For those who may be hundreds, even thousands, of miles away from the physical fighting, war inflicts harm in different ways. Physically, there are shortages of materials, including important nutrients and medicines. Diseases can flourish among civilian populations during wartime.
War can also devastate political liberty. The crisis created by war provides the opportunity for political leaders to argue that urgent and exceptional circumstances necessitate and justify their suspension of the usual civil rights.
The government may contend that during peacetime, citizens have the right to freely discuss and analyze a government - pointing out its flaws - but during wartime, the situation is too important or too critical to allow unrestrained free speech. This is precisely what Woodrow Wilson’s administration did, in 1917 and 1918, when it enforced the Sedition Act and the Espionage Act.
A wartime government can inflict even more detriment on its citizens when it restricts not only their freedom to speak, but their freedom to act: when it regulates various aspects of ordinary life.
Again using war’s urgency as an excuse, governments tell farmers which crops they may grow, and at which prices they may sell them. Governments may tell bakers which type of bread to bake, and at which prices it may be sold.
This violation of an individual’s economic freedom is carried out in the name of the war effort. But such government intervention may destroy the very liberty which the war is allegedly defending.
Historians often call wartime regulations “war socialism.” Many political leaders simply can’t pass up the opportunity to gain more control over the lives of their subjects. After WWI, when Woodrow Wilson left the presidency in 1919, the voters expressed a strong desire for “normalcy.”
But Wilson’s thirst for power extended beyond the borders of the United States, and past the end of the war: not content with intervening in the lives of citizens during the war, Wilson wanted to control global relations after the war.
Redrawing the map of Europe, Wilson inflicted his revenge, largely against the Austrian Empire, for which he harbored a hatred: a hatred which many historicans find difficult to explain. Historian Hans-Hermann Hoppe writes:
As an increasingly ideologically motivated conflict, the war quickly degenerated into a total war. Everywhere, the entire national economy was militarized (war socialism), and the time-honored distinction between combatants and non-combatants and military and civilian life fell by the wayside. For this reason, World War I resulted in many more civilian casualties — victims of starvation and disease — than of soldiers killed on the battlefields. Moreover, due to the ideological character of the war, at its end no compromise peace but only total surrender, humiliation, and punishment was possible. Germany had to give up her monarchy, and Alsace-Lorraine was returned to France as before the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71. The new German republic was burdened with heavy long-term reparations. Germany was demilitarized, the German Saarland was occupied by the French, and in the East large territories had to be ceded to Poland (West Prussia and Silesia). However, Germany was not dismembered and destroyed. Wilson had reserved this fate for Austria. With the deposition of the Habsburgs the entire Austrian-Hungarian Empire was dismembered. As the crowning achievement of Wilson's foreign policy, two new and artificial states, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, were carved out of the former Empire. Austria herself, for centuries one of Europe's great powers, was reduced in size to its small German-speaking heartland; and, as another of Wilson's legacies, tiny Austria was forced to surrender its entirely German province of Southern Tyrolia — extending to the Brenner Pass — to Italy.
Although the logic of Wilson’s foreign policy is obscure, he felt that Habsburg dynasty and the Austro-Hungarian Empire posed a greater danger than the new Soviet Union.
Wilson’s policies seem to stem both from a desire to control and from a mysterious animus. He wanted to control economies, the expression of ideas, and the general shape of society. For unclear reasons, he harbored a deep antipathy against the Austrian monarchy.
