Wi USA is pro German in ww1

G-6

Banned
What if the USA government was pro German instead of pro British in ww1 and attempted to keep on trading regardless of British blockade even using a earlier version of lend lease and also enforce
Pan-American Security Zone .
 
The Entente must win quickly or not at all. American goods, supplies, and capital kept them afloat for as long as they did with only direct American intervention leading to victory. Without any of this, the Entente would quickly burn through its capital (assuming the US still traded) or not be able to sustain the war effort to the extent that they did.
 
It is easy to see how British arrogance and enforcement of their blockade of the Central Powers could have gone horribly wrong. Something like a repeat of the Trent Affair for instance.
 
What I would see happening with a Trent type fiasco is armed neutral convoys that wave the US flag VERY broadly and that essentially force BOTH the British and the Germans to sit by and watch as cargo goes to BOTH sides.

It’s a pure Merchants of Death approach, but I could see it happen. Two PODs coming out at the same time could do it:

Zimmerman Telgraph is an actual forgery and in fact Zimmerman reveals a very different real message that clearly shows it was tampered with by the British. At the same time, credible leaks from survivors or others reveal that the Lusitania was in fact loaded with arms and was a legitimate target.

That causes a massive outrage that leads to “a pox on both of them, so let’s make money from both.”
 
It is easy to see how British arrogance and enforcement of their blockade of the Central Powers could have gone horribly wrong. Something like a repeat of the Trent Affair for instance.

See https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...ep-trading-with-germany.471362/#post-19201730 for why America was unlikely to go to war with the British over the blockade. Your bringing up the Trent is interesting because people sometimes forget how the US position during the ACW set precedents that made it more difficult for the US to oppose the blockade. Anyway, every time it did look like the US was going to get serious about retaliation (economic rather than military) there would be another German submarine attack to remind Americans of the difference between British violations of US neutral rights (which caused commercial damage to Americans) and German violations (which killed Americans). Wilson's decision that the former should be met by nothing more than protests and demands for eventual compensation would probably have been made by any plausible POTUS at the time.
 
American armed neutrality annoys London, which in turn decides to try a bit of foreign interference in the 1916 election? Woodrow Wilson gets really incensed, militarizes the Canadian border, and things go down hill from there after a machine gunner with an itchy finger and a case of fragile nerves has a really bad night...
 
Leaving aside economics. This era saw a surge in ethnic nationalism. Anti immigrant laws were piling up, Jim Crow laws were well enforced, lynchings tolerated & against other ethnic groups as well as African Americans. The revival of the KKK was aimed at non WASP whites. Cathoilics, Orthodox, Hispanics, "Mediterranean Types", Slavs, Asians, and suspect Nordic types like Germans and Swedes with their funny accents and liking for Ludifisk & Saurkraut. From the perspective of the nativist of 1914 John Bulls and Scottys were far more acceptable as Allies than beer swilling Germans (who did not support the temperance movement). That many of the German immigrants were Catholics only made it worse.

The posturing of the Kaiser & his political power affected liberal' thinking. The Prgressives, Socialits, & others less affected by ethnic issues, regarded France & Britain favorably as republics or democracies better suited for the future of mankind than the beplumed aristocrats who were the public image of the Germanic empires.
 
And the British Empire was Germany's largest trading partner, which was why the war was obviously impossible...

Exactly. Straight forward surface economics or trade little affected the thinking of 1914-1917. There were some more subtle underlying factors which had their influence. There were frequent and strong business & family connections between the US and other European, or Asian & Latin American nations. The difference in the case of Britian was a degree of ownership in the US. During the 18th and 19th Century a significant portion of US industrial development was financed by London banks. Along with this was a heavy direct participation by British merchants in US business development and ownership. The Brits were not just buying raw materials and goods from North American, they often owned the businesses exporting. French, German, or Japanese busnissmen came to the US to buy, thanks to early development of a central banking system the capitol generated by large empire, and a history of ownership, the Brits came to investi in US business of a relatively large scale. These deep running connections gave them a advantage that simple sales statistics don't reflect.
 
