Why did Italy betray the Triple Alliance? This is the real reason that Germany lost WW1

There was me thinking it was about the Berlin to Baghdad railway

So if Italy didn't want the war, why didn't it just stay neutral?

Italy was very fond of Germany

Here's a more interesting question: why didn't Austria-Hungary ally with Russia against Germany? Why did A-H join the Central Powers?

>why didn't italy want to fight for Austria
I HAVE NO IDEA user, WHAT POSSIBLE ANIMOSITY COULD THERE BE BETWEEN THE UNIFIED ITALY AND THE POWER THAT KEPT ITALY APART, HMMMMMMMMM

I think the consensus of that nowadays is that it was the war that solidified the alliance between german and turkish intersts, not viceversa.

>So if Italy didn't want the war, why didn't it just stay neutral?
Treaty of London, plus some degree of internal instability. The entente bribed the leaders, and the leaders used internal cultural and political unrest to push the country into the war. It must be remembered that the country was very strongly divided on the subject. The british concessions would have gone a long way to further italian interests in the balkans and shore up both the alpine defenses and the irredentist aims.

If you go look up the whole diplomatic set up of the period, you'll see that the alliance could pretty much be redefined as a neutrality pact between Italy and Austria rather than any sort of alliance, because between clauses and options and other treaties and shit, Austria would have needed to ask Italy's ok for every sort of intervention in the balkans to secure italian help and they would have needed to neither declare war upon France nor be declared war upon by France (aside from a french lack of casus belli). Basically Italy's partecipation in Austria's wars would only have been possible in case of russian aggression or in case of a planned out and preapproved offensive war in the balkans (which was very unlikely considering Italy's and Austria's conflicting interests in the area).

Even though Italy never even got the lands

It got some. Notably those that would make it very hard for Austria to go on the offensive against Italy.
It didn't get those who would have basically given Italy the ownership of the Adriatic, because that would have meant a weak as shit Yugoslavia that couldn't have acted as check in the balkans (waste of effort, considering how weak it was anyway).

huh..

*Italy declares war on Britain*

*Britain says 'no coal lol' and Italy's economy collapses in a month*

That's why. Italy was heavily import dependent for its industrial needs.

As said before, the Allies offered a better deal to Italy in terms of land at the expense of Austria-Hungary. Namely SudTirol, Trieste, Zara, and Dalmatia. The central powers could only offer Italy French Tunisia, Nice, Corsica, and Savoy from France, so the allied overtures won out being bigger gains.

But in the end, the Italians were pissed that the allies went back on their deal with the Treaty of London and refused Dalmatia and Zara to Italy, leaving them with just the Trentino region and Trieste, and going back on the deal was a key reason for Italy's entry against the allies in the next war.

Why did it benefit A-H to ally with Germany? Wouldn't allying with Russia have made more sense?

>Then why did Germany ally with Austrungary?

Because "Austrians" are Germans the German cancer had spread throughout Europe.

When you look at maps like these you realize just how scarily close Mitteleuropa became in reality.

you do realize austria-hungary declared war on serbia, who russia decided to back. why the fuck would russia ally with someone that was going to war with one of their allies? also why would austria-hungary go to war with germany, there ally???

Can someone please explain to me why the Germans were fucking everywhere?

Russia never would have allied with AH because they intervened to try and defend Serbia from AH. AH was allied with Germany during the war because Wilhelm have them a blank cheque so they could do whatever the fuck they wanted and Germany had to back them up.

A-H should have been more careful about who they decided to ally with, that's all I'm saying.

they didn't have any other choice, they were already allied to Germany, while France and Russia where also allied and they couldn't go up against russia alone

A-H fucked it up in the 1880s when they decided to claim Bosnia. Retard move of the century.

I know they were allied to Germany. I'm just saying that was a bad idea, they shouldn't have done that.

Betray is a strong word. Remember that Germany betrayed Belgium's neutrality. Italy betrayed a betrayer.

What happened to Belgium during the war was divine justice for their crimes against the Congolese people.

Touché

it might have been a "bad" idea but it was the least shit idea. Unless Austria did a complete 180 in foreign policy and decision making there was just no way for Austria-Hungary and Russia to ever be allies, the league of three emperors was a complete sham and joke from it's inception

They were peasants runing away from German extreme serfdom and poverty.
There were never that many Germans in Greater Poland.

How do you type without hands?

Reminder that Congo was Leopold's initiative, belgian people didn't give a fuck about it until western powers obliged Belgium to take control of its king's private colony

>Whoever declares war is the offender
I guess the pacific war was an american war of aggression against Japan then?

Pearl Harbour was an act of war, which counts as a declaration.
You know, this isn't debateable shit, this is all international law.

>being that much of a daft retard on purpose

Pearl Harbour was an official act of war on the behalf of the Japanese Empire, as far as everyone knew, Princip's assassination of the Archduke never involved the Serbian government.

Triple Alliance Treaty was a defensive pact. The Germans and Austrians declared an offensive war, thus nullifying any requirement or duty that the Kingdom of Italy had.

>Berlin to Baghdad railway
This
>I think the consensus of that nowadays is that it was the war that solidified the alliance between german and turkish intersts, not viceversa.
Fucking nonsense dude do you have a citation for that or are you just pulling it from your ass?

>in 1914, under the laws and customs of warfare then observed (not to mention the desire to avoid compromising national security), general mobilization of one nation's military forces was invariably considered an act of war by that country's likely enemies.
Quoting wikipedia, but it's usually a fine source for basic information.

Not like you'd think though, that was mostly considered too big of a deal to ignore because back then it was thought that whoever gets his army on the battlefield first has a guaranteed victory, so mobilization was taken extremely seriously. It was not a formal thing.
Also Japan declared war on the united states right after pearl harbor.

>it doesn't count because I say so
>that sentence structure
Calm down user. Obviously there is room for interpretation about the offender in ww1 and Italy used that to avoid having to go to war on terms they didn't like.

You can epic greentext anything friend, doesn't make you have an argument though

They did not betray the triple Alliance, Austria-Hungary declared war, the Alliance was defensive, not offensive. Declaring war on your former defensive allies when they seem weak is nothing more then opportunistic backstabbing though.

>This is the real reason that Germany lost WW1
the reason why germany lost is because their generals were stuck 50 years in the past and thought they could pull out another 1870. germany was doomed to lose from the start. no real global empire compared to their enemies, useless allies, an incompetent figurehead, bad diplomacy, and generals stuck in the past. there was a reason why bismarck spent his life trying to prevent russia from allying france, and wilhelm ii fucked it all over.

Germany didn't think anything though, they were just desperate

> running away

Adolf, please.

The German colonization effort in Europe was a plague, supported and encouraged by the German government and using its wealth and political power the push out and supplant native farmers and business with Germans, who refused to assimilate and in fact turned those regions in mini-Germanys aligned with their homeland.

No, it was Eastern European kangz who invited the German peasants and artisans to settle.