for empirical analysis. It is an engine of analysis. It helps you see which specific
questions to focus on.”3 Only by investigating the specific arguments Mearsheimer advances via
historical inquiry, then, can one be relatively certain that his theoretical model adequately
accounts for U.S. intervention in World War I.
I developed precisely this sort of research design in order to study Mearsheimer’s
explanation for the entry of the United States into the First World War several years ago in a
2
For a sampling of the works which argue in this vein, see Forrest Davis, The Atlantic System: The Story of AngloAmerican Control of the Seas (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1943), 227; Peter Trubowitz, Politics and Strategy:
Partisan Ambition and American Statecraft (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 130; Alfred Vagts,
“The United States and the Balance of Power,” Journal of Politics, vol. 3, no. 4 (1941): 431-433; Stephen M. Walt,
“The Ties That Fray: Why Europe and America Are Drifting Apart,” The National Interest, no. 54 (1998-1999): 3;
Stephen M. Walt, “Explaining Obama’s Asian Policy,”
http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/11/18/explaining_obamas_asia_policy (accessed 18 November 2011).
3
Marc Trachtenberg, The Craft of International History: A Guide to Method (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2006), 32 (emphasis in original).
2 paper that was ultimately published in Security Studies.4 Through the employment of historical
methodology, I argued that America’s concern about the plight of the Allies in the spring of 1917
and Washington’s anxiety about an imminent German victory could not explain Wilson’s
decision to take the country to war, as U.S. officials did not evince concern about such a
possibility at the time. To the contrary, most American estimates of the military balance at the
time indicated that the war was stalemated. Concerns of an impending Allied collapse, therefore,
do not appear to account for the timing of the Wilson Administration’s decision to intervene.
Rather than recapitulate at length the argument I made in the Security Studies article, in
this paper my objective is to outline the process by which I arrived at these conclusions.5 By
highlighting, step by step, how I executed the research design for the project, I seek to describe
to other scholars an effective methodology for evaluating key empirical claims made by
international relations theorists in support of their models. I proceed to describe this approach in
five parts. First, I summarize Mearsheimer’s overall theory of offensive realism and explain how
the case of U.S. intervention in the First World War relates to his arguments about “offshore
balancing.” Next, I show that by simply checking Mearsheimer’s own citations, one can begin to
evaluate whether or not the empirical evidence on which his arguments rest is persuasive. Third,
I describe how one can find important clues regarding America’s perceptions of the European
military balance and decision for war in 1917, simply by looking at several secondary sources
and memoirs. I then very briefly highlight some of the primary sources and archival documents I
utilized to arrive at my final conclusions regarding Mearsheimer’s argument on this subject.
4
Galen Jackson, “The Offshore Balancing Thesis Reconsidered: Realism, the Balance of Power in Europe, and
America’s Decision for War in 1917,” Security Studies, vol. 21, no. 3 (2012): 455-489.
5
Inevitably, however, this paper draws heavily on what I wrote in that article and I refer back to it when reiterating
certain points I made in that piece. For an excellent template for how to do this sort of work, see Trachtenberg, The
Craft of International History, chapter 4.
3 Finally, I restate some of the central points of the paper and draw attention to its main lessons in
a short conclusion.
Offensive Realism and U.S. Entry into World War I
According to Mearsheimer’s theory of offensive realism, the anarchic structure of the
international system causes intense security competition among states.6 Because the best way for
states to survive is through self-help, they attempt to maximize power, and thereby provide for
their own security. What this implies is that there are few status quo powers in world politics, as
states stop seeking additional power “only when hegemony is achieved…. In short, states do not
become status quo powers until they completely dominate the system.”7 A unique element of
Mearsheimer’s theory is the concept of “regional hegemony.” In his view, no state can possibly
dominate the entire world, both because of “the stopping power of water” and the fact that no
country is likely to ever develop “clear-cut nuclear superiority.” Consequently, the best that any
state can hope to achieve is dominance in its own region of the world—only in the unlikely
scenario in which a country were to attain such a preponderant position would it then be
satisfied. Even if a state were fortunate enough to gain this objective, however, Mearsheimer
contends that it would continue to keep a close eye on other states that appeared to be on the
verge of consolidating themselves as regional hegemons, as such competitors could then
conceivably threaten its vital interests. In these circumstances, regional hegemons will no longer
be content with the status quo, and will intervene in order to prevent the rise of such a powerful
rival. It is this behavior which Mearsheimer describes as offshore balancing.8
6
I have also summarized Mearsheimer’s theory elsewhere. See Jackson, “The Offshore Balancing Thesis
Reconsidered,” 455-458.
7
John J. Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001), 34-35.
8
Ibid., 41-42, 114-128, 140-141, 157-162.
4 According to Mearsheimer regional hegemons are uncommon, and he argues that only
the United States has succeeded in modern history in attaining such a preponderant position by
rising to dominance in the Western Hemisphere in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. Since that time, he asserts, the Americans have intervened on four separate
occasions—World War I, World War II in Europe, World War II in the Pacific, and in Western
Europe during the Cold War—to prevent the rise of a regional rival elsewhere in the world.9 U.S.
entry into the First World War, therefore, plays a key role in supporting Mearsheimer’s
interpretation of American foreign policy, as this case represents a quarter of all his data on the
topic. And if the goal is to assess Mearsheimer’s argument, it makes sense, as Trachtenberg
observes, to study the cases he himself uses in support of his theory.10 Specifically, Mearsheimer
claims,
The United States entered World War I in good part because it thought that Germany was gaining
the upper hand on the Triple Entente and was likely to win the war and become a European
hegemon. America’s buck-passing strategy, in other words, was unraveling after two and a half
years of war…. Consequently, the United States was forced to enter the war in the spring of 1917
to bolster the Triple Entente and prevent a German victory.11
Feeling threatened by the prospect of a German hegemon in Europe, Mearsheimer asserts, the
Wilson Administration could not sit idly by as the Allies were being overrun. Such an outcome
would be unacceptable, as Berlin could then begin to focus on targeting the United States next.
Such reasoning, even without historical investigation, seems credible. Indeed, though one
could argue that this interpretation is logically at odds with Mearsheimer’s concept of the
“stopping power of water,” a great deal of literature on Realism and offshore balancing exists in
international relations theory to buttress Mearsheimer’s claims about what led the United States
9
Ibid., 41, 143, 252-261, 265.
Trachtenberg, The Craft of International History, 46.
11
Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 253-254.
10
5 to act as it did in 1917.12 Moreover, a number of observers at the time voiced concern about the
implications for U.S. security of a total German victory in Europe. As America’s ambassador to
Germany James Gerard, for instance, wrote in 1917,
I believe that we are not only justly in this war, but prudently in this war. If we had stayed out and
the war had been drawn or won by Germany we should have been attacked, and that while Europe
stood grinning by: not directly at first, but through an attack on some Central or South American
State to which it would be at least as difficult for us to send troops as for Germany. And what if
this powerful nation, vowed to war, were once firmly established in South or Central America?
What of our boasted isolation then?13
Likewise, even before war broke out in 1914 Lewis Einstein had advanced many of the same
arguments about what a Europe dominated by Germany would mean for the security of the
United States.14 And, as Mearsheimer points out in an endnote, the Germans did indeed attempt
to provoke a conflict between America and Mexico during the war, so as to ensure that the U.S.
could not aid the Allies from across the Atlantic.15 When combined with the fact that, even since
the early years of Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency, American military planners had begun to
evince concern about Berlin’s ambitions in the Western Hemisphere, and that evidence does
exist to suggest that the Germans were interested in such a plot, Mearsheimer’s argument seems
rather convincing at first glance.16
Nevertheless, the power of Mearsheimer’s theoretical model and the realization that there
was an appreciation, at least among some Americans, that a victorious Germany could endanger
12
If, as Mearsheimer claims, natural water barriers like the Atlantic Ocean prevent aggressor states from projecting
their power against their rivals, the United States would not have had anything to worry about in 1917 when the
Germans appeared to be on the verge of victory.
13
James W. Gerard, My Four Years in Germany (New York: George H. Doran Company, 1917), xi.
14
Lewis Einstein, “The United States and Anglo-German Rivalry,” National Review, vol. 60 (1913): 736-750.
15
Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 493, n.60. On this issue, see Barbara W. Tuchman, The
Zimmerman Telegram (New York: Macmillan, 1966).
16
John A.S. Grenville and George B. Young, Politics, Strategy, and American Diplomacy: Studies in Foreign
Policy, 1873-1917 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), 305-307, 309, 325-326; Richard D. Challener,
Admirals, Generals, and American Foreign Policy, 1898-1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973),
16-19, 24-29, 32-35, 44, 66-68, 88, 102-103, 120-121; Holger H. Herwig, Politics of Frustration: The United States
in German Naval Planning, 1889-1941 (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1976), chapters 2-4; Christopher
Layne, The Peace of Illusions: American Grand Strategy from 1940 to the Present (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 2006), 183.