The most likely steps taken by an administration sympathetic to Germany would be prohibitions of loans to belligerents and of arms sales to belligerents. These measures would be neutral on their face (though everyone would know their effect would be favorable to Germany) and would not involve the risk of a shooting war that an attempt to challenge the blockade by force would.
 
That the most likely direction. A German alliance it just to difficult for the era. I'm unsure exactly how to get there. People argue Roosevelt was to aggressive and anti German to remain neutral. I have my own thoughts on that, but am not a expert. What about Taft? would he have been able to steer a neutral course. Any other sort of neutrality leader as president or in Congress is a much longer shot.
 
The most likely steps taken by an administration sympathetic to Germany would be prohibitions of loans to belligerents and of arms sales to belligerents. These measures would be neutral on their face (though everyone would know their effect would be favorable to Germany) and would not involve the risk of a shooting war that an attempt to challenge the blockade by force would.
The arms sales sure, but could the USA forbid the loans?

One question crops up here for me. In OTL the Entente had to secure their loans, but to what degree were they secured? Like 50% or more? If less then 100% then maybe the USA can demand that all loans have to be backed at full value.
 
The arms sales sure, but could the USA forbid the loans?

Forbidding the loans was in fact the initial US policy but was reversed fairly soon. An arms embargo had wide support in Congress and might well have passed but for the opposition of the administration (even Bryan opposed it).

The point is, that if you had an administration that was pro-German enough, the ban on loans could have continued (though it would have been harmful to the US economy) and a ban on arms sales could have been enacted.

The best short discussion I know of these issues is by Richard Leopold in The Growth of American Foreign Policy: A History, pp. 298-301. (I quote him a lot both because I was a student of his and because he makes a real attempt to analyze the dilemmas facing US foreign policy makers during the First World War instead of glibly condemning Wilson as so many people here do.)

***

With respect to loans, international law distinguished between money lent by neutral governments and by citizens of a neutral state. It did not forbid, nor did American domestic statutes so forbid, individuals to float loans or to extend short-term credits for facilating trade. Such a prohibition was not needed in the Napoleonic era when the young republic lacked financial reserves. During the Civil War, the Union borrowed extensively from Prussian bankers; during the Russo-Japanese struggle. New York investment houses aided Japan. Although the Hague Conferences had taken no stand on the matter, many Americans — Bryan among them — came to believe by 1914 that unless some curbs were imposed, the operations of private financial institutions might undermine American neutrality.

Actually, the administration's first pronouncement was a surprise. On August 15, 1914, Bryan, with respect to a French plan to float a bond issue of $100 million with J. P. Morgan & Company, declared that loans to belligerents by American bankers "were inconsistent with the true spirit of neutrality." Money, he had told Wilson five days earlier, was "the worst of all contrabands because it commands everything else." The Secretary argued that public subscriptions intensified emotions and would destroy the very impartiality the President sought, and on that point Bryan may have been right. But there were much sounder reasons why huge loans to combatants should be discouraged in August, 1914. The war had unsettled the entire American economy. The security markets were disorganized and the gold reserves endangered. To ban loans as unneutral merely confused the problem. If the export of dollars was to be forbidden as contraband, why should not the outflow of other contraband items also be stopped? Bryan did not go that far, and it is not clear whether his concept was designed to keep the country out of war, to offset the advantage held by the Allies, or to promote the material well-being of the United States. If persisted in, however, his policy would have led to serious economic dislocation, since within a few months British sea power made a prosperous foreign trade possible with only England and France.

