Woodrow Wilson was president of the United States during the First World War. His position was one of isolationism—that is, he firmly held that the United States would not get involved in what was perceived as a war between crumbling European empires. The problem with this position was that the United States believed that its geographical position—having the benefit of being bordered by two oceans—allowed it to ignore conflicts brewing in other regions. This turned out not to be true.
The contemporary view of the First World War is that it resulted from the stirring of nationalist sentiments throughout Europe. The war ignited after the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand by the Serb Gavrilo Princip. Many of the alliances that were formed during the First World War between the Allied Powers (e.g., Great Britain, France, later the United States, and Italy) and the Central Powers (e.g., Germany, Austria-Hungary, Bulgaria, the Ottoman Empire) would remain relatively intact during World War II.
The First World War began on July 28, 1914, but the United States did not enter the war until April 6, 1917, after the nation declared war on Germany for the sinking of the Lusitania, a Cunard ocean liner carrying American citizens that was torpedoed by a German U-boat.
By the time the United States entered the war on the side of the Allied Powers, members of the Allied Powers, particularly among the French, had seen massive losses in soldiers. Some argue that the United States' entry into the war helped to precipitate an armistice, ending the war on November 11, 1918. This view is debatable. However, Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, delivered in a speech to Congress on January 8, 1918, helped to set the terms that would end the war.
Among the key points were freedom of sea navigation, equal trade, an "adjustment of colonial claims" with consideration of the sovereignty of nations, the evacuation and freedom of Belgium and France, the autonomous development of Austria-Hungary (this led to the break-up of the former empire into separate nations), the readjustment of the frontiers of Italy, and the freedom of Romania, Montenegro, and Serbia, with the inclusion that Serbia should have access to the sea.
Another condition was that Germany, which was blamed for the First World War in the Treaty of Versailles, would pay war reparations to the Allied Powers. This resulted in severe economic depression, causing the Deutschmark to be rather worthless, as well as a loss of national pride that was restored in some sense by the rise of fascism in 1933.
Once again, the United States underestimated the danger posed by Nazism in the 1930s. Moreover, the Roosevelt administration was busy pulling the nation out of the Great Depression, the bursting of the wheat boom in the High Plains, and repairing the environmental devastation of the plains due to excessive wheat farming, a crisis that resulted in the Dust Bowl.
American entry into the Second World War was also prompted by an attack—this time on December 7, 1941 on the Hawaiian naval base Pearl Harbor. The Japanese forced America's hand, pulling it now into both the Pacific and across the Atlantic to fight, again, against the Germans.
Prior to the Pearl Harbor attack, there were isolationist sentiments within the United States, despite knowledge of the Holocaust.
In May 1939, the MS St. Louis, a German ocean liner, was carrying more than 900 Jewish refugees. The captain, Gustav Schröder, attempted to disembark in both the United States and Canada. Both countries refused the refugees entry. Joseph Kennedy, father of future president John F. Kennedy, was the American ambassador to Great Britain and sought to dissuade President Franklin Delano Roosevelt from entering the war. There were also Americans who were Nazi sympathizers, including the renowned aviator Charles Lindbergh.
After its entry into the war, the United States played a key role in freeing France from the grip of the Germans. More notoriously, it forced the end of the war in the Pacific by introducing the atom bomb, which it dropped in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This introduction of atomic warfare would prompt future panic about another attack of its kind on American soil, particularly from what was then the Soviet Union. Though the Soviet Union and the United States were allies during both the First and Second World Wars, they would become enemies after the end of the Second World War in 1945, prompting the Cold War. After the Iron Curtain dropped on the former Eastern Front, Communist Eastern Europe, dominated by Soviet power, closed itself off from the capitalist West, dominated by the United States.
Meanwhile, the League of Nations was formed by the United States and the former Allied Powers. This would lead to the creation of the United Nations. Former secretary of state and secretary of defense George C. Marshall instituted the Marshall Plan, which was a recovery plan intended to rebuild Europe. The United States's role after the Second World War was similar to that of the First World War—to help Europe form lasting alliances. However, this time, there was also assistance with recovery as well as a recognition that the United States had risen as the leader on the world stage. With both its massive military power and diplomatic acumen, the world would now look to America, for better or worse, "to keep the world safe for democracy."
https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/wilson14.asp
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