Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World

by Patrick J. Buchanan

Had the Austrians not sought to exploit the assassination of Ferdinand to crush Serbia, they would have taken Serbia’s acceptance of nine of their ten demands as vindication. Had Czar Nicholas II been more forceful in rescinding his order for full mobilization, Germany would not have mobilized, and the Schlieffen Plan would not have begun automatically to unfold. Had the Kaiser and Bethmann realized the gravity of the crisis, just days earlier, they might have seized on Grey’s proposal to reconvene the six-power conference that resolved the 1913 Balkan crisis. The same six ambassadors were all in London, including Germany’s Prince Lichnowsky, an Anglophile desperate to avoid war with Britain. Had Grey himself conveyed to Lichnowsky, more forcefully and “just a few days earlier,” that Britain would likely be drawn into a European war, writes one historian, “Berlin almost certainly would have changed its position more quickly and firmly. Austria might then have deferred its declaration of war, and Russia would have had little reason to mobilize.”70 The Great War might have been averted.