Welcome to the show. We are we are so thrilled
you could join us today. Now, if you're listening
to this, you probably already know, you know,
a fair bit about the First World War. Right.
The endless trenches, the barbed wire. Exactly.
The just. unbelievable tragic scale of the battlefield.
But today we are going on a deep dive into a
really comprehensive source, specifically a massive
Wikipedia article detailing the diplomatic history
of World War I. Yeah, we are taking a look far
beyond the mud of the artillery today. Our mission
today is to uncover the hidden non -military
chess game that was being played in the shadows.
We're talking about a game of smoke -filled back
rooms, weaponized bank accounts, and secret telegraphs
that quite literally drew the borders of the
modern world you live in today. It's a completely
different way of looking at the conflict. I mean,
it really is. And to really understand that subterranean
chess game, we actually first need to correct
a very persistent historical myth that the article
tackles right up front. Oh, right, the cheering
crowds. There's this... incredibly common image.
You've probably seen it in, you know, old black
and white news reels or historical documentaries.
Yeah, European crowds in August 1914, cheering
enthusiastically in the streets, waving hats
and flags and just joyfully welcoming the outbreak
of war. But reading through this historical analysis,
it makes it very clear that this is. largely
a manufactured myth. Right. The reality on the
ground was a deep pervasive sense of foreboding
across the continent. People were absolutely
terrified. The idea of war fever was highly exaggerated
by later propaganda and that famous overly optimistic
slogan. The boys will be home by Christmas. Yeah,
that one. The historical record shows that the
phrase over by Christmas wasn't actually coined
until three years into the meat grinder. Right.
Very few people in power actually expected a
short, happy conflict. It was a nightmare from
the start. And because it quickly devolved into
a total war, wartime diplomacy fundamentally
changed. It wasn't just about negotiating peace
treaties. anymore, diplomacy was entirely weaponized.
OK, let's unpack this because weaponized diplomacy
sounds like an oxymoron. Usually we think of
diplomats trying to stop the shooting. Not here.
In this context, diplomacy was used to actively
subvert enemy nations from the inside out. Yeah.
It was used to lure neutral countries into the
conflict with lavish promises of other people's
land. Right. And it was used to finance the total
economic destruction of rival empires. It was
an instrument of war, just as much as a machine
gun. Which is wild because when the war kicked
off in 1914, it was so sudden and unexpected
that neither side even had long -term goals.
They were just reacting. Exactly. But as the
stalemate set in, government suddenly had to
figure out what they were actually sacrificing
millions of lives for. The Allies, Britain, France,
Russia came up with these very ad hoc sort of
on -the -fly goals. They wanted to break German
military power. Right. Break German power, restore
the independence of Belgium, and unsurprisingly
for the era, carve up Germany's overseas colonies.
But then you contrast that with Germany's ambitions,
which were chillingly specific. In September
1914, a senior German aide sketched out what
historians now call the September program. And
this wasn't some pre -war master plan, right?
No, not at all. It wasn't something they had
been plotting for decades. It was rather ideas
formulated on the run once they thought they
might actually win quickly. And the goals were
staggering. Germany wanted to turn all of Central
and Western Europe into a German controlled common
market. basically a forced economic union under
military threat. Exactly. They plan to reduce
Belgium to a mere vassal state, stripping it
of its sovereignty. And as for France, they demanded
financial indemnity so crippling, so astronomically
high that the French economy would become entirely
dependent on Germany forever. So it wasn't just
about moving a border a few miles. It was an
attempted economic takeover of the entire continent.
Yeah. But to pull off those massive ambitions,
both sides realized pretty quickly that they
needed more troops. They needed allies to throw
into the trenches. And that is when they turned
to this secret chessboard. They started making
secret treaties to entice neutral nations to
join the war. But how do you even keep something
like that a secret when it involves whole nations
and shifting borders? Well, they tried their
best usually by keeping the negotiations limited
to a tiny handful of aristocrats and ministers.
