Nia Bowers
In an age of instant headlines, digital diplomacy, and rapidly shifting alliances, the early Twentieth Century can feel remote, almost abstract. Yet for Dr. Marco Rimanelli, Professor of International Security at Saint Leo University, the legacy of World War I is anything but distant. Its consequences, he argues, continue to define the strategic tensions, alliances, and conflicts shaping the world today.
Dr. Rimanelli’s latest book, Centennial of World War I & League of Nations to Today, 1914–2020s, is not simply a historical account. Spanning 470 pages, it is a deeply analytical and interdisciplinary work with 13 co-authors, yet easy to read, that traces a direct line from the “Great War” to contemporary crises, including the war in Ukraine and rising global tensions with Russia and China.
A Life Informed by History
Dr. Rimanelli’s motivation for this monumental study is deeply personal. Born in Italy and now a U.S. citizen, his own family history reads like a roadmap of Twentieth Century upheavals. From his grandfather, a General of the Carabinieri and World War I gold medal to valor, to his Anglo-Hungarian grandmother who survived the shifting borders of Europe and the Ottoman-Turkish Empire, Dr. Rimanelli was raised on stories of intelligence, survival, and the high-stakes game of international relations.
“I grew up in the shadow of my grandfather’s military career during World War I and Fascist Italy, as well as my maternal uncles’ and my father’s roles in World War II,” Rimanelli recalls as the formative experience that sparked his lifelong interest in power, diplomacy, and international security.
That interest evolved into an exceptional academic and professional journey, taking him from a B.A. at the University of Rome, Italy to an M.A. and Ph.D. Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), and later into rare advisory and research roles on NATO as a Scholar-in-Residence at the U.S. State Department and the CIA. This blend of academic rigor and real-world strategic insight gives his work both credibility and urgency.
Rethinking the Origins of World War I
One of the book’s central contributions is its challenge to simplified narratives about the Great War’s origins. Rather than treating the assassination of Austria-Hungary’s heir to the throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, as a singular cause, the chapters of Dr. Rimanelli and Professor Hall Gardner of the American University of Paris, France, reveal a dense web of rival alliances, arms races, and rigid “automatic mobilization” plans that made a large-scale conflict increasingly unavoidable.
A particularly compelling section is Dr. Rimanelli’s analysis of Italy’s “forgotten” role as the “Least of the Powers.” The book explores Italy’s controversial shift from the German-led Triple Alliance to the Entente/Allies and its costly participation in one of the most brutal and least understood fronts of the war, the Alpine trench campaigns against Austria-Hungary. Despite eventual victory, Italy emerged deeply divided, disillusioned, and at odds with the Allies over the spoils of victory, all conditions that helped fuel the rise of Mussolini’s Fascist regime and later join Nazi Germany against the Allies in World War II.
The lesson, Dr. Rimanelli suggests, is clear: unresolved postwar grievances and political humiliation can become fertile ground for extremism and new conflicts.
Why These Lessons Matter Today
The book argues that the world has entered, since the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021, what Rimanelli terms a “New Global Strategic Powers Confrontation Era.” Drawing unsettling parallels to the years before 1914, he points to the erosion of the global strategic balance among major powers and the reemergence of rival blocs today, most notably the alignment of Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea against weakened U.S.-led Western institutions (NATO, European Union, and United Nations).
Invoking George Santayana’s famous warning that “those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” Rimanelli frames Russia’s 2022–2025 invasion of Ukraine as a modern echo of early Twentieth Century territorial expansionism. He also examines whether today’s international institutions, particularly NATO and the United Nations, can succeed in preserving a fragile peace where the League of Nations failed, or whether they risk repeating similar structural security weaknesses.
More Than Military History
What sets the Centennial of World War I apart is its interdisciplinary scope. Beyond geo-strategy (the rival alliances’ war-plans and combat) and diplomacy (semi-neutral America’s entry into war to save the Allies from defeat, or the Allies’ rival partition plans over the Ottoman-Turkish Middle East, China, and Germany’s African and Pacific island colonies), the book explores also the Great War’s cultural, social, and human dimensions, including:
Trench Poetry and Memory: Insightful analyses of “trench poets” such as the Canadian John McCrae, American John Allan Wyeth, and British Isaac Rosenberg, whose front-line words captured the emotional cost of total warfare.
Media and Propaganda: How in Great Britain the 1916 first war-film “The Battle of the Somme” was used to manipulate the “Home Front” and sustain a national will to fight Germany, while the parallel devastating impact of the 1916-21 Irish Republican rebellion and civil war undermined post-war national unity and imposed Ireland’s independence.
Overlooked Contributions: Chapters dedicated to the crucial but often overlooked combat roles of the U.S. Marines and African-American “Buffalo Soldiers” in France (and again in World War II in Italy and the Pacific), or wartime medicine (field-hospitals, ambulances, prosthetics for amputees, the “Great Influenza” pandemic that killed 100 million in few years), or the failed neutralist diplomacies of Pope Benedict XV and U.S. President Woodrow Wilson overwhelmed by rival political interests among the victorious Allies at the 1919 Versailles Peace Treaty, or the failed trials by the Allies and League of Nations to prosecute German war-crimes and the Ottoman-Turkish genocide of the Armenians, which set the future international legal roadwork for later war-crimes tribunals from Nuremberg and Tokyo in 1946, to Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 1990s, to today’s ineffective the International Criminal Court.
A Timely and Enduring Work
With the Centennial of World War I & League of Nations to Today, 1914–2020s, Dr. Marco Rimanelli offers more than a diplomatic-historical survey. He provides a framework for understanding the fragile nature of global order and the consequences of ignoring the past.
By combining scholarly depth with a narrative that is both global in scope and deeply human, the book stands as essential reading for historians, political scientists, policymakers, and engaged citizens alike. As modern conflicts continue to unfold, Rimanelli’s work reminds us that the lessons of 1914 are not relics of history; they are warnings written into the present, and guides for navigating an uncertain future.