When the dust had settled and the carnage had been cleared away, all of Europe stood as the losers of the First World War, only the United States emerge victorious. I believe that this statement is true. At the turn of the century, Americans mainly focused on domestic issues. Washington had warned the United States about avoiding European entanglements, and for the most part people still agreed with him. Europe and its politics were still looked at suspiciously by most Americans. While Americans admired much about French fashions or British culture, Americans tended to see European political leaders as corrupt, sneaky, and basically amoral. While the US was willing to trade with the Europeans, they did not want any deep level commitments to Europeans and were determined to keep the Europeans out of the Americas. Americans still viewed themselves as the New Israel and believed that it was their duty to spread the American version of democracy wherever they could. Their main purpose was to show other countries the glories of American democracy. The Europeans, observing all this, developed a wide range of reactions. Many Europeans immigrated to the US, because they saw it was the land of opportunity. However many Europeans saw America as socially primitive, culturally backwards, substantially naive,hopelessly idealistic and very arrogant. Given these attitudes by the Europeans, it was surprising that America gotinvolved in World War I. The major reason for their involvement was Americaninternational trade. The United States was trading with the Germans and the British at theoutset of the war. All of this trade was necessarily conducted via merchant shipping.America believed that since the were not in the war, their ships should be allowed to sailinto ports of and belligerent countries without interference. The Germans and the Britishdid not see things quite this way. Within a few months after the outbreak of war, Britaindeclared a naval blockade against shipment of possible war material to Germany, and later any shipment to Germany was blocked.