Look at the Treaty of London in 1915. The one
with Italy. Right. The Allies desperately wanted
Italy to join their side and open up a new front.
So they secretly promised Italy massive slices
of the Austro -Hungarian Empire. They were essentially
using an enemy's land as the ultimate bribe.
Wow. Then you have the Treaty of Bucharest in
1916. Romania was promised huge territorial gains
in exchange for attacking Austria -Hungary. But
Article 16 of that treaty explicitly stated the
deal had to be kept an absolute secret. They
were just sitting in drawing rooms carving up
the map of Europe like a pie with zero input
from the people who actually lived on that land.
And honestly, they probably would have gotten
away with it if it weren't for the Russian Revolution.
Oh, this part is incredible. It's one of my favorite
details. When the Bolsheviks took power in Russia
in November 1917, they marched into the Imperial
archives and found all these secret treaties.
And what did they do? They just published them.
Dumped them right in the newspapers. Yeah, for
the entire world to see. What's fascinating here
is the massive ripple effect of that exposure.
By publishing those documents, the Bolsheviks
exposed all these Imperial land grabs. It completely
validated what socialists and anti -war activists
had been screaming about all along. That it wasn't
a noble war for freedom. Exactly. That it was
just a cynical capitalist plot for territory
and wealth. It was a catastrophic PR disaster
for the allies. Which forced the United States,
who had just recently entered the war, to heavily
pivot. President Woodrow Wilson realized he had
to regain the moral high ground. So in January
1918, he issued his famous 14 points. And it's
no coincidence that his very first point was
a direct reaction to those Bolshevik leaks. Right.
He demanded, quote, open covenants of peace,
openly arrived at. He was trying to publicly
outlaw the exact kind of secret backdoor diplomacy
that had dragged half the globe into the mud.
If a perfect illustration of how differently
the two sides were starting to view strategy.
The Allies, despite the embarrassment of the
secret treaties, were increasingly relying on
a complex web of soft power, while Germany was
doubling down on raw, unfiltered military might.
Yeah, reading the historical analysis, it feels
like they were operating from two completely
different playbooks. How did Germany's diplomatic
strategy become so militarized? It happened from
the top down. In Germany, the diplomatic steering
wheel was essentially hijacked by the military
high command. Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg
and his deputy General Erich Ludendorff effectively
took control of the country. They just bypassed
the civilian government. Completely. They worked
around the Kaiser. They completely ignored the
warnings of civilian politicians. And they treated
diplomacy as an afterthought. They didn't care
about diplomatic nuance or international public
opinion. They gambled the fate of their empire
on quick, decisive military supremacy. And that
arrogance led to one of the most disastrous decisions
of the entire war. unrestricted submarine warfare.
By early 1917, the German military decided to
just start torpedoing every single merchant ship
headed to Britain. Regardless of whether it was
a neutral ship or not. Right. The civilian leaders
in Berlin were practically begging them not to
do it. They knew full well it would drag the
United States into the war. But the military
made a cold, calculated gamble. They looked at
the spreadsheets and bet that their U -boats
could starve Britain into submission before the
Americans could mobilize, train an army, and
ship them across the Atlantic. A fatal miscalculation
because what they completely underestimated was
the Allied mastery of soft power, specifically
finance, diplomacy, and global trade. The Allies
weren't just fighting in the trenches, they were
fighting in the global markets, and the mechanics
of this are just brilliant. The whole situation
with the cotton industry is such a wild example.
It really is a masterpiece. class in economic
statecraft. Explain how the British handled the
cotton problem. Right, so cotton is vital for
a war effort. You need it for uniforms, sure,
but you also need massive amounts of it to manufacture
explosives. Britain knew this, so they set up
a naval blockade to completely cut off all shipments
of cotton reaching Germany. Makes sense strategically.
