It is astonishing how easily the goals and agendas for which nations go to war are forgotten. In the post-1865 American South, no serious resistance was mounted to the abolition of slavery. No one in post-1871 France voiced any further desire to advance the Franco-German border to the Rhine or expressed any yearning for continental hegemony. Likewise, post-1918 Germany abandoned its “Weltmacht” aspirations and dismissed the construction of a naval fleet to rival England’s as an unfortunate idiosyncrasy of Emperor Wilhelm II’s.
