When President Woodrow Wilson plunged the United States into Europe's carnage in 1917, he shed a century-long Republican tradition of anti-militarism and nonintervention in the quarrels of the Old World.
Needless to say, there was absolutely nothing noble that came of Wilson's intervention. It led to a peace of vengeful victors, triumphant nationalists and avaricious imperialists — when the war would have otherwise ended in a bedraggled peace of mutually exhausted bankrupts and discredited war parties on both sides.
By so altering the course of history, Wilson's war bankrupted Europe and midwifed 20th-century totalitarianism in Russia and Germany.