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Originally Posted by nik-
backwater, impotent and unimportant ... hmm. Isolationist I'll give you, but the US was still the largest economy in the world before WW1. Bigger than the UK, Germany and Austria combined. There's a reason the the british wanted them in the war so badly, and it's not the three things you listed.
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You're confusing what they were with their potential. The US had a tiny army and medium navy, and at that time, military might was how nations were ranked. The Germans tried to incite Mexico into fighting the US and keeping them occupied and out of the war - Mexico! Whether that would have worked or not is debatable, but that it was assumed the Mexicans could take them on at all tells you how little American power was respected.
The Allies wanted the US in the war badly because they were losing, and this was the only plausible source of sufficient manpower left them. There was an expectation the Americans would fight under British and French command, which never happened, but again they were definitely viewed at the time as junior partners. (The Americans mostly wanted to join because they realized they had loaned out all their free capital to nations that wouldn't be able to pay them back if they lost the war).
Once the war was won, the British position as the world's financiers was lost and the Americans slowly surpassed them there as well, but until they entered World War II and started arming, they still had a joke of a military that nobody feared. So yes, they were an industrial power, but they didn't have the financial power and they definitely didn't have the military power that the European nations had (and needed).