If you could change one event in history,

[NNadir]

38. I actually don't believe that Wilson was "itching" to get into the war.

The US could have easily just sold weapons, to both sides if industrial interests were the only consideration.

This was hardly the case. Wilson won reelection based on promises to not get into the war, (as did Roosevelt in 1940).

Two things changed public opinion, one being unrestricted submarine warfare and the other was the "Zimmerman telegram" which asked Mexico to go to war with the United States to recover Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California, all of which were militarily conquered from Mexico, only about 60 years before the outbreak of World War I.

By 1920, after the final defeat of the Prussian monarchy, which was dissolved, it didn't matter whence Hitler came geographically. He was, in fact, a German speaking Austrian, not German from Germany. The little Austrian corporal in the German army was fully imbued with a love of German militarism, since it was only in military life that he had any sense of self worth and respect.

The fact is that his entire appeal was an appeal to German nationalism, pan Germanic mythology that was a built around the Germany dominated by the former Prussian State. To the very last, Hitler was caterwauling about how he was the new Frederick "the Great," the Prussian King. The Hohenzollerns, previously Kings of Prussia became the Emperors of Germany, by use of war engineered by Bismarck, a Prussian State minister.

By 1914 all of Germany was Prussianized. In fact, the World War, phase I, was essentially a religious war, since Nicholas II of Russia sought to defend an Orthodox state, Serbia, which was being threatened by a polyglot state dominated by German speakers, Austria. It was also very much about familial relationships between the Monarch's of Europe.

The story is told very well in Barbara Tuchman's wonderful The Guns of August, which begins with a very beautifully written account of the funeral of Edward VII, Wilhelm II's uncle, who treated his nephew with barely disguised contempt, as an unruly little boy.

Although Wilhelm II was the person most itching for war in Europe in 1914, he certainly was not the only factor in its outbreak, as much as a very convoluted and largely secret series of alliances more or less made the war nearly inevitable in an imperial age, perhaps a dying imperial age, but an imperial age all the same. For my money the idiot Monarch who had the most to do with the outbreak of the war ended up being killed a result of it. That would be Nicholas II.