WI: The US accepts unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917

Just what it says: After Germany declares USW in 1917 the US accepts it as a legitimate act of war and stays neutral

BTW: This isn't ASB. In OTL, 50 Congressmen and 8 Senators voted against the war with another 6 Senators abstaining. That number would soar without the Zimmerman telegram and rise a lot higher if the Americans believed that the Zimmerman telegram was a British trick. USW doesn't stretch the law of the sea that much and would be considered lawful if the German blockade around the British Isles was deemed "effective"
 

DougM

Donor
If the was was realy about unrestricted submarine warfare you may get a change. But being as Money, Big business and Big Banking had at least as much to do with it I don’t think anything changes.
By the point USW was mostly an excuse used to sell the war.
 
With regard to it being simply an "excuse" there is in fact no evidence that Wilson was going to seek a declaration of war before the Germans resorted to USW. (The Zimmerman Telegram also aided the prospects for war, but that telegram was sent precisely because the Germans anticipated that their decision for USW would being the US into the war, and wanted to get Mexico's support in that event.)

But I agree that acquiescing in USW is perfectly plausible--if someone like Bryan or La Follette is president.

A President Champ Clark might also have acquiesced--or at most he would probably have contented himself with "armed neutrality"--in effect, a limited undeclared naval war. Wilson's ostensible reason for ultimately rejecting armed neutrality as inadequate was that "To defend our rights upon the seas, we must fight submarines. . . Germany has intimated that she would regard the only sort of warfare that is possible against her submarines as an act of war and would treat any persons who fell into her hands from the ships that attacked her submarines as beyond the pale of law. Apparently, to make even the measures of defense legitimate we must obtain the status of belligerents." https://archive.org/details/woodrowwilsonand007665mbp/page/n321 Yet Secretary of the Navy Daniels in his diaries wrote that "I went over to see the President who said we had a right to put armed guards on ships & the piracy talk was absurd & if such spirit prevailed the change in character in ship would not avert it." https://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&hl=en&q="piracy+talk+was+absurd"&= Indeed, it seems unlikely to me that even the German government would be dim-witted enough to hang captured Americans as pirates, given that (a) it could lead to all-out (rather than limited and undeclared) war by the Americans and (b) at the very least, it could lead to Americans reciprocating by hanging captured Germans in retaliation. I think that Wilson's real motive was a belief that armed neutrality would give the US the worst of both worlds--in a shooting war with the Germans yet not involved fully enough to alter the outcome of the World War.
 
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