After a shower and a shave, here is part 2.

Americans are taught in high school history that WW1 was a mistake, more or less.  A bunch of first cousins who were grandchildren of Victoria of England got dragged into a fight due to 50 year old alliance structures and the countries were not ready for horrific new war technology.  Eventually the US showed up, crazily charged out of trenches into machine gun nests, and the war was over.  The US took their ball and went home, and the winners blamed the losers and shackled them with onerous reparations (as it has ever been), and Germany suffered and suffered for a couple of decades before nationalist pride led to the second go around.  The US only showed up this time because the Japanese guessed wrong in Hawaii and after kicking butt and taking names ended up with the only intact industrial infrastructure and Navy, and here we are now scared of Russia and rallying everyone else around capitalism.

Americans are taught in college that WW1 was a result of empires stifling trade.  They started colonies to create captive raw material supply and captive markets, but refused to trade across empire borders without expensive barriers.  So you had a bunch of European circa 1900- era more or less peasants who had been dislocated from the economy due to wild Victorian-era tech advances, who couldn’t get what they wanted and needed and then you had an unhappy populace, which led to popular unrest with the then-current ruling class.  One hothead in Sarajevo met up with the representative of said then-current ruling class, and the spark ignited.  So off we go and eventually the US gets dragged into it and ends up on the side of the British, at least partially due to their control of the trans-Atlantic cable and some forms of yellow journalism.  The winners shackled the losers with reparations and the US took their ball and went home, and 20 years later here we all are again because the underlying economic issue had never been solved, and there were still populations who felt they couldn’t get the goods they needed due to external forces (reparations payments, whatever).   So … things were so bad crazy ideas flourished and bad things happened and here we are again the second time.  Then following WW2 the leaders decided we were going to have free trade and free navigation and lots of treaties and international institutions where we could talk and negotiate out our differences and people (outside of communism) would be able to use free trade to get what they wanted and needed.  And boy, was that awesome.  

So, from the US college history perspective, how can anyone be so foolish as to not want as free of trade as possible when the lack thereof blew up the world twice and still, still, there are holdouts, some of whom have nukes, who think their tribe or group or power is so much more important than the overall good that they are willing to sow the seeds of WW3.  How can we continue to support institutions that are not willing to recognize fundamental subversion of the principles under which they were formed. So along comes enough popular upswell of opinion to elect a guy who is willing to cut the Gordian knot of all of this and call a spade a spade.  And here we are, like it or not.