Because it was commercially unsound and strategically unwise, this opposition to loans was gradually relaxed and ultimately abandoned. But to save Bryan's pride and to avoid offending German sympathizers, the return to tradition was not candidly explained, with the result that many joeople at the time and in later years regarded it as a conspiracy against the Secretary and proof of the pro-Allied bias of the administration. On October 15, 1914, the Department privately conceded that loans stood on the same ground as the shipment of other contraband and did not violate American neutrality. On October 23 Lansing secretly assured two investment houses that it was proper to extend commercial credits to the belligerents. Bryan assented, but he insisted on maintaining a distinction between credits — which banks could grant quietly to promote trade that was valuable to the whole country — and loans — whose bond rallies might arouse popular passions and divide the American people. By March 31, 191 5, it was pubhcly acknowledged that short-term credits were not barred by the statement of August 15, 1914. The statement itself was never openly repudiated; but the President tacitly renounced it on September 7, 1915, when he agreed to permit a group of New York bankers to float a $500 million bond issue which England and France desperately required if they were to continue their substantial war purchases in this country.

Thus ended in failure the first attempt by the United States to include among neutral duties a proscription on loans by its citizens to belligerent governments. It failed because it seemed inconsistent to halt the export of dollars as contraband and not to halt the shipment of other kinds. It failed because it seemed unfair to deny the Allies access to American banks to carry on a mutually profitable commerce just because Germany had no comparable trade to finance. But it failed primarily because such a ban, while beneficial to the nation's economy in August, 1914, had the opposite effect a year later. The influence of Wall Street or fear of a German victory had nothing to do with the reversal. There was no expectation in September, 1915, that the Allies would be defeated or that the United States would enter the struggle.

The sale of munitions posed a more difficult problem. Again, there was nothing in international or domestic law to stop American manufacturers from selling guns and shells to belligerent governments. Secretary of State Jefferson admitted as much on May 15, 1793, while forty-four nations declared at The Hague on October 18, 1907, that a neutral was not obliged to prevent the export of weapons. The only limiting factor was that, as contraband, those materials could be confiscated by the belligerents wherever found. In theory, then, the United States had no authority to halt the arms traffic, and Germany had no grounds to protest. But in practice, many Americans were disturbed by the deaths which the products of their factories inflicted almost wholly on the Central Powers. The Germans, caught in the grip of the British navy, had to rely on propaganda and their kinsmen in the New World to try to check that trade in the name of humanity and fair play.

Once again Wilson faced a dilemma. To stop the flow of munitions would penalize the Entente for its command of the sea at the very moment when its foes had shown themselves more powerful on land. To permit the traffic to go unimpeded would antagonize Germany and perhaps invite retaliation. Neither traditional neutrality nor a new interpretation of its duties fully protected the national interest. Hence, the President refused to interdict the sale of guns and shells, arguing that it would be more unneutral to alter the rules after hostilities had commenced, especially to compensate one side for its inferiority, than it would be to adhere to precedent. But because the arms traffic obviously helped the Allies more than it did their rivals, because it aroused humanitarian sentiment, and because it seemed easier to eliminate by legislative fiat, the administration met with a stiffer challenge than on the loan issue. Resolutions empowering the executive to impose an arms embargo were introduced into both houses and found strong support among idealists, pacifists, Anglophobes, and German sympathizers. Bryan agreed with Wilson on this matter and tried to stem the agitation on January 25, 1915, by a public defense of the President's policy. On February 18 the Senate tabled by a margin of 51 to 36 an embargo contained in an amendment to another bill. Although the campaign for a ban on arms shipments was renewed in the next session, no other vote was taken.

For a second time a move to widen the duties of a neutral lost. Once again it failed early in the war, before relations with Germany were embittered by the submarine controversy and before it was felt imperative to save the world from Prussian autocracy. Once again it failed because it ran counter to Wilson's definition of the national interest. Superficially, of course, an arms embargo seemed to insure greater impartiality; actually, it would have been an attempt to offset an advantage possessed by one belligerent. Superficially, too, it looked as if the continuation of the munitions traffic was dictated by economic considerations; actually, Wilson did not make up his mind on that ground.

https://archive.org/details/growthofamerican00inleop/page/298
 
The arms sales sure, but could the USA forbid the loans?
Yes.

