Ask Lemmy

Not much of a war, really just a naval blockade, but I think that the Venezuelan crisis of 1902 is maybe the most overlooked major event of the 20th century.

Basic breakdown: Venezuela took out shitloads of loans from England and Germany in the late 1800s. In that same time, they underwent a series of revolutions. The dude who ended up in charge decided that he didn't want to pay off the debts that somebody 5 governments ago had accrued. He also assumed that the US would keep the European powers from doing anything about it based on the whole manifest destiny thing. Teddy Roosevelt however decided that he would keep out of it.

A bunch of British and German warships then anchored just off the Venezuelan coast and started taking ships and messing with all the marine traffic. The British mostly led the charge on this whole operation, except for one time that a German ship bombarded a little base called Fort San Carlos, killing a couple dozen people.

This entire time, Americans had kind of been stewing about this whole thing. The bombardment was a tipping point, and the US started putting pressure on Britain and Germany to get out of our sphere. The British said that they had given strict orders not to attack any land-based targets, so the blame landed firmly on the Germans. A couple weeks later all the countries agreed to terms of arbitration.

All of this seems relatively tame on the scale of international conflict. However, 12 years later this massive fucking war broke out between all these European powers. They beat each other up for years, and everything seemed to be going really poorly for everybody. Then the US decided to join.

A lot of people don't realize how close it was, which side of the war the US would fight for. Generally we had better relations with the Entente powers (Britain, France and Russia) than we did with Germany, but there were millions of German immigrants living in America and it had been less than a century since Britain had burned down our capitol. The Venezuelan blockade played a large part in our decision, just because the general populace had this idea of "Germany bad" because of it.

Now, American troops didn't do well in WWI. They mostly got their asses kicked. But just the fact that there were fresh troops being infused into the lines meant that the momentum shifted towards the Entente powers (now Britain France and the US). Within two years the war is over, Germany surrenders, signing a shitty-ass peace accord that all but guarantees that WWII will happen.

I'll admit that this is a bit of an oversimplification, and a bit of speculation on my part. But I really believe that the entire 20th century would have been completely different if that blockade had gone differently. The Soviet revolution, Mussolini, Hitler, the Holocaust, Chairman Mao, the Cold War, Vietnam, etc. All of that might not have happened if that German captain had gotten the memo to not shell land-based targets.