Okay, so I was skeptical that he had ever said such a thing, but it turns out that a magazine called the New York Enquirer (later, the National Enquirer), which was later charged with sedition for opposing america's entrance into WWII did publish an article claiming that he said it.

Churchill claimed that he had said no such thing, and was sued for libel over it: https://www.winstonchurchill.org/publications/finest-hour/fi...

After the publisher was indicted for sedition, the judge dismissed the case.

It sounds to me absolutely nothing like something he would have said.

The reasoning there is kind of hard to follow. Did the US add the War Guilt clause to a treaty that was otherwise going to be fairly neutral?

In school we learned that it was England and France who pushed for the punitive version of the Treaty of Versailles, but I guess this could be my American textbooks whitewashing the world.

The idea is that if the US had not entered the war, then the UK and the continental powers would have worn themselves out (they were already pretty worn out by the time we joined) and have sued for peace (armistice) and hammered out an agreement. It wouldn't have been ended up being lop-sided, because there would have been no winner(s) dictating terms -- just a bunch of tired people agreeing to quit and not fight again. Who knows if this is true or not, but the Treaty of Versaille was negotiated between clear winners and clear losers - which was enabled by the US joining the war late on one side.

The confusing part is, if the war was ended indecisively then how is that going to prevent future wars? Brush fire wars plagued Europe for centuries until WWII came about and everybody realized that war was too dangerous to toy with anymore.

The people might have been different, but I don't see how an indecisive WWI prevents another border skirmish from getting out of hand 20 years later. Maybe it would have been better for the Jews, but even that's iffy given the generally hostile attitudes of continental Europeans to Jews and Gypsies.

Counter-factual hypotheticals are tough. I think it intriguing to consider that the US staying out would have prevented the rise of the Nazis and Soviets, but I'm not in a position to run the experiment.

The reasoning is without the US the powers were balanced enough that nobody would have been the clear victor. The Treaty of Versailles was punitive because the victors could dictate terms to the Germans instead of coming to an agreement entered into willingly on both sides.

No, you're right; France more than anyone was responsible for the awfulness of the Versailles Treaty. But if the US hadn't gotten involved, the war would've ended indecisively, and the French could never have demanded and gotten such terms. (The Austrian Empire would probably also have been kept intact, and Italy would have had little chance of stealing the South Tirol.)

A negotiated peace in the west would probably have also repealed the horrible peace in the east. The Germans defeated Russia completely enough that they could get whatever it occurred to them to demand; the resulting treaty was almost as hard on the defeated as Versailles, even though Germany wasn't actively out to destroy Russia, and it certainly didn't help the Whites in the civil war.

I think the reasoning here is that without American intervention the Allied powers would not have been in a position to insist on a punitive armistice treaty.

The reasoning is that the countries involved would have agreed to a treaty to end fighting without a clear victor, so there would have been no real grounds to impose such harsh conditions on germany.