Description
Were World Wars I and II inevitable? Were they important wars? Or were they products of calamitous failures of judgment?
In this monumental and provocative history, Patrick Buchanan makes the case that, if not for the blunders of British statesmen–Winston Churchill first among them–the horrors of two world wars and the Holocaust would possibly have been have shyed away from and the British Empire would possibly never have collapsed into ruins. Half a century of murderous oppression of scores of millions under the iron boot of Communist tyranny would possibly never have happened, and Europe’s central role in world affairs would possibly have been sustained for lots of generations.
Among the British and Churchillian errors were:
• The name of the game decision of a tiny cabal within the inner Cabinet in 1906 to take Britain straight to war against Germany, must she invade France
• The vengeful Treaty of Versailles that mutilated Germany, leaving her bitter, betrayed, and receptive to the appeal of Adolf Hitler
• Britain’s capitulation, at Churchill’s urging, to American pressure to sever the Anglo-Japanese alliance, insulting and isolating Japan, pushing her onto the trail of militarism and conquest
• The greatest mistake in British history: the unsolicited war guarantee to Poland of March 1939, ensuring the Second World War
Certain to create controversy and spirited argument, Churchill, Hitler, and “the Pointless War” is a grand and bold insight into the historic failures of judgment that ended centuries of European rule and guaranteed a future no person who lived in that vanished world could ever have envisioned.