Right, but there was a huge problem. The American
South relied on selling that cotton. If Britain
just blocked the trade, they risk infuriating
the rural American South, which could push the
neutral United States to oppose the Allied war
effort. So what do they do? While blocking Germany,
the British government... simultaneously starts
making massive subsidized purchases of American
cotton themselves. They literally bought up the
supply at inflated prices just to keep the American
agricultural sector happy and financially stable.
They bought political goodwill with cotton subsidies.
Which is incredibly clever, but it brings up
the elephant in the room. Buying up global commodities
to wage an economic war is insanely expensive,
and that transitions us into the sheer financial
scale of World War I, which fundamentally shifted
global power dynamics forever. The numbers are
staggering. The total direct cost of the war
was about $80 billion in 1913 U .S. dollars.
The historical data translates that to roughly
two trillion dollars in modern currency. Two
trillion. Two trillion dollars spent on artillery
shells, rations and buying up American cotton.
How on earth were these countries paying for
this? Well, following the money reveals the true
hierarchy of the alliances. Initially, Great
Britain acted as the bank. They generously bankrolled
the weaker allies, Russia, Italy, France, keeping
their economies afloat. But they couldn't do
that forever. No, Britain couldn't do it alone.
They had to rely on Wall Street. The Bank of
England struck a deal with JP Morgan and Company
to be their sole underwriter for war bonds in
the United States. Through that arrangement,
JP Morgan loaned about $1 .5 billion, which is
roughly $28 billion today, to the Allies. But
eventually, the spending was so catastrophic
that even the lighty British empire ran out of
cash. And when Britain finally went broke, the
United States government had to step in, replacing
private banks with even larger state loans. And
this is a massive historical insight. Yeah. This
exact financial crisis is the moment the US shifted
from being merely a massive industrial power
to becoming the undisputed financial superpower
of the world. London handed the crown to New
York because they needed to buy more bullets.
Precisely. But while the Allies were busy weaponizing
global finance and shifting the center of the
economic world, Germany was weaponizing information
in ways that feel incredibly modern, almost like
a 21st century cyber warfare campaign, but played
out with trains and gold. Here's where it gets
really interesting. Germany realized that if
they couldn't break the stalemate purely on the
battlefield, they could subvert their enemies
from the inside. They basically invented state
-sponsored regime change as a tactic for this
war. The German Foreign Ministry recognized the
immense value of subversion. They spent over
50 million gold marks secretly funding the Bolsheviks
in Russia. They were essentially bankrolling
a radical revolutionary group inside their enemy's
borders, using neutral banks to funnel the money.
And then they took it a step further in 1917.
They executed one of the most audacious diplomatic
moves in history. Vladimir Lenin, the radical
Bolshevik leader, was living in exile in Switzerland.
The Germans secretly loaded him and his top aides
onto a sealed train, guarded it and transported
him right across German territory, ultimately
dropping him off at the Russian border. Winston
Churchill later described it as transporting
a plague bacillus. They literally imported a
revolution. And from a cold strategic standpoint,
it worked flawlessly. Lenin arrives, sparks the
October Revolution, overthrows the Russian government,
and immediately knocks Russia out of the war.
And Germany then forces the new, fragile Bolshevik
government to sign the brutal Treaty of Brest
-Litovsk. And the scale of this treaty is hard
to fathom. Russia surrendered massive amounts
of its own territory, giving up Ukraine, the
Baltics, and Poland to German control. It was
a huge win for Germany. It was a strategic masterstroke
by Germany in the short term, absolutely. But
we have to acknowledge that Germany's success
there was only possible because of the catastrophic
failure of Russian leadership. The Tsar... Nicholas
II was entirely out of touch with reality. He
just refused to listen. We consistently ignored
the need for civilian military coordination.
He even took personal command of the army at
the front, despite having incredibly poor strategic
judgment, which meant every military defeat was
blamed directly on him. Meanwhile, the home front
was a disaster. He allowed the home front to
completely collapse. The economy was stretched
beyond its limits. Soldiers in the trenches literally
lacked rice holes and labor strikes were rampant
in the cities. Nicholas II created a massive
power vacuum and Germany just used Lenin to fill
it. But Russia wasn't the only empire rotting
from the inside out. The central powers were
completely falling apart, too. Let's look at
Austria -Hungary. Their leadership was desperate.
Emperor Charles X of Austria actually trying
to make secret peace overtures to the allies
behind Germany's back to save his crumbling empire.
He saw the writing on the wall. He did. And he
was willing to compromise. But the deal was vetoed
by Italy. Why? Because Italy wanted the land
they were promised in that secret treaty of London
we talked about earlier. And the fallout for
Emperor Charles was humiliating. Oh, it was a
disaster. Charles's secret letters negotiating
peace were eventually leaked to the press by
the French prime minister. Could you imagine?
It completely destroyed his credibility. Right.
It infuriated the Germans. And it ironically
ended up binding a totally weakened Austria.
even closer to German control because they had
nowhere else to turn. And then, alongside Austria
-Hungary, you have the Ottoman Empire. Their
entry into the war was highly consequential.
According to the memoirs of German General Ludendorff,
the Ottoman entry prolonged the global conflict
by an estimated two years. Wow. two extra years.
Yes, but the internal actions of the Ottoman
government during this time were horrific. The
historical source we're looking at outlines the
systematic extermination of their Armenian subjects,
the Armenian genocide. Approximately 1 .5 million
Armenians were murdered through state -sponsored
massacres and brutal death marches into the Syrian
desert. It's an incredibly grim reality of this
period. And we should note here for you listening,
we're just impartially reporting what the historical
analysis and our source lays out about these
events. We aren't taking sides, just sharing
the documented history. But what's notable from
a diplomatic perspective is how the international
community reacted. Yes. In 1915, the Allies actually
issued a joint public denunciation of the mass
murders. They officially called it a crime against
humanity. But after the war ended, despite bringing
the matter to the Paris Peace Conference and
demanding justice, the Allies ultimately didn't
follow through. By the time the post -war Treaty
of Lausanne was signed in 1923, geopolitical
priorities had shifted and the treaty effectively
granted amnesty to the perpetrators. It's a stark
reminder of the often cynical nature of wartime
diplomacy, where moral outrage is frequently
sidelined by post -war geopolitical maneuvering
and the desire for regional stability. And speaking
of the complexities of regional stability, we
have to examine how British diplomacy operated
in the Middle East during the slow collapse of
the Ottoman Empire. Right. And this is a section
where the historical analysis highlights some
highly debated interpretations of events. Again,
impartially reporting the source material here,
we're just going to look at how the historians
frame the deeply conflicting promises that were
made, because those promises created the geopolitical
reality of the Middle East today. The diplomacy
there was a tangled web of completely contradictory
commitments. First, the British promised Arab
leaders, specifically Hussein Ben Ali, the Sharif
of Mecca, that Britain would support the creation
of a sovereign Arab state. In return, the Arabs
agreed to launch a military revolt against the
Turks. Which they did. But almost simultaneously,
the British and French governments were holding
completely different secret meetings. Two diplomats,
Marc Sykes and Francois Georges Picot, basically
sat in a room with a map and a ruler, literally
drawing arbitrary lines across the Middle East.
