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

by Patrick J. Buchanan

In the Sino-Japanese war of 1894–95, Japan defeated China, seized Taiwan, and occupied the Liaotung Peninsula. Britain’s preeminent position in China was now history. In the summer of 1895, London received a virtual ultimatum from secretary of state Richard Olney, demanding that Great Britain accept U.S. arbitration in a border dispute between British Guiana and Venezuela. Lord Salisbury shredded Olney’s note like an impatient tenured professor cutting up a freshman term paper. But President Cleveland demanded that Britain accept arbitration—or face the prospect of war with the United States. The British were stunned by American enthusiasm for a war over a patch of South American jungle, and incredulous. America deployed two battleships to Britain’s forty-four.5 Yet Salisbury took the threat seriously: “A war with America … in the not distant future has become something more than a possibility.”