6 U.S. security, are not enough on their own to prove that power political considerations provided
the immediate impetus for the Wilson Administration’s decision to enter the war. How, then,
could one become relatively more certain that such factors were what ultimately drove American
policy in 1917? Jumping right into the primary sources hardly makes sense, as one would have a
hard time knowing precisely where to look or whether it was even worth making the effort to
verify the offshore balancing thesis. A better approach would be to examine Mearsheimer’s own
specific claims, as well as the exact sources he cites to justify them. This research strategy not
only allows one to verify whether or not the evidence actually supports what Mearsheimer is
arguing, it can also provide clues as to where else to look for additional data and about what
other assertions past scholars have made about America’s entry into the war. Thus, as
Trachtenberg succinctly writes, “if you want to get to the bottom of a historical issue, it’s not the
money that you should follow. It’s the footnotes.”17
Checking the Sources
Among the sources Mearsheimer refers to in his citations on U.S. intervention in the war is
George Kennan’s famous American Diplomacy, a collection of essays which includes a chapter
on U.S. foreign policy during the First World War.18 That Mearsheimer would choose to rely on
Kennan’s work to support his theory is hardly surprising, given the belief held by each in the
power of the Realist paradigm. When one reads what Kennan has to say about American strategy
during World War I, however, it quickly becomes clear that his account does not offer much in
the way of backing for the offshore balancing explanation. To be sure, Kennan observes that “an
awareness of the damage that would be done to our world position by the elimination of England
as a strong force in the world” did exist in the minds of U.S. policymakers, and he acknowledges
17
Trachtenberg, The Craft of International History, 87.
George F. Kennan, American Diplomacy, 1900-1950, Expanded Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1984), chapter 4.
18
7 that this realization did lead to “a gradual growth of pro-Allied sentiment” in Washington.
Nonetheless, he concludes that Wilson’s decision to intervene “was over an issue of neutrality.”
Moreover, Kennan asserts that once the United States entered the war its policies inevitably led
to “the destruction of Europe’s equilibrium,” even though practical considerations “argued
against total victory.” In Kennan’s view, therefore, American officials would have been better
off getting the country ready for war at the conflict’s outset, preparing public opinion for the
possibility of intervention, and then, if a German victory appeared imminent, joining the Allies
“for the avowed purpose… of ending the war as rapidly as possible… in order to achieve the
termination of hostilities with a minimum prejudice to the future stability of the Continent.”19 In
short, though he agrees with Mearsheimer’s prescriptive understanding of how great powers
ought to act, Kennan’s explanation for why the United States intervened in the war is not entirely
consistent with the former’s description of this case.
Mearsheimer also cites Edward Buehrig’s Woodrow Wilson and the Balance of Power
whose account of American intervention, though more supportive of the offshore balancing
thesis than Kennan’s interpretation, suffers somewhat from logical inconsistencies. For Buehrig,
the real bone of contention between Germany and the United States during the First World War
was British control of the seas. Whereas Berlin sought to challenge London’s naval might,
Washington “regarded British power benevolently, as a factor contributing to American
security.” Indeed, instead of building up its military establishment during the nineteenth century
to be able to enforce the Monroe Doctrine, “there grew up an implicit reliance on British sea
19
Ibid., 65-68, 71-73. While acknowledging that domestic politics probably would have made this an extremely
difficult course for Wilson to follow, Kennan nevertheless claims that this fact should not be used as an excuse.
“History,” he writes, “does not forgive our national mistakes because they are explicable in terms of our domestic
politics.” For his part, Mearsheimer makes quite clear that he considers offensive realism both a descriptive and
prescriptive theory, saying, “States should behave according to the dictates of offensive realism, because it outlines
the best way to survive in a dangerous world.” See Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 11
(emphasis in original).
8 power” for U.S. security. Conflict between the Americans and Germans, then, was inevitable, as
the latter desired nothing less than to break Britain’s naval dominance. The United States,
however, was unaccustomed to viewing international affairs in power political terms and, as a
result, the Wilson Administration framed the debate over how to approach relations with
Germany in terms of neutral rights violations and the defense of American prestige. As Buehrig
argues, “The Administration saw in Germany a menace to national safety and, beyond that, a
sinister threat to the universal aspirations of democracy.” Congress and the American people,
however, were unlikely to support U.S. intervention “except for the issue of neutral rights. The
Administration had been caught in the unenviable position where the larger purpose depended on
the smaller.” Thus, while secondary considerations became the focus of the dialogue in America,
the threat to the balance of power was what occasioned the U.S. declaration of war in April
1917.20
Buehrig is by no means the only scholar to have pointed out that prior to World War I the
British Fleet was a significant source of American security, and the logic of his argument is
consistent with that underpinning Mearsheimer’s view.21 Buerhig, however, makes several of the
same points as Kennan when discussing the reasons for American intervention in 1917. While he
claims that “an appreciation of the balance of power point of view” underlay the Wilson
Administration’s policies, he also acknowledges the president’s genuine belief in the need to
resist German attacks on neutral rights and in the righteousness of spreading democracy. In
addition, he notes several of Wilson’s advisers’ disappointment with his inability to think in
20
Edward H. Buerhig, Woodrow Wilson and the Balance of Power (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press,
1955), ix, 7, 16-17, 58-84, 149.
21
On the contribution of the British Fleet to the safety of the United States, see Bradford Perkins, The Great
Rapprochement: England and the United States, 1895-1914 (New York: Atheneum, 1968); Stephen Rock,
Appeasement in International Politics (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2000), chapter 2. As a
result, as Alfred Vagts has shown, Germany became American naval planners’ greatest concern in the decade
preceding the First World War. See Alfred Vagts, “Hopes and Fears of an American-German War, 1870-1915,”
Political Science Quarterly, vol. 54, no. 4 (1939): 514-535.
9 power political terms. In dealing with this countervailing evidence, Buehrig merely states his
belief that this situation “emphasizes the extent to which American policy was conditioned by an
immature and undisciplined public opinion, unaccustomed to dealing with hard problems of
foreign policy.”22 In short, Buehrig appears to recognize that balance of power factors were not
the only force driving U.S. policy at this time, but he downplays this fact by arguing that, in the
background, they provided the critical impetus for an American declaration of war. Buehrig,
however, makes little effort to demonstrate this point empirically and, consequently, one is left
wondering how exactly he arrived at the conclusion that non-strategic considerations should be
viewed as relatively unimportant. Moreover, just as Kennan observed that the entry of the United
States into the war resulted in the total destruction of the equilibrium of power on the European
continent, so Buehrig seems to recognize that once the Americans opted for war a “peace without
victory” that would maintain a stable balance in the region was no longer possible.23 Thus, while
Buehrig’s balance of power thesis certainly squares with the interpretation offered by
Mearsheimer, the evidence he provides for his claims is by no means overwhelming.
Two of Mearsheimer’s other sources, Walter Lippmann’s U.S. Foreign Policy and
Patrick Devlin’s Too Proud to Fight, suffer from similar shortcomings.24 For his part, in
identifying himself clearly with the Realist school Lippmann makes the same claim as Buehrig,
asserting that the Wilson Administration’s statements about the defense of neutral rights merely
disguised the real reasons for America’s intervention. According to Lippmann, the president’s
“superficial reasons” for going to war “would never have carried the day if a majority of the
people had not recognized intuitively, and if some Americans had not seen clearly, what the
22
Buehrig, Woodrow Wilson and the Balance of Power, 139-140, 150, 274.
Ibid., 144, 169, 186, 265. On this point, see also Jackson, “The Offshore Balancing Thesis Reconsidered,” 464.
24
Walter Lippmann, U.S. Foreign Policy: Shield of the Republic (Boston: Brown, Little, and Company, 1943);
Patrick Devlin, Too Proud to Fight: Woodrow Wilson’s Neutrality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975).
23
10 threatened German victory would mean to the United States.” While basing an argument entirely
on the idea that the U.S. public understood “intuitively” what was really going on is problematic
enough, Lippmann then contradicts himself several pages later, writing that the public did not
understand that the United States needed to intervene to keep Germany from achieving “mastery
of the Atlantic Ocean.” “Because this simple and self-evident American interest was not made
candidly explicit,” Lippmann argues, “the nation never understood clearly why it had entered the
war.”25 Aside from these logical shortcomings, Lippmann’s account also suffers from a lack of
evidence. Indeed, other than a single footnote describing a conversation he had had with
Wilson’s adviser Edward House, the author presents no concrete support for his arguments.
Similarly, Devlin, while observing that power political factors contributed to the U.S.
decision for war, curiously asserts that the reasons the country went to war were somewhat
different from why Wilson opted to intervene. In Devlin’s view, Realism does indeed better
explain U.S. entry into the war than do accounts which point to the defense of neutral rights,
national prestige, or the promotion of American idealistic values. And yet, he then claims that
balance of power considerations cannot explain Wilson’s decision, as the president “regarded
Germany as no worse [a] menace to America than Britain….” Instead, Devlin observes, Wilson
took the country to war because he had no other way of promoting his vision of a new
international order, based on collective security and the principle of national self-determination,
saying, “America [had to] either abandon what Wilson truly believed to be her historic mission
on whose accomplishment he had set his heart or else go to war. For Wilson the former could not
be.” Moreover, even Devlin’s evidence that the United States intervened for balance of power
reasons is quite weak. Indeed, he bases this assertion on the fact that the U.S. again opted for war
in 1941, “when the previous exorcism having failed, America had to intervene again, this time
25
Lippmann, U.S. Foreign Policy, 33-34, 38-39.
