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the conviction that it would be a brief confrontation, like the wars before, but after 7-8 weeks of struggle, a phenomenon appeared, that was hard to predict: the two fronts, East and West, were simply "stuck" and reached
a war of positions, where combatants fought for several hundred meters of land, with an unimaginable amount of loss on both sides.
Only in these circumstances, which were a nightmare for the leaders of the countries involved in the war, it was possible that Romania, which on July 21st/August 3rd 1914 had adopted the solution of the "military expectation", would become a negotiator
on an equal footing with the powers that requested its participation, or at least, neutrality (the Central Powers) or its participation in what could have been a parallel war (the powers of the Entente).
For the first, but also the last time in the history of Romania, we see a prime minister, Ion I.C. Brătianu, who negotiates on
a par with the leaders of the great powers, and which under these circumstances supports and affirms the Romanian national ideal as expressed in the revolution of 1848, in which one of the most important leaders was his father, Ion C. Brătianu.
This ideal meant the annexation of Transylvania, Bucovina and the other territories inhabited by the Romanians from the Austro- Hungarian double monarchy,
which was going to be dismembered after the defeat of the Central Powers.
Today, almost a hundred
years after the founding of the League of Nations, or almost 75 years after the founding of the UN, when international law principles state that equality between large and small states is a matter of course, such negotiations seem normal,
but at that time they were definitely not, and will not
be repeated. In the first two years since the outbreak of the Second World War, 1939 -1941, Germany and its allies won a series of resonant victories, from Paris to the outskirts of Moscow, and then for Romania there was nothing left to negotiate: it had to take the side of those who challenged and destroyed Greater Romania, with the hypothetical hope of restoring its borders torn in the tragic summer of 1940. In the last eight months of the same World War, starting August 31, 1944, the Soviet Red Army, supported by the US military and industrial efforts, occupied eight capitals: Bucharest, Sofia, Belgrade, Budapest, Warsaw, Vienna, Berlin and the last, Prague on 9 May 1945.
Again there was nothing
to negotiate at that time: Romania entered for 45 years in the political system of the Soviet Union, which initiated the destruction of the Greater Romania and promoted a political system diametrically opposed to the democratic one in which Romania had evolved for nearly 90 years.
For the historians who studied the details of the military operations of the first two years of the Great War, it
is obvious that the moment of September 2, 1914, when the Russian army conquered the fortress of Lemberg (today Lvov) and surrounded the Przemysl Fortress on September 16, or the time of Italy's entry in the war on 23 May 1915, or especially the first successful weeks of the famous Russian offensive led by General Brusilov (June 4 - September 20, 1916), were so many favorable moments when an intervention of the Romanian army could have had far more effects (it
could have overturned the defensive system of the Central Powers) than those that were seen when the Romanian intervention took place at the end of August 1916.
Why the powers of the Entente did not force Romania to
enter the conflagration in any of the previously mentioned moments? This question can only be answered by the supposition that, given the numerical superiority of their troops, the leaders of the Entente were convinced that they would achieve the decisive victory. In addition, there are diplomatic documents showing that for the Russian Empire it was not desirable the forming of a state with 14 million Romanians at its borders.
Only when the hopes of victory broke one after the other, when the battles of Verdun (February 21-December 18, 1916) and Somme (July 1 to
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