Why Did World War 1 Increase US Power

How did World War I increase U.S. power?

As a result of World War I the United States experienced relative and absolute gains in power and influence, as the former world powers of Europe were reduced to mere shells of their former selves by war debts, dried up economies, and an unrecoverable loss of life.The United States’s participation in the Great War solidified its status as the world’s leading economic and military power, primed to become the world’s dominant political power, a superpower in the making. The United States was on the cusp of greatness, but it would take another world war for it to accept this responsibility with earnestness and welcome the status of superpower. Until then the American people held their heads up high content

a. Escaping the destructive scale of World War I the United States became the world’s leading economic power. Europe on the other hand found itself short of $350 billion and virtually bankrupt. The war had ruined the economies of the Allied nations, which had been limited to the production of armaments for the last four years. A terrible product to invest a nation’s entire economy, weapons could only be used during times of war, serving no other purpose than this, and so the Allied nations looked on at their weapon stockpiles and groaned at the money wasted, as their economies entered a period of decline. To make matters worse, the total death toll of the Great War and the Spanish Influenza that followed it numbered in the tens of millions, a loss of life that meant Europe’s economies had been robbed of the talents and brains of an entire generation of young men. In addition to this, the Allied nations owed the United States $30 billion worth of loans that had been used to finance their war effort. The United States had raised $20 billion from the sale of Liberty war bonds to support the Allied cause, complemented by an additional $10 billion raised from taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations. Furthermore, the American economy had just experienced the

The United States’s participation in the Great War solidified its status as the world’s leading military power bypassing Britain. The American army, despite their limited operations in Europe, made up for its lack of experience with impressive numbers. By 1918, only a year after the United States had declared war on Germany and Austro-Hungary, more than 2 million American troops were stationed in Europe. And to their credit, American forces fought in several pivotal battles that helped turn the tide of the war in the Allies’ favor. American troops assisted in the defence of Paris at Chateau Thierry and Belleau Wood, later winning the Second Battle of the Marne in July 1918, pushing back the advancing German armies, ending Germany’s Spring Offensive. The Allied forces followed this victory with the Meuse-Argonne Offensive, during which General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing led a force of 1.2 million Americans to great success, cutting off German railways to the Western Front, effectively denying German forces supplies, munitions, and reinforcements. The series of successes enjoyed by the Allied armies came only a year after Britain’s failed Flander’s Field Offensive which threatened to knock the English out of the war, a testament to the decisiveness of America’s military intervention. Besides boasting a large land force, the United States put its navy to good use, leasing ships to Britain and France, and assigning naval vessels to guard convoys from U-boat attacks. All in