11 without any great flourish of ideals, to help put down Hitler.”26 How this proves that the 1917
decision was motivated by realistic policy, the author never makes clear. Thus, Devlin seems
open to the criticism, which later scholars also leveled at Lippmann, that he may have applied the
logic governing America’s intervention in the Second World War to 1917.27 In short, Too Proud
to Fight not only suffers from several logical inconsistencies, particularly its distinction between
a decision for war made by the United States and one made by Wilson, when the latter had
unchallenged command of U.S. foreign policy, it also repeats Lippmann’s error of not providing
sufficient evidence to support its claims about the power political aspects of American strategy.28
Mearsheimer, therefore, is entirely correct when he cites these books as works which defend the
offshore balancing explanation, but unfortunately they do not offer strong empirical support for
his argument.
Mearsheimer also refers to Secretary of State Robert Lansing’s memoirs as evidence in
support of his theory.29 To be sure, Lansing, who served in this post from 1915 to 1920 and
played a key role in designing America’s neutrality policies in the years prior to Wilson’s
decision for war in March-April 1917, was a major advocate for war against Germany who
defended this position on power political grounds.30 In addition, according to Daniel Smith, the
foremost expert on Lansing and his policies, the secretary of state’s recollections cannot be
discounted, as he was the “most powerful figure in the first critical year of American neutrality
26
Devlin, Too Proud to Fight, 675, 681.
On this point, see Richard W. Leopold, “The Problem of American Intervention, 1917: An Historical Retrospect,”
World Politics, vol. 2, no. 3 (1950): 422-423; Christopher Layne, The Peace of Illusions: American Grand Strategy
from 1940 to the Present (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 199, 276-277.
28
On Wilson’s total control of U.S. foreign policy at this time, see Ross Gregory, The Origins of American
Intervention in the First World War (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1971), 13; Arthus S. Link, Woodrow
Wilson: Revolution, War, and Peace (Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1979), 14.
29
Robert Lansing, War Memoirs of Robert Lansing, Secretary of State (New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Company,
1935).
30
Daniel M. Smith, Robert Lansing and American Neutrality, 1914-1917 (Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1958); Daniel M. Smith, “Robert Lansing and the Formulation of American Neutrality Policies, 1914-1915,”
Mississippi Valley Historical Review, vol. 43, no. 1 (1956): 59-81.
27
12 in World War I.”31 The fact that Lansing was also, in the words of Ross Gregory, “at heart a
realist” whose strong ideological commitment to democracy and fear of autocratic forms of
government led him early on in the conflict to defend a hard line against Berlin, also suggests
that one could credibly point to Lansing’s memoir as evidence that the Wilson Administration
was deeply concerned with the implications of a German hegemon in Europe.32 Indeed,
Lansing’s desire to enter the war at an early date in order to prevent such an outcome is reflected
in a July 1915 memorandum he reproduces in the book:
My judgment is that the German Government, cherishing the same ambition of world power
which now possesses it, would with its usual vigor and thoroughness prepare to renew its attack on
democracy [in the event of victory in the war]…. The remedy seems to me to be plain. It is that
Germany must not be permitted to win this war or to break even, though to prevent it this country
is forced to take an active part.33
It seems clear, then, that even at a very early stage in the war, the secretary of state favored
intervention.
Even this source, however, does not necessarily corroborate the offshore balancing
perspective. Although Lansing did serve as Wilson’s highest-ranking diplomat throughout most
of the war and was an influential individual within the administration, by his own account he
faced tremendous difficulties in his efforts to convince the president to adopt his views.
According his recollections, while he considered American attempts to bring about peace
between the belligerents “a useless waste of energy,” he concedes that Wilson refused to
abandon this hope until March 1917.34
More importantly, Lansing readily acknowledges that, despite his many attempts to
convince the president to intervene against Germany due to the threat its system of government
31
Smith, “Robert Lansing and the Formulation of American Neutrality Policies,” 81.
Gregory, The Origins of American Intervention, 22. Lansing’s ideological concerns do not, strictly speaking,
accord with Realist theory. Nonetheless, the secretary of state clearly harbored deep concerns about a German
victory, not only due to his beliefs about democracy and authoritarianism, but also because of power political
considerations.
33
Lansing, War Memoirs, 21, 103.
34
Ibid., 36, 174, 214.
32
13 and potential power posed to the security of the United States, the White House may never have
made the decision it did had Berlin not commenced with unrestricted submarine warfare against
U.S. merchant ships in February 1917. Indeed, the secretary of state writes that the renewal of Uboat attacks was “one of the chief, if not the chief, ground for the United States declaring a state
of war with the Imperial Government of Germany.” Calling his effort to persuade Wilson and the
American people of the necessity of American intervention against “the evil nature of the
German Government’s aims and of the menace of those aims to our national safety” a “long slow
process” that took nearly two years, Lansing admits, “It might have failed even then but for the
crass stupidity of the Germans in declaring their purpose of renewing unrestricted submarine
warfare on February 1, 1917, in later attacking and sinking American merchant ships, and,
finally, in attempting to induce Mexico to make war upon the United States in the event that we
declared war against Germany.” In describing the events that led the Americans into the war,
Lansing adds,
I have wondered sometimes what would have been the result if [German Ambassador] Count von
Bernstorff’s advice had prevailed with his government and if submarine warfare had been
abandoned…. An American today, reviewing the two years preceding the declaration of war by
Congress in April, 1917, may feel a chill of fear as he sees how the mere change of policy at
Berlin in regard to submarine warfare, a change that nearly took place, might have reversed the
whole course of events…. The Allied Powers may thank German stupidity and stubbornness for
saving the situation. Submarine warfare may have been a blessing in disguise.35
In short, while it is undoubtedly true that Lansing himself favored going to war against Germany,
for both ideological and realistic reasons, he acknowledges that his point of view did not prevail
in the Wilson White House for much of the war and that, had it not been for Berlin’s decision to
launch an unrestricted campaign of submarine warfare against U.S. shipping, the president may
very well have chosen to stay out of the conflict. Thus, by Lansing’s own account, although he
35
Ibid., 25, 41, 53.
14 personally was thinking in terms consistent with Mearsheimer’s argument during the war, it is
not at all clear that Wilson was.36
Mearsheimer also references Smith’s excellent book The Great Departure. When one
reads the introduction, it becomes quite clear that Smith’s thesis is somewhat more complex and
multifaceted than that proposed by Mearsheimer. Indeed, he writes at the outset of the book that
the Americans came into the war “in an involved controversy over neutral rights, because of
national self-interests and an even greater concern in the creation of a stable and just postwar
world society. American foreign policy, throughout the neutrality and the war periods, was in
general practical and based on these national interests.”37 On the one hand, Smith’s use of the
words “national self-interests” in these sentences appears to offer some backing for
Mearsheimer’s assertion that Washington had chosen to “buck-pass” during the initial phase of
the war and then intervened to prevent the rise of a German hegemon in Europe. On the other
hand, the fact that he also highlights the defense of American neutral rights and points out that
the Wilson Administration hoped for the erection of a “stable and just postwar world society”
creates the impression that perhaps the logic of U.S. entry into the war was not as simple as
Mearsheimer suggests. These are clues that Smith may believe that a variety of factors were at
play in 1917 and, therefore, that this particular source requires careful reading.
36
Ibid., 172. Lansing also claims Wilson did not understand the nature of the threat posed by a potential German
victory in the war, and seemed more concerned with defending U.S. neutral rights in the face of British
provocations. Writing in October 1916, when America’s wartime relations with Great Britain hit rock bottom, the
secretary of state lamented, “On no account must we range ourselves even indirectly on the side of Germany, no
matter how great the provocation may be. The amazing thing to me is that the President does not see this. In fact, he
does not seem to grasp the full significance of this war or the principles at issue. I have talked it over with him, but
the violations of American rights by both sides seem to interest him more than the vital interests as I see them. That
German imperialistic ambitions threaten free institutions everywhere apparently has not sunk very deeply into his
mind. For six months I have talked about the struggle between Autocracy and Democracy, but do not see that I have
made any great impression.”
37
Daniel M. Smith, The Great Departure: The United States and World War I, 1914-1920 (New York: John Wiley
& Sons, 1965), x.
15 As one continues through The Great Departure it does in fact become clear that Smith,
though convinced that the balance of power was an element in the American decision to go to
war, does not consider this to be the only explanation for the Wilson Administration’s
diplomacy. To be sure, he argues “that realistic concepts of the national interests were held by
Wilson and his principal advisers and were involved to a degree in the formulation of basic
neutrality policies and the ultimate transition to belligerency.” Moreover, Smith appears to back
Buehrig’s assertion that the United States viewed British sea power benevolently, and considered
Germany’s challenge to London on this front a potential future threat to American security. The
fact that these attitudes existed among “a minority of informed citizens,” he writes, “made it
inestimably easier to condemn Germany on moral and idealistic grounds and probably facilitated
the ultimate entry into war.” As for Wilson’s views, Smith also asserts that the president was
capable of thinking in power political terms and that, to a certain degree, he did worry about
what a German victory would imply for American security. The fact that Smith also notes that
the United States’ neutrality policies were, in effect, heavily biased in favor of the Entente
powers from 1914 to 1917, also suggests that the author believes realistic factors did play a role
in the administration’s decision to enter the war.38
Smith, however, lists a number of other reasons why Wilson ultimately opted to take the
country to war. Indeed, the author points out that although the president saw Germany as a
potentially hostile power, he nonetheless “did not believe that a German victory, undesirable
though it would be, would pose an immediate threat to the United States.” Wilson, Smith asserts,
“was confident of an eventual Allied triumph. But if the opposite should result, he thought that
Germany probably would be too weakened by the European war to offer more than a future
menace to the security of the Western Hemisphere.” Smith, like Buehrig, also argues that the
38
Ibid., 9, 14, 25, 39, 42, 46, 51, 61.
16 president saw a “peace without victory” as the key to a stable postwar world, but chose not to
intervene until after his diplomatic initiatives had failed and the Germans had recommenced with
U-boat warfare. When Berlin chose to once again resort to its submarines in the winter of 1917,
“American honor and prestige” had been so thoroughly committed as a result of previous crises
with Germany “that virtually no room was left for further diplomatic maneuver.” Even after Uboat targeting of U.S. ships began once again, Smith claims, Wilson was tormented by the
decision he was forced to make and hoped to stay out of the war. He eventually capitulated to the
counsel of his advisers due to past “policy assertions of strict accountability,” which “left no
alternative except a humiliating retreat.”39 It seems that Smith, in addition to his belief that
power political considerations played a role in bringing the United States into the war on the side
of the Allies, also sees other factors as quite important in influencing U.S. diplomacy.
And, unsurprisingly, in the most significant section of the book relating to the choice for
intervention, Smith observes that the cause behind Wilson’s decision to intervene “defies
simplistic explanations.” Indeed, he argues that scholars like Charles Seymour, who contend that
it was mainly the resumption of submarine attacks on American ships that led to U.S. entry into
the war, are probably right that there would have been no war without the submarine issue, for
otherwise Germany and America “would not have had a direct clash of interests and power.”40
Smith also contends that U.S. policy was probably not even the result of deliberate planning, and
that economic exigencies and cultural affinity may also account for Washington’s pro-Allied
neutrality policies. Nor does Smith claim that American intervention can be explained as a
response to the criticality of the military balance in 1917, as Wilson and his advisers primarily
viewed Germany as a potential future threat. Though the president was “far more practical in his
39
40
Ibid., 26-27, 66-67, 77-79.
See Charles Seymour, American Diplomacy during the World War (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1964), 209-210.
17 policies and thinking than many scholars formerly believed,” he nonetheless was also driven, in
part, by his determination to uphold “economic and prestige interests, as well as moral
considerations.”41
What this all seems to imply is that Smith, rather than firmly believing that strategic
imperatives were the sole, or even the main, determinant of American statecraft during the First
World War, sees an array of issues at play. Thus, it is not especially surprising that in the final
analysis he pools together a number of factors in order to explain U.S. entry in 1917:
The answer seems to have been that the prestige and honor of the nation were so committed as the
result of previous policies that nothing less than a diplomatic break and a forceful defense of
American interests were possible. By 1917 the evidence suggests that Wilson feared that a
German victory was probable and that it would disturb the world balance, and although he was not
apprehensive about an immediate threat to the United States, he did believe that such a result
would endanger his idealistic hopes for a just peace and the founding of a new and stable world
order. He referred to Germany as a madman who must be restrained. He finally accepted the
necessity for actively entering the war, it would appear, with the submarine as the precipitant, only
because he believed that larger reasons of national prestige, economic interests, and future security
so demanded, and above all because of his commitment to the cause of an enduring world peace.42
That Smith concurs with Mearsheimer’s assessment that concerns about national security were
involved in the American decision for war is obvious, but it is equally clear that the former does
not see these considerations as purely responsible for the Wilson Administration’s actions. In
short, this source, like Lansing’s memoir, does lend some credence to the offshore balancing
explanation, but it also raises a number of other dynamics that influenced U.S. policy in 1917.
A careful reader of Mearsheimer’s book will note that the author, rather subtly, points out
in an endnote that “other factors [also] contributed to the American decision to enter World War
I.”43 In support of this claim, he cites Ernest May’s The World War and American Isolation.
Given that this source, by Mearsheimer’s own admission, may point to other factors as
influencing the American decision for war in 1917, scholars looking to evaluate the offshore
41
Smith, The Great Departure, 80-81.
Ibid., 82.
43
Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 492, n.56.
42
18 balancing thesis would be well advised to read it diligently. And, indeed, when one examines
May’s arguments as to why the United States entered the war, it becomes clear that he considers
realistic factors to have been clearly “subsidiary” in the thinking of U.S. officials.44 Instead, May
contends that even after the Germans announced their unrestricted submarine campaign on
February 1, Wilson still “did not want war or even armed neutrality.” Berlin’s announcement,
however, preceded as it was by U.S.-German diplomatic crises over the same issue in both 1915
and 1916, made backing down “impossible,” as such a response “would sacrifice America’s
prestige and moral influence.” There is no other possible explanation for U.S. intervention, May
argues, as neither the country’s economic nor security interests were at stake. In his view,
“Despite the Zimmerman note… Wilson had not retracted his earlier assertion… that no
European power offered an immediate menace to the United States…. And he had little or no
reason to suspect that Germany would win, even if the United States tolerated the U-boat
blockade.”45 In other words, May seems to agree with Smith that considerations of prestige,
honor, credibility, and a desire to avoid international humiliation all contributed to the American
decision, but considers such factors to have been much more important. Moreover, he takes issue
with the argument that strategic concepts played a role in Wilson’s thinking, as he claims the
president had no reason to believe that the Germans would win the war when he chose to enter
the conflict.
May further disputes the Realist account by pointing out that Wilson did not expect to put
large numbers of American troops in Europe when he decided on war. To the contrary, he
argues, the Allies were expecting “only ammunition and rolling stock to achieve victory in
1917.” Had Wilson thought U.S. forces would be needed to put down the German threat, he
44
Ernest R. May, The World War and American Isolation, 1914-1917 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1966), 437.
45
Ibid., 423, 427.
19 probably would have persisted in the policy of arming America’s merchant marine. “Expecting
America to fight mainly with her factories and ships,” May observes, “Wilson chose war in
preference to armed neutrality.”46 Thus, while Mearsheimer deserves credit for acknowledging
that some scholars see non-strategic imperatives as decisive in bringing the United States into the
war, May’s study nevertheless seems to contradict his emphasis on offshore balancing as the key
element in the American decision-making process.
What is one to make of the analysis of Mearsheimer’s sources on the issue of American
intervention in 1917? To be sure, Mearsheimer can point to a number of scholars who claim that
realistic factors contributed to the Wilson Administration’s decision for war. Moreover, several
of the experts he cites, namely Kennan, Lansing, and Lippmann appear to support offensive
realism’s prescriptive doctrine. On the other hand, the works to which Mearsheimer refers hardly
indicate that U.S. entry was a straightforward, uncomplicated event that resulted from a simple
assessment of the European balance of power. The accounts of Buehrig, Devlin, and Lippmann,
for instance, all suffer from both logical inconsistencies and a dearth of evidence to support their
claims about the realistic motivations of American statecraft. Similarly, both Lansing and
Kennan, though their respective books assert that the United States ought to have pursued a
policy much more in line with power political realities, lament the fact that Wilson had difficulty
thinking in such terms. And both Smith and May point to non-strategic influences that impacted
Washington’s decision-making process, with the latter essentially refuting the idea that the
balance of power in Europe played any role at all in the White House’s view of the situation.
None of this necessarily means that Mearsheimer’s theory is incorrect or that the offshore
balancing explanation for American diplomacy can be quickly tossed aside. To the contrary, all
one knows from performing this exercise is that there may have been more going on in 1917 than
46
Ibid., 432.
20 an offensive realist account would allow. The fact that the collection of sources Mearsheimer
lists is not entirely persuasive, in other words, raises questions about the strength of his argument
and necessitates a closer look at the evidence relating to this particular historical episode.47 One
cannot simply conclude one way or another whether Mearsheimer’s argument holds water, but
certainly additional investigation is now justified. Thus, without examining a single primary
document, a great deal of progress has been made in the evaluation of the offshore balancing
thesis.
Fortunately, Mearsheimer also makes a number of straightforward claims about why the
United States intervened precisely when it did in the spring of 1917. Moreover, he once again
cites a number of sources to back up his assertions on this point. It is possible, therefore, to once
again check these endnotes in order to determine whether or not his claims are empirically valid.