One question crops up here for me. In OTL the Entente had to secure their loans, but to what degree were they secured? Like 50% or more? If less then 100% then maybe the USA can demand that all loans have to be backed at full value.
There were mainly backed by British holdings and investment in the USA, which was enormous (~US$4.2 billion with another US$400M from France, and US$640M from the Netherlands).

If you want a pro-CP, or anti-Entente, USA try no McAdoo in 1914.

In 1914 the U.S. economy was still immature and the nation a global debtor with a currency that no-one wanted and that was subject to recurring panics. After the Great War started Europeans, who supplied much of the capital to the United States, were cashing in their US stocks and bonds and dollars for gold, and taking the metal home. That was terrible news for US securities, for the US dollar, and for US bank who couldn't redeem paper for metal. This was stopped by William Gibbs McAdoo, who took decisive, if dubiously legal, actions to stop this; including closing the NY stock market for four months and flooding the economy with currency via the Aldrich-Vreeland Act
McAdoo was US Treasury Secretary, and Wilson's son-in-law.

Without McAdoo's actions it's likely that the US economy would have been severely damaged by the British and French liquidation of their US securities in 1914. There'd also probably have been no bailout of the bankrupt city of New York (which owed vast sums to the Entente powers), no Bureau of War Risk Insurance et cetera.
 

BigBlueBox

Banned
And the British Empire was Germany's largest trading partner, which was why the war was obviously impossible...
Germany gambled that Britain didn’t care enough about Belgium so they could achieve a strategic advantage over France. It lost that gamble. America had no reason whatsoever to defy the British blockade. The only people who would benefit would be a handful of war profiteers, and many of them were satisfied with selling to the Entente only.
 
German/American cooperation could change the conditions that lead to WW1.
Changing the evolution of the US is hard, but a possible change of German colonial policy could do the trick.
It would require Germany to renounce tradicional imperialism and back the US "open door" policy of international capitalism (demanding the right to trade in other countries areas of interest)
This would make economical sense, and it would lead to the US and Germany being on the opposite camp of Britain and France.
 

BooNZ

Banned
The most likely steps taken by an administration sympathetic to Germany would be prohibitions of loans to belligerents and of arms sales to belligerents. These measures would be neutral on their face (though everyone would know their effect would be favorable to Germany) and would not involve the risk of a shooting war that an attempt to challenge the blockade by force would.
Agreed, although a ban on arms sales would be substantially redundant, since the US was predominantly supplying the machine tools and raw materials rather than completed armaments. OTL the mere suggestion by Wilson/Fed in 1916 that any US creditors providing unsecured loans to the Entente would be on their own, triggered a financial crisis in the Entente war effort. A strictly independent/neutral US foreign policy alone would suffice to sink the Entente boat before 1918.

Germany gambled that Britain didn’t care enough about Belgium so they could achieve a strategic advantage over France. It lost that gamble.
No. Most Germans were not privy to the harebrained scheme to invade Belgium and many German decision makers remained ever hopeful of British neutrality in the case of a conflict. However, the key proponent of the scheme was Molke, who assumed British beligerence in all circumstances (per discussion with Conrad). The German decision to invade Belgium was simply not weighed against potential British beligerence.

America had no reason whatsoever to defy the British blockade. The only people who would benefit would be a handful of war profiteers, and many of them were satisfied with selling to the Entente only.
Technically there was no formal blockade. The British were claiming satisfaction under an obscure doctrine of retaliation, since many of their actions did not conform to the international requirements/expectations of a formal blockade. Essentially, the British were illegally preventing Americans from trading with much of Europe. Principles such as the protection of neutral shipping rights would provide a reason to go to war (or take retaliatory measures), if such a decision was also otherwise deemed expedient.
 
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