Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, by Pat Buchanan
Buchanan accuses Churchill, at that time First Lord of the Admiralty, of having a "lust for war" in 1914.[2] Buchanan follows the conclusions of the American diplomat George F. Kennan in his 1984 book The Fateful Alliance that the Franco-Russian Alliance of 1894 was an act of Franco-Russian "encirclement" of Germany, and that German foreign policy after 1894 was defensive rather than aggressive.[3]
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Buchanan claims that the Kaiser Wilhem was desperate to avoid a war in 1914, and accepts the German claim that it was Russian mobilization of July 31, 1914 that forced war on Germany.[10] Buchanan accuses Churchill and Grey of illegally committing Britain to war in 1914 by making promises that Britain would defend France without the knowledge of either Cabinet or Parliament.[11] Buchanan argues that United States should never have fought in World War I, and
that the American people were "deceived and dragged" into war in 1917, and says that "Americans blamed the 'Merchants of Death' – the war profiteers – and the British propagandists" who created the myth of the Rape of Belgium.[12] Buchanan called the British "hunger blockade" of Germany in World War I "criminal", and accepted the contention of the British economist John Maynard Keynes in his 1919 book The Economic Consequences of the Peace that the reparations imposed on Germany in the Treaty of Versailles were "impossible" to pay.[13]
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Buchanan argues that it was a great blunder on the part of Chamberlain to declare war on Germany in 1939, and even greater blunder on the part of Churchill to refuse Hitler's peace offer of 1940, thus making World War II in Buchanan's opinion the "unnecessary war" of the title.[36] The title of course was borrowed from Churchill, who stated in his memoirs, "One day President Roosevelt told me that he was asking publicly for suggestions about what the war should be called. I said at once, "The Unnecessary War." There never was a war more easy to stop than that which has just wