Woodrow Wilson Quotes
Let us build a navy as big as hers and do as we please.
Woodrow Wilson, 1856-1924, 28th President of the United States (Democrat, NJ), Statement to aids discussing the fact that Great Britain had the largest navy in the world and had to be accommodated in creating American foreign policy, 1916, Quoted in Adam Tooze, The Deluge, 2014
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This quotation illustrates several historical differences of the past with today. To be a world superpower, one had to have a dominant navy. Yet that navy was, in Churchill’s concept, a defensive system. It could protect the nation from invasion, and its merchant ships on the seas, but a navy provided no threat to invade towns and villages in Europe or elsewhere. Germany and France in contrast, with their large armies could invade other nations and menace Europe and Asia. It also illustrates why the navy and the army were considered completely separate departments of government in that they had different functions. The early American government had a Navy Department and Secretary but no Secretary of the Army or standing army.
Germany had a very small and insignificant navy. It was Tirpitz who persuaded the nation to develop sea power.
See {629350} for his reason that we had to have a strong navy.
He was referring to attacking the Barbary States. The Barbary Pirates had an incredible extortion racket going in the Mediterranean. If nations would pay them an annual sum each year, they would not attack and seize merchant ships of that country and sell the ships and goods while holding the sailors for ransom. See {640846}.
The German naval command—without the permission of the Kaiser—at the eve of a losing war decided that the entire German navy would make a grand attack against the far superior English fleet. It was to be a virtual suicide attack on a grand scale. However, most German sailors heard about the plan and refused orders to attack in what was the largest mutiny in history. The German naval leaders then took the fleet out to sea and scuttled all the ships so that the English would not capture them. The result was the same but tens of thousands of lives were saved; many German officers felt that German naval honor had been lost.
Military men tend to rely so much on military history that they are almost always fighting the last war. Soon air power would supplant sea power as the critical factor. Then nuclear power, and then nuclear weapons became too severe for actual use and yet wars still continued with no consensus as to that will be in the future.
Frederick the Great. He and many other Europeans thought that England had been so preoccupied with the American rebellion that she was ignoring Europe and other traditional foreign policy interests of theirs.
Thomas Woodrow Wilson was an American politician and academic who served as the 28th president of the United States from 1913 to 1921. A member of the Democratic Party, Wilson served as the president of Princeton University and as the 34th governor of New Jersey before winning the 1912 presidential election. As President, Wilson led the United States into World War I in 1917. He was the leading architect of the League of Nations, and his progressive stance on foreign policy came to be known as Wilsonianism. Scholars have generally ranked Wilson in the upper tier of U.S presidents, although he has been criticized for supporting racial segregation and white supremacy.