Mearsheimer begins his analysis by pointing out that the Russians, devastated by the war,
were on their last legs by March 1917. “The Russian army,” he writes, “which had been badly
mauled in almost every engagement it had with the German army, was on the verge of
disintegration by March 12, 1917, when revolution broke out and the tsar was removed from
power.”48 In other words, Mearsheimer’s argument is that because Russia, collapsing both
internally and externally, was about to be knocked out of the war, the Americans had added
reason to come to the aid of the Allies. The timing of these events, moreover, correlates directly
with the American decision to intervene, which was made in the second half of March.
The first source Mearsheimer lists in support of his claim about the state of affairs in
Russia is Nicholas Golovine’s The Russian Army in the World War.49 In this particular instance,
Mearsheimer appears to be on solid footing, as Golovine clearly indicates that the Russians were
47
On this methodological point, see Trachtenberg, The Craft of International History, 60.
Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 254.
49
Nicholas N. Golovine, The Russian Army in the World War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1931).
48
21 indeed in dire straits. The revolution, he observes, soon spread to the army and, consequently,
when combined with the toll taken by three years of conflict, led to “the urgent desire of the bulk
of our soldiers to end the War.”50 Likewise, Alfred Knox’s memoir With the Russian Army,
which Mearsheimer also cites, clearly supports the claim that Petrograd was reeling in the wake
of the March 12 revolution. Though Knox contends that, were it not for political instability on
the home front, the Russian army would have fought fiercely and “made possible an allied
victory by the end of [1917],” he nevertheless highlights a diary entry of late March in which he
wrote, “It seems to me that we are moving straight to anarchy and a separate peace.”51 Knox,
then, seemed aware quite soon after the revolution that the Russian war effort would soon
encounter tremendous obstacles. Mearsheimer, therefore, does have strong backing for his
assertions about the military situation on the Eastern Front in the early months of 1917.52
What is conspicuously absent from these sources, however, is any indication of how the
United States perceived what was happening in Russia throughout this period. While one could
speculate that the situation was so clearly not in Petrograd’s favor by this point in the war that it
would have been difficult for the Americans to miss what was going on, without an assessment
of U.S. views one cannot simply conclude that the March revolution put added pressure on
Washington to come to Russia’s rescue. The evidence Mearsheimer presents ought to make one
somewhat more confident in his claims regarding American intervention, but more work needs to
be done before a definitive evaluation of his argument can be made.
50
Ibid., 259.
Alfred Knox, With the Russian Army, 1914-1917, Volume 2 (London: Hutchinson & Company, 1921), 552, 586.
52
Mearsheimer’s other sources corroborate the views expressed by Golovine and Knox. See W. Bruce Lincoln,
Passage through Armageddon: The Russians in War and Revolution, 1914-1918 (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1986); Allan K. Wildman, The End of the Russian Imperial Army: The Old Army and the Soldiers’ Revolt, Volume 1
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980). See also Jackson, “The Offshore Balancing Thesis
Reconsidered,” 466.
51
22 Mearsheimer buttresses his argument by referring to the desperate condition of France in
early 1917. “The French army,” he points out, “was also in precarious shape, and it suffered
mutinies in May 1917, shortly after the United States entered the war.”53 Concerned that without
a strong French presence on the Western Front to support British troops in that theater the
Germans would be able to defeat the Allies and march on Paris, Mearsheimer implies that the
Americans saw a threat to U.S. security and, as a result, took appropriate action to correct the
military imbalance.
In this case, Mearsheimer’s own evidence is rather more problematic for his argument
about U.S. intervention in 1917. One source he cites is Richard Watt’s Dare Call it Treason, a
book that deals directly with the issue of the French army mutinies.54 To be sure, Watt notes that
by the winter of 1916-1917 France’s army and people “had almost been bled to death.” Indeed,
“In the trenches and on the home front, France was ready for collapse.” In addition, according to
Watt, Robert Nivelle, the French commander on the Western Front, acknowledged in midDecember 1916 that “the man in the ranks is no longer aware of why he is fighting.”
Furthermore, in January he wrote that French morale was low and that this situation represented
a “grave threat.”55 According to Watt, however, French morale soon turned around after the
army’s commanders convinced the troops that an Allied victory was imminent. During the
preparations for the spring offensive, which commenced in mid-April, “the spirit of August 1914
began to return and the blue-clad marchers once again sang ‘The Marseillaise.’” Nivelle, says
Watt, was able to convince the men that the war would be over by Christmas, and this belief
reinvigorated the army. Indeed, by early April, when the United States declared war, “the morale
of the troops could not be higher. The prospect of victory at last had filled the troops with an
53
Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 254.
Richard M. Watt, Dare Call it Treason (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1963).
55
Ibid., 146-147, 150, 153.
54
23 implacable resolve.” Even when the offensive proved a dismal failure, Watt points out, “The
gallantry and élan of the troops had been magnificent.”56 Thus, Watt appears to be arguing that
the mutinies resulted from the failure of the Nivelle Offensive, begun on April 16, meaning they
cannot possibly explain America’s decision for war—the United States declared war on April 6,
when Watt claims French morale was soaring. The timing of the mutinies, therefore, does not
square with Mearsheimer’s analysis.57
Leonard Smith’s Between Mutiny and Obedience, another source to which Mearsheimer
refers, tells a similar story. According to Smith, the army was noticeably worn down by the
winter of 1916-1917, and many soldiers began to “view themselves as incarcerated in the
trenches, potentially in perpetuity.” One lieutenant writing in October 1916 noted, “[The troops]
are no longer men, they are piles of mud.”58 Even during this dark time, however, Smith points
out that many soldiers remained dedicated to their cause. Indeed, “Such sentiments appeared as
regularly as sentiments of despair in SRA reports, and were construed by staff officers… as
confirmation of the identity between soldierly and command expectations.”59 In addition,
Smith’s work is consistent with Watts’s, as he argues that morale began to turn during the leadup to the April offensive. The troops’ belief that they would finally break the German lines
revived their spirits. As one general put it on March 22, “The morale of all, enhanced by the
present events, is excellent and the… Division will certainly know how to show itself worthy of
its past in the coming battles.” Even during the first wave of mutinies, which took place between
April 16 and May 15, Smith observes, French commanders were not particularly worried. To the
56
Ibid., 158, 167, 172.
One of Mearsheimer’s other sources on this issue actually makes this quite clear in its title. See Philippe Pétain,
“Crisis of Morale in the French Nation at War, 16 April-23 October, 1917,” trans. Rivers Scott, in Edward Spears,
ed., Two Men Who Saved France: Pétain and De Gaulle (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1966), 67-128.
58
Leonard V. Smith, Between Mutiny and Obedience: The Case of the French Fifth Infantry Division during World
War I (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 156, 167.
59
Ibid., 171.
57
24 contrary, this initial disobedience was “considered a nuisance rather than a dire threat by the
command structure….”60 In short, both Watts and Smith assert that French morale was quite high
during the period in which the United States was contemplating intervention on the side of the
Allies and, in any case, the mutinies were a response to an event that occurred after the
Americans were already formally in the war. Moreover, just like in the case of Mearsheimer’s
sources regarding the situation on the Eastern Front, neither of these works deals at all with how
all this was perceived in Washington.61 There seems to be room for skepticism, therefore,
concerning Mearsheimer’s claim that the French military situation was one cause of the
American decision for war.
Mearsheimer’s final claim about the plight of the Allies at the time the United States
came into the war concerns the United Kingdom. Although he acknowledges that the “British
army was in the best shape of the three allied armies” because it “had not been bled white like
the French and Russian armies,” he nevertheless asserts that London was “in desperate straits by
April 1917, because Germany had launched an unrestricted submarine campaign against British
shipping in February 1917 that was threatening to knock the United Kingdom out of the war by
the early fall.”62 Just as the Western Front might have collapsed had the Americans not
intervened at a crucial moment, so Mearsheimer argues that London “might have succumbed to
the German submarine campaign if the United States had not entered the war on the Allies’
side.”63 Again, the coincidence of the timing of the Wilson Administration’s decision to
intervene in the conflict and the beginning of serious troubles for the British, he argues, strongly
suggests that the two developments were closely related.
60
Ibid., 174, 181.
Jackson, “The Offshore Balancing Thesis Reconsidered,” 470-471.
62
Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 254.
63
Ibid., 493, n.60.
61
25 The evidence Mearsheimer cites on this point does tend to confirm that the United
Kingdom was in bad shape during this period as a result of the German U-boat offensive.
According to an article to which he refers by Holger Herwig and David Trask, Berlin’s use of its
submarines was quite effective during the campaign’s first three months and had in fact created a
“very real emergency.” Indeed, the main reason the U-boat strategy ultimately failed, they point
out, was that Britain was able to turn to the United States for anti-submarine craft, which allowed
the two countries to thwart Germany at sea via a system of convoying.64 The article, in other
words, is entirely consistent with Mearsheimer’s claims about London’s position in the Atlantic
in the spring of 1917 and the critical role played by the Americans in helping to turn the naval
battle. His other sources on this issue also provide solid backing for his description of the state of
affairs at this point in the war.
None of these works, however, assert that the Americans were aware of how much
trouble the British were having combating Germany’s submarines or that London had lost its
mastery of the sea. To the contrary, two of Mearsheimer’s sources actually indicate precisely the
opposite—that Washington was totally surprised to learn, after declaring war, that the Admiralty
was struggling mightily with the threat posed by the U-boat to the United Kingdom’s shipping.
Arthur Marder’s book on the subject, for instance, while it corroborates the general story
outlined by Herwig and Trask, points out that the United States seemed completely ignorant of
Britain’s crisis. Marder cites a meeting in London between Admiral William Sims, who would
later command all American naval forces in Europe during the war, and British Admiral John
Jellicoe that occurred on April 10, after the United States had already declared war against
Germany. Sims, according to Marder, later wrote that when Jellicoe informed him that the
64
Holger H. Herwig and David F. Trask, “The Failure of Imperial Germany’s Undersea Offensive Against World
Shipping, February 1917-October 1918,” The Historian, vol. 32, no. 4 (1971): 614, 618.
26 British were suffering catastrophic losses and had not yet devised any effective counter to the
submarine, he was stunned: “It is expressing it mildly to say that I was surprised by this
disclosure. I was fairly astounded; for I had never imagined anything so terrible.”65 Paul Halpern,
who Mearsheimer also cites, describes Sims’s trip to London at greater length and includes the
admiral’s April 14 cable to Washington, which makes abundantly clear that U.S. naval
intelligence officials and strategists simply did not know that the British were in danger of
capitulation because of the submarine campaign. Sims, as Halpern quotes him, later wrote,
Yet a few days spent in London clearly showed that all this confidence in the defeat of the
Germans rested upon a misapprehension. The Germans, it now appeared, were not losing the
war—they were winning it. The British Admiralty now placed before the American
representatives facts and figures which it had not given to the British press. These documents
disclosed the astounding fact that, unless the appalling destruction of merchant tonnage which was
then taking place could be materially checked, the unconditional surrender of the British Empire
would inevitability take place within a few months.66
By Mearsheimer’s own evidence, then, it appears quite likely that when the Wilson
Administration decided on war it did not know how grave a threat the U-boat offensive actually
posed to the United Kingdom. While all of the sources he cites corroborate his claims about
London’s plight at this time, the only ones which comment on U.S. perceptions of the British
position indicate that Washington was unaware of what was happening in the Atlantic. This fact,
in turn, raises questions about the strength of Mearsheimer’s offshore balancing interpretation.
So after reviewing Mearsheimer’s numerous sources regarding his specific claims about
the military balance in Europe in early 1917 a clearer picture of the evidence has begun to
emerge. In the case of Russia, Mearsheimer seems to have robust empirical support, as all of the
works to which he refers indicate that the toll of the war and the March revolution had
completely undermined the Russian economy and armed forces by the time the Americans
65
Arthur J. Marder, From the Dreadnought to Scapa Flow: The Royal Navy in the Fisher Era, 1904-1919, Volume
4, 1917: Year of Crisis (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 148.
66
Paul G. Halpern, A Naval History of World War I (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1994), 359-360.
27 intervened. Nonetheless, additional research will be necessary since none of these sources
discuss American perceptions of the state of affairs on the Eastern Front in early 1917. His
French and British cases, moreover, appear somewhat weaker. French morale, according to both
Watt and Smith, rebounded considerably in the months preceding the Nivelle Offensive, which
commenced in mid-April, and it was only as a result of its failure that the mutinies began on the
Western Front. Since this occurred well after the American decision to intervene, one ought to be
skeptical that the crisis in the French army was a key factor in the minds U.S. officials when
contemplating whether or not to go to war. These sources also do not mention how Washington
viewed what was going on, meaning that they cannot be considered authoritative evidence in
support of the offshore balancing thesis. Finally, while Mearsheimer’s citations clearly show that
London was in fact in deep trouble by the spring of 1917 because of Germany’s unrestricted
submarine offensive against British shipping, two of the books he references point out that the
Americans were completely unaware of this reality until Sims’s visit to the United Kingdom in
mid-April, which came after the U.S. declaration of war. In short, a close examination of
Mearsheimer’s evidence does not reveal particularly strong support for the notion that the
Americans entered the war when they did in order to prevent an Allied collapse.
One may be tempted to conclude from this analysis that the offshore balancing
explanation can now be dismissed as unconvincing. After all, Mearsheimer’s own endnotes do
not appear especially persuasive regarding the specific points he makes about U.S. intervention
and the Allies’ plight at the time the American decision to enter the war was made. Such
reasoning, however, is deeply flawed. To be sure, it now appears that the Wilson
Administration’s decision-making process was perhaps not as straightforward as offensive realist
theory implies. Nonetheless, a number of Mearsheimer’s references contend that power political
28 considerations did play a role in the thinking of key U.S. officials at the time. In addition, while
his precise claims about the Allies’ position in 1917 are not entirely supported by his own
evidence, anyone familiar with international relations theory must concede that Mearsheimer’s
theoretical model is buttressed by a powerful strategic logic. The compelling nature of his own
approach to world politics on its own, therefore, means that further investigation into this case is
justified. As Trachtenberg points out, theory can be quite helpful in helping scholars with
historical analysis, and “the key thing is to do the sort of work that can draw theory and history
together.”67 With this in mind, the next step in the process of executing the research design is to
examine secondary sources and memoirs which deal with the issue of American perceptions of
the military balance in Europe in the spring of 1917. While this sort of analysis is by no means a
substitute for an investigation of the relevant primary documentary evidence, it allows one to
better evaluate the validity of the offshore balancing argument. And since these types of sources
are readily accessible, one can perform this sort of research in a relatively short period of time.
Understanding the View from Washington in 1917
One of the key scholarly sources pertaining to the American view of what was going on in
Russia in early 1917 is Norman Saul’s War and Revolution.68 To a certain extent, this book
corroborates Mearsheimer’s argument about the impact of the deterioration of the Russian war
effort on American strategy. Indeed, Saul observes that most reports during the winter of 19161917 “portrayed a country on the verge of economic collapse.” As additional evidence for this
claim, Saul points out that U.S. ambassador David Francis wrote Lansing, “The securing of
67
Trachtenberg, The Craft of International History, 44.
Norman E. Saul, War and Revolution: The United States and Russia, 1914-1921 (Lawrence, KS: University Press
of Kansas, 2001). A discussion of how to identify relevant scholarly literature on a particular historical subject is
beyond the scope of this paper. I refer those interested in this methodological skill to Trachtenberg, The Craft of
International History, Appendix I. For further analysis of U.S. perceptions of Russian military strength at this time,
see Jackson, “The Offshore Balancing Thesis Reconsidered,” 466-470.
68
29 food… is becoming a very serious problem throughout Russia and especially in Petrograd where
there are said to be at present one million refugees from war territories and other outlying
sections.”69
Yet Saul also argues that the March revolution, rather than alarm Washington, actually
was received with great optimism. Whereas in January Saul notes that British agent William
Wiseman reported to his government that Wilson’s opposition to the autocratic nature of the
Russian regime stood “in the way of complete sympathy between [the] United States and [the]
Allies,” following the tsar’s overthrow “Americans basked in the bright light of what they
thought was a new Russian era.” Thus, he writes, “It is unlikely that a direct cause-and-effect
connection can be made between the Russian Revolution and American entry into the war. The
latter would no doubt have occurred regardless of what happened in Russia, but it certainly made
the declaration of war more enthusiastic and wholehearted.” In short, Saul’s primary contention
about the effect of the revolution in Russia was that it made an open alliance between Petrograd
and Washington less of an ideological challenge, and “added another cause to the American
reasons for entering the war.”70 Rather than being a source of anxiety in the United States, then,
Sauls contends that the change of government in Petrograd was met, due to ideological reasons,
with satisfaction in the United States—the war was now considered a contest between
democracy and autocracy, as Wilson would point out in his April 2 address to Congress.
Kennan’s analysis of U.S.-Russian relations during this period largely supports
Mearsheimer’s claim that Petrograd was in serious trouble. The revolution, he writes, guaranteed
69
Saul, War and Revolution, 82, 105.
Ibid., 77, 79, 93, 96-97, 100. Saul also notes that American estimates of the situation in Russia were not always
consistent. For instance, he points out that on December 5 Francis informed his son that conditions might be
improving, saying, “the danger of a separate peace being made by Russia is greatly diminished, if not entirely
removed.” He also writes that in his opinion the crucial factor that brought the United States into the war was
German targeting of U.S. merchant ships in the Atlantic.
70
30 that political instability would plague the country for the immediate future, and “meant that the
prospects for Russia’s continued participation in the war were very poor.” Nevertheless, Kennan
claims,
neither of these realities was widely noted in the United States; it is, indeed, not an exaggeration to
say that the policy of the United States government toward the Russian Provisional Government
was founded largely on ignorance of both of them and on the hope that just the opposite would be
the case: that Russia would evolve rapidly, that is, in the direction of democratic stability, and that
she would continue to prosecute vigorously, as a loyal and enthusiastic member of the western
coalition, the war against Germany.71
In Kennan’s view, therefore, American concerns about Russia’s ability to continue to wage war
cannot possibly account for Wilson’s decision to intervene. To the contrary, since the president
and his advisers seemed to believe that the tsar’s overthrow would actually contribute to the
Allied war effort, the change of government in Petrograd “could not have come more
opportunely.” In short, similar to Saul, Kennan argues that the revolution’s main impact on
Washington was to “create a loftier and more inspiring rationale than the mere defense of neutral
rights… one more directly related to the needs and ideals of men everywhere—not just to the
people of the United States.”72
So neither of these sources appears to provide solid backing for the idea that the dire
condition of the Russian army forced the Americans to act. Evidently, Washington was aware
that the situation was deteriorating by late 1916 but nevertheless was under the mistaken
impression that the revolution in March would actually strengthen the Allies on the Eastern
Front. More importantly, neither Saul nor Kennan argues that there existed any direct connection
between Wilson’s decision to intervene and state of affairs in Russia. To the contrary, both
authors contend that neutral rights violations and German U-boat attacks on American ships
were what accounted for U.S. entry into the war. The Russian Revolution, if it had any effect at
71
George F. Kennan, Russia Leaves the War: Soviet-American Relations, 1917-1920, Volume 1 (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1956), 11-12.
72
Ibid., 13-14.
31 all in Washington, was important primarily for ideological reasons and because it made an
alliance between the United States and Russia less anathema to American ideals.
Still, if one wanted to be relatively more certain about the Wilson Administration’s
perceptions of the situation, it might help to have access to the memoirs of one of the key
officials involved in the decision-making process. And, luckily, Saul’s reference to the Francis
cables provides a clue that the ambassador wrote his own account of his recollections of his years
of service.73 When one examines what Francis has to say about his time in Petrograd, it becomes
quite clear that his reports to Washington could only have increased the American government’s
confidence in the ability of the Russians to continue to wage war in the wake of the revolution.
To be sure, a number of the ambassador’s cables in the months preceding the events of March
were quite pessimistic. By March 15, however, Francis felt assured enough to write, “This is
undoubtedly a revolution, but it is the best managed revolution that has ever taken place, for its
magnitude…. Upon the whole Russia is being congratulated in my judgment on the prospect of
getting through an important change in government with so little bloodshed and without material
interference with the war she is waging with powerful antagonists.” Three days later, he added,
“This revolution is the practical realization of that principle of government which we have
championed and advocated—I mean government by consent of the governed. Our recognition
[of the new Russian government] will have a stupendous moral effect especially if given first.”74
Thus, we now have a first-hand account, written by a key American official, confirming the
conclusions of both Saul and Kennan. Without having had to travel to an archive or closely
examine any primary sources, it now seems likely that, contrary to the implication of
Mearsheimer’s argument, the Russian Revolution actually had a minimal effect on the thinking
73
David R. Francis, Russia from the American Embassy, April, 1916-November, 1918 (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1921).
74
Ibid., 72, 90-91.
32 of high-ranking policymakers in the U.S. government while they contemplated war with
Germany.
Locating literature on U.S. perceptions of the French military position in early 1917 is
somewhat trickier. One article by Bentley Gilbert and Paul Bernard provides supplementary
verification that the mutinies were mainly the result of the failed Nivelle Offensive in mid-April,
but it says nothing about how Washington saw the situation prior to choosing war.75 In addition,
Robert Bruce has written a piece on the French military mission to the United States in the wake
of the American declaration of war in which he argues that, prior to the delegation’s visit, the
Wilson Administration apparently did not understand that a great many U.S. combat troops
would be needed to shore up the Allies’ position on the Western Front.76 This finding implies
that the Americans were not especially concerned about the ability of the French to continue
fighting, but it says little about how Washington discerned the situation prior to going to war.
This means one must get a bit creative and attempt to locate any relevant memoirs on the
topic that might help better address this issue. Having already reviewed Lansing’s recollections,
we know that on January 28 the secretary of state wrote there was “no doubt but that the Allies in
the west are having a hard time….”77 It might be more helpful, however, to determine whether or
not the U.S. ambassador to Paris William Graves Sharp has written anything about the matter.
And, fortunately, he has a memoir on the subject of his years at the embassy. More importantly,
he addresses the topic of how he perceived the military balance on the Western Front directly.
Referring to a January 12 letter he addressed to Wilson, Sharp notes that he informed
Washington that the Allies would not agree to a “peace without victory” because they had “a
75
Bentley B. Gilbert and Paul P. Bernard, “The French Army Mutinies of 1917,” The Historian, vol. 22, no. 1
(1959): 24-41.
76
Robert B. Bruce, “America Embraces France: Marshal Joseph Joffre and the French Military Mission to the
United States,” Journal of Military History, vol. 66, no. 2 (2002): 407-441.
77
Lansing, War Memoirs, 208.
33 very great faith in their ability to win such victories over the Central Powers as either to crush
them or cause them at least to offer very definite and liberal terms of peace,” and are
“determined to push their offensive with renewed energy.”78 By early 1917, therefore, the
American ambassador to France did not seem to evince any concern about an imminent French
collapse.
And what of the implication of Bruce’s article that U.S. officials did not understand prior
to the decision to intervene that the United States would soon be called upon to send a large
number of ground troops to contribute to the Allied war effort? As noted above, May made a
similar point in his critique of the argument that the Americans intervened to preserve the
European balance of power. Perhaps secondary sources and memoirs also exist that deal with
this particular issue.
One book that sounds fairly promising on this topic is Trask’s The United States in the
Supreme War Council.79 The title itself suggests it may include some pertinent information on
the matter and, in fact, Trask discusses it fairly early on in the book. Wilson’s military advisers,
he points out, “assumed that the United States would concentrate on assisting the Entente Powers
with materials, shipping, naval support, and financial aid but would not place a large army in the
field…. No one seems to have anticipated the eventual size of the American mobilization, largely
because the Entente initially did not ask for extensive manpower.”80 Daniel Beaver, in his book
about Secretary of War Newton Baker’s role in preparing the United States for war, draws a
78
William Graves Sharp, The War Memoirs of William Graves Sharp: American Ambassador to France, 1914-1919
(London: Constable & Company Limited, 1931), 161-162. Three days later, Sharp also sent a cable to Wilson
informing the president that he did not believe a military breakthrough in the West was likely “for another year or
two.” See Jackson, “The Offshore Balancing Thesis Reconsidered,” 473.
79
David F. Trask, The United States in the Supreme War Council: American War Aims and Inter-Allied Strategy,
1917-1918 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961).
80
Ibid., 9.
34 similar conclusion.81 Likewise, Wilson’s Secretary of Agriculture David Houston has written a
memoir in which he summarizes the discussion the cabinet had about this issue while
considering going to war. Though Houston was clearly in favor of joining the conflict against
Germany and writes that both he and Baker favored raising “a great army” and instituting
conscription, he also claims that on March 18 the French ambassador had told him that few
American troops would be needed to win the war. Houston related that the ambassador had
informed him, “I do not know whether you will enter the war or not, but if you do, we shall not
expect you—and I am sure that I am speaking the sentiments of my government—to send any
men to France except a detachment, for sentimental reasons, to return the visit of Rochambeau.
We shall want you to aid us mainly on the sea and with credits and supplies.”82 It seems clear,
therefore, that Washington had not anticipated the need to raise a large army until after the
decision for war had already been taken.
While one cannot definitely say that the state of the French army in early 1917 had little
to no impact on the Wilson Administration’s choice to intervene, the picture that emerges from
even this cursory analysis casts significant doubt as to the veracity of that claim. Sharp’s cable
from January to Wilson, the issue of the timing of the mutinies relative to the American
declaration of war, and the fact that the United States apparently did not foresee the need to send
a large number of troops to Europe all suggest that Paris’s weakening position was not well
understood in Washington. In short, by simply reviewing a small sample of memoirs and
81
Daniel R. Beaver, Newton D. Baker and the American War Effort, 1917-1919 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1966), 39. Army Chief of Staff Hugh Scott also consistently lamented the failure of the American government
to get better prepared for war. See Hugh L. Scott, Some Memories of a Soldier (New York: The Century Company,
1928), 544, 555-560. See also Jackson, “The Offshore Balancing Thesis Reconsidered,” 465-466.
82
David F. Houston, Eight Years with Wilson’s Cabinet, 1913 to 1920, Volume 1 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday,
Page & Company, 1926), 243.
35 secondary literature on the matter, one can question with much greater confidence
Mearsheimer’s argument that the French army mutinies contributed to the U.S. decision for war.
One can perform this same sort of exercise when evaluating Mearsheimer’s specific
claims about the United Kingdom.83 Indeed, having read both Marder and Halpern, we now
know that Admiral Sims wrote a memoir in which he recounted his experiences in developing
America’s naval war plans. Unsurprisingly, this source corroborates what Marder and Halpern
wrote about the matter, as Sims claims that it “was not until the spring of 1917 that [the United
States] really awoke to the actual situation… that Britain did not control the seas.”84 More
importantly, it turns out that Jellicoe has also written a memoir, and that he confirms Sims’s
account of their meetings in mid-April. Indeed, according to the British admiral, when they first
met Sims informed him “that neither he nor anyone else in the United States had realized that the
situation was so serious.” The Americans, he was told, were under the mistaken impression that
the British actually had everything under control and were not having a difficult time combating
the German U-boat offensive.85 The fact that, according to Trask’s Captains & Cabinets, U.S.
Chief of Naval Operations William Benson also seemed relatively unconcerned in the months
preceding the American declaration of war and reportedly was against the idea of joining either
side, lends even greater credibility to the idea that Washington was unaware of the desperate
situation the British were encountering.86
What is one to make of this admittedly somewhat casual analysis? Despite the fact that,
with the possible exception of a handful of memoirs, the above review does include a reference
83
For my more thorough discussion of this topic, see Jackson, “The Offshore Balancing Thesis Reconsidered,” 476482.
84
William S. Sims, The Victory at Sea (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1984), 21 (emphasis in original). See
also Elting E. Morison, Admiral Sims and the Modern American Navy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1942).
85
John Jellicoe, The Crisis of the Naval War (London: Cassell, 1920), 158-159.
86
David F. Trask, Captains & Cabinets: Anglo-American Naval Relations, 1917-1918 (Columbia: University of
Missouri Press, 1972), 44.
36 to a single primary source, it appears suddenly that Mearsheimer’s claims about the connection
between the weakening of the Allied war effort in 1917 and the American decision to enter the
conflict rest on rather shaky foundations. To be sure, all three countries were in serious trouble
by this time, but it seems clear that this was not recognized in the United States. To the contrary,
the Wilson Administration had concluded that the March revolution in Russia would help the
situation on the Eastern Front and, in any case, paid much greater attention to what it perceived
to be a democratic transition in Petrograd; U.S. policymakers do not appear to have been overly
anxious about an imminent French collapse and did not expect to have to send a large army to
Europe; and, lastly, Washington was in the dark about Britain’s naval problems, largely because
London had intentionally doctored its shipping statistics to prevent the public from panicking.
One could be forgiven, therefore, for being somewhat more skeptical of the type of argument
Mearsheimer presents regarding U.S. intervention in the First World War.
The Real Test: Primary Source Analysis
While a full analysis of the relevant primary documents and archival records are well beyond the
scope of a methodological piece, here I want to briefly explain how one might go about getting
started on this part of the project. Some might argue that, given the shortcomings in
Mearsheimer’s evidence outlined earlier, as well as the conflicting evidence that emerges from
other secondary accounts and memoirs, the job is done. To be sure, the literature review laid out
above demonstrates that Mearsheimer’s offshore balancing explanation rests on somewhat shaky
evidentiary foundations. Nevertheless, without at least investigating several of the main primary
sources relevant to the issue of U.S. entry into World War I, one cannot say with total confidence
that his thesis falls short of the mark.
37 Most research university libraries can provide scholars with a great deal of what they
need in the way of primary sources without even having to travel to a single archive. Indeed,
documentary collections like the Foreign Relations of the United States series are especially
useful for this sort of work. Moreover, many of these volumes are now available online. In the
case of U.S. strategy in the First World War, the State Department has published “supplements”
on American diplomacy during this period. For those interested in studying the question of why
the United States ultimately decided to enter the war, the volumes from 1916 and 1917, as well
as the Lansing Papers collection, are particularly valuable. Likewise, the Papers of Woodrow
Wilson, which have been meticulously edited by Arthur S. Link, are an especially powerful
source that contain a great deal of information relating to how Washington viewed the war in
Europe prior to the decision to intervene. Thus, with minimal effort, one can collect a
tremendous amount of information on this issue, and in a relatively short period of time, simply
by searching the stacks at most research university libraries.
Still, if one really wanted to get to the bottom of this issue it would be necessary to take
the extra step of conducting serious archival research. Although many young scholars seem
tentative to do this sort of work, in practice it is actually quite straightforward, especially given
the ways in which technology has facilitated the task of locating and collecting primary source
evidence. Indeed, the advent of digital cameras, which allow researchers to accumulate great
masses of archival material in a relatively short period of time; the digitization of important
documents and finding aids, which permit scholars to accomplish a significant portion of their
work prior to even travelling to the archives; and the convenient organizational arrangement of
many archival collections at key federal repositories, has made conducting historical work far
easier than it once was.
38 Where would one go in order to find the necessary evidence to evaluate Mearsheimer’s
claims about U.S. intervention in the First World War in a truly systematic way? A quick look at
the websites of several of the main repositories in the United States reveals that there is a great
amount of material available for investigation. Since Mearsheimer’s argument hinges mainly on
Washington’s perceptions of the military balance in Europe in early 1917, it makes sense to
search for military and diplomatic records from this time. And, fortunately, as noted on its
website, the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. houses the personal collections of Baker,
Benson, Sims, Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, and Army Chief of Staff Hugh Scott. In
addition, the Yale University Manuscript Division in New Haven, Connecticut also looks
promising, since it has the personal papers of Lippmann, House, and the Head of British Military
Intelligence in the United States William Wiseman. Finally, National Archives II in College
Park, Maryland has the microfilm collections for the Correspondence of the War College
Division and Related General Staff Offices from this period. Other potentially rich documents on
microfilm, such as The Diplomatic Papers of David R. Francis and the Records of the
Department of State Relating to the Internal Affairs of Russia and the Soviet Union series, are
also open to researchers. These archives are all in relatively close proximity and, thus, a single
trip would likely allow anyone interested in these issues to collect a huge amount of data on what
governed the thinking of key officials in the Wilson Administration as it related to the decision to
intervene in the Great War.
Locating this sort of evidence, then, is not particularly difficult. While many scholars still
tend to believe that archival research is too time-intensive and arcane, this is in fact not the case.
To the contrary, one can do this sort of work in a reasonable period of time simply by taking
advantage of the advances in modern technology. And, most importantly, this is exactly the type
39 of scholarship that needs to be done if one truly desires to get to the bottom of an issue as
complex as U.S. entry into World War I.
Conclusion
In sum, even on an issue as studied as U.S. intervention in the First World War, historical
analysis can help advance scholarship in a number of ways. By doing something as simple as
checking a particular author’s citations, one can get a better handle on whether his or her
evidence supports the argument being made. The footnotes, in turn, will point to a number of
other sources, as well as provide clues as to what issues are still a matter of debate among
experts on a given topic. The evidence, moreover, will probably not be totally consistent one way
or another—just like in a statistical study, there will be a distribution, and one must determine in
which direction the bulk of the evidence points. The key is to try to approach the subject as
impartially as possible. While reliance on theory is absolutely necessary if one hopes to devise a
set of researchable questions, as Trachtenberg observes, one must be careful, as “Theory can be
misused…. You might fall in love with a certain way of looking at things and interpret the past
accordingly.” If one approaches the question in the right way, however, this sort of problem can
be managed.87
All too often, as historians and other scholars who utilize qualitative research methods
point out, political scientists depend excessively on secondary accounts to support their
theoretical arguments. To be sure, there is nothing wrong with employing such sources to
enhance serious scholarship. In order to really get at the heart of major questions in the field of
international relations, like the Wilson Administration’s choice to enter the First World War,
however, these accounts must be used to supplement rigorous primary source research. Indeed,
87
Trachtenberg, The Craft of International History, 33.
40 as this case study has shown, without going to the archives and carefully reviewing the
documentary record, one cannot claim, with any degree of confidence, to truly understand these
incredibly complex, fundamentally important issues at a deep empirical level. Put differently, it
is when scholars of international politics do the sort of work that combines theory and history
that they are most likely to be able to make lasting contributions to the political science and
international relations literatures.
In the case of Mearsheimer’s explanation for America’s entry into World War I, there are
reasons to doubt his specific arguments. By checking Mearsheimer’s own evidence on the
matter, one discovers that his interpretation is not as strong as it appears at first glance. This lack
of empirical support from his own sources ought to alert a critical reader to the possibility that
U.S. entry into the war was perhaps not as straightforward as Mearsheimer makes it out to be.
And this realization, in turn, should motivate scholars interested investigating his theoretical
claims in light of the historical evidence to examine primary documents and archival material
relevant to the subject.
As I have written previously, however, none of this means that the theoretical framework
Mearsheimer presents in The Tragedy of Great Power Politics lacks academic or policy value.88
To the contrary, most theories, especially those in the social sciences, have major limits in terms
of what they are capable of explaining. Indeed, as Mearsheimer himself acknowledges early on
in his book, offensive realism, though it can illuminate a great many case studies by serving as a
“powerful flashlight,” cannot be expected to describe everything in the historical record.89 The
realist perspective he brings to bear, in other words, is quite powerful, if not perfect. Thus, while
88
89
For my discussion of this issue, see Jackson, “The Offshore Balancing Thesis Reconsidered,” 489.
Mearsheimer, The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, 11.
41 Mearsheimer’s theory is able to comprehend a great deal of American diplomatic history, U.S.
intervention in the First World War is one case in which it appears to fall a bit short.
42