Editing The World Wars (section)

===Aftermath===
The consequences of WWI cannot be understated. This four-year-long international bloodletting completely destroyed the Eurocentric world order that had persisted since the 1500s, reduced all European powers except Russia from being superpowers in their own right to second-rank states, and began the end of the age of (overt) imperialism for good. The amount of money spent on this war was enormous; Britain went from the world's biggest lender to its biggest debtor, having spent a treasury accumulated over the course of 300 years of colonial British and English history in just four years. France saw its industrial and agricultural heartlands in the northeast reduced to a shell-pocked, poisonous wasteland that is ''to this day'' unusable and dangerous from all the unexploded ordnance buried in the fields and forests. Germany had gone from its familiar Prussian semi-feudal social order to a constitutional republic with nothing to fill the social void that was left when the old Imperial elites just fucked off elsewhere and left it to the Social Democrats and Liberals to try and clean up the mess they had created. Russia was transformed into the Soviet Union and could only compensate for the extreme loss of people and infrastructure by installing a tyrannical regime and condemning millions of its own people to death in forced labour camps and engineered famines. And that's just in Europe. In the Middle East, the Sykes-Picot Agreement between Britain and France haphazardly carved the region up into a bunch of countries and territories with no regard ([[Marines Malevolent|or intentional disregard]]) for the cultural mixup of the lands they took from the Ottomans. This ended up creating some of the most vicious and long-lasting ethnic conflicts in history, most of which are still going on to this day, with the Iraq-Iran, Israeli-Palestinian and in general Sunni-Shi'a conflict and the Turkish-Kurdish war (of which the latter's first uprising was explicitly aided by the British) being particularly noteworthy examples. The latter one in particular is only on the way out more than one hundred and ten years later when military crackdown and drones made terrorism unviable (and Turkish Kurds realizing that living in Turkey as opposed to a nonviable independent state surrounded by hostile powers, or worse, Syria or Iraq, wasn't so bad after all). And of course all of these people ended up nursing a profound grudge against the West that would only get worse when they found themselves relegated to being a mere prize for the Soviets and the Western bloc to compete over during the Cold War. This too would end up coming back to haunt everyone involved nearly a century later. Japan gained a bunch of Pacific territory taken from the Germans, which put them a lot closer to Britain and America's colonial holdings and caused them to start thinking more seriously about flexing their own imperialist muscles in the region. Moreover, Japan's vocal dissatisfaction with how they were treated by the rest of the Allies after the war caused a negative feedback loop of hostility and distrust between them and the Western powers, which had direct and dire consequences in the next war.