This was the Sykes -Picot agreement, secretly
carving up the region into spheres of French
and British control after the war. So they promised
the land to the Arab leaders, but secretly planned
to keep it for themselves. And then... It gets
even more complicated with the Balfour Declaration
in 1917. The third promise. Yes. The British
government issued an official statement promising
the establishment of a national home for the
Jewish people in Palestine. The declaration also
stated that nothing should be done to prejudice
the civil and religious rights of existing non
-Jewish communities in Palestine. So they were
essentially making massive sweeping promises
concerning the exact same territory to entirely
different groups of people. And this is exactly
where our source highlights how historical views
on the American endorsement of this declaration
vary wildly. When President Woodrow Wilson endorsed
the Balfour Declaration, historians are deeply
split on his motivations. Right. On one hand,
Some historians argue that Wilson supported it
out of a deep Christian sentiment, genuinely
seeking a peaceful, governing role in the region
based on his own moral framework. But on the
other hand, the article notes that pro -Palestinian
historians argue Wilson and the U .S. Congress
actually ignored democratic values to push this
through. They point out that the U .S. State
Department heavily opposed the endorsement at
the time, explicitly fearing it would alienate
Arab populations. But those internal government
fears were ultimately ignored in favor of a strong
pro -Zionist lobby. of how decisions made in
the chaotic, high -stakes diplomatic back rooms
of World War I are still directly shaping the
geopolitics and the conflicts of our world over
a century later. Which brings us finally to the
massive pivot that changed the entire trajectory
of the 20th century, the entry of the United
States into the war. This shift in American public
opinion from 1914 to 1917 is just one of the
most radical transformations in history. In 1914,
Americans wanted absolutely nothing to do with
this European bloodbath. They were completely
isolationist. They were so utterly disconnected
from the geopolitics of Europe that future President
Herbert Hoover actually had to lead a massive
private effort just to repatriate over 100 ,000
American tourists who were stranded in Europe
completely oblivious when the shooting started.
President Wilson was adamant at the time that
the U .S. must remain impartial in thought as
well as in action. But maintaining that neutrality
became structurally impossible. The triggers
just kept piling up. First, you have the sinking
of the Lusitania. in 1915 by a German U -boat,
where over a hundred American civilians died.
Then, as we mentioned earlier, Germany's desperate
gamble in 1917 to resume unrestricted submarine
warfare, knowingly sinking American merchant
ships. And you cannot forget the German espionage
network operating inside the U .S., which the
historical record describes almost like a dark
comic opera. You had German agents desperately
trying to sabotage American factories, but doing
it with staggering incompetence. The briefcase
incident. Yes. The best example is the German
diplomat Heinrich Albert, who literally fell
asleep on a train in New York City and left his
briefcase on the seat. An American Secret Service
agent just grabbed it. And inside were all the
documents proving Germany was funding sabotage
and labor strikes across the country. They published
it and the American public was furious. It created
a deep, pervasive paranoia regarding national
security. But the absolute final straw, the thing
that made war inevitable, was the Zimmerman Telegram.
The sheer audacity of this telegram. The German
foreign minister, Arthur Zimmerman, sends a secret
message to Mexico, offering them a military alliance
against the United States. Germany actually promised
that if Mexico attacked America, Germany would
reward them by helping them reconquer Texas,
New Mexico, and Arizona. It's unbelievable. I
mean, asking a neighboring country to invite
Texas in 1917 is just a comical strategic wonder.
But once British intelligence intercepted that
telegram and the American public found out, the
outrage was absolute. was. But this raises an
important question. How did Wilson take a deeply
isolationist country and convince them to send
millions of young men across an ocean to fight
and die? So what does this all mean? How did
he pull off that psychological shift? He did
it by brilliantly turning a geopolitical conflict
over borders, resources and sea lanes into a
grand moral crusade. He didn't tell the public
they were fighting to protect British loans or
to maintain French borders. He told them they
needed to fight a war to make the world safe
for democracy. If we connect this to the bigger
picture, Wilson elevated the conflict. He convinced
Americans that they possessed a superior moral
position and that true lasting peace required
a world based on free democracies, not secretive
empires. It was a vision that entirely shaped
America's role in world affairs for the rest
of the century. It really did. And really, for
you listening, understanding this hidden diplomatic
war changes everything. The world map you look
at today was drafted in these smoke -filled back
rooms, the borders of the Middle East, the very
existence of Eastern European nations like Poland
and the Baltic states, the modern financial dominance
of Wall Street over London. All of it was forged,
not just with artillery and bayonets, but with
checkbooks, propaganda, and secret backdoor deals.
It's incredible to realize how much of the war
was actually fought miles away from the trenches,
which leaves us with a final thought for you
to mull over. If the real lasting turning points
of the First World War were orchestrated through