Because of the lack of American action, Germany decided to take the matter into their own hands utilizing a new weapon of war: the Unterseeboot, or submarine. In March 1915, the a German U-boat sunk the HMS Falaba, which had on board an American, the first killed by either side in the conflict. German U-boats sunk other ships, the Arabic, Lusitania, and the Sussex throughout the war. Each time Germans inflicted major American civilian casualties, the United States government warned Germany of the illegality of such actions and their possible repercussions. After the sinking of the Lusitania, in which over one hundred Americans died, Lansing contended that America should adopt a firmer stance towards Germany, claiming that since the American
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Royce denounced the Germans as against humanity itself, and argued that America’s rightfully belonged alongside the Entente. Meanwhile, representative Kenneth D. McKellar, a Democrat from Tennessee, defended the popular anti-German stance in Congress, but his logic contained an important fallacy. McKellar claimed that with an American passivity toward German attacks, the number of attacks would skyrocket, thus damaging American commerce and the Democratic party’s domestic position. Although his argument contained the primary flaw of a slippery-slope fallacy, it held water in the anti-German 64th Congress. In this scenario, American domestic politics clearly interferes with foreign policy, because McKellar primarily worried about, as delineated by the end of his slippery-slope argument, the Democratic party’s control in American politics. This particular focus can lead to errors of judgment in foreign policy, such as partiality in a conflict while that nation claims neutrality. With a right hand man already clearly aligned with the Entente and a public calling for the Kaiser’s head, Wilson and his country had been confined to one path at this point, the path toward …show more content…
On the contrary, a counterclaim to this methodology indicates that when and why the United States officially abandoned neutrality has less importance than why America had behaved so partially before they officially joined the war. Simply put, the United States had participated in the war before officially declaring war, thus why the quality of their neutrality rapidly declined should matter more in the consideration of this
Royce denounced the Germans as against humanity itself, and argued that America’s rightfully belonged alongside the Entente. Meanwhile, representative Kenneth D. McKellar, a Democrat from Tennessee, defended the popular anti-German stance in Congress, but his logic contained an important fallacy. McKellar claimed that with an American passivity toward German attacks, the number of attacks would skyrocket, thus damaging American commerce and the Democratic party’s domestic position. Although his argument contained the primary flaw of a slippery-slope fallacy, it held water in the anti-German 64th Congress. In this scenario, American domestic politics clearly interferes with foreign policy, because McKellar primarily worried about, as delineated by the end of his slippery-slope argument, the Democratic party’s control in American politics. This particular focus can lead to errors of judgment in foreign policy, such as partiality in a conflict while that nation claims neutrality. With a right hand man already clearly aligned with the Entente and a public calling for the Kaiser’s head, Wilson and his country had been confined to one path at this point, the path toward …show more content…
On the contrary, a counterclaim to this methodology indicates that when and why the United States officially abandoned neutrality has less importance than why America had behaved so partially before they officially joined the war. Simply put, the United States had participated in the war before officially declaring war, thus why the quality of their neutrality rapidly declined should matter more in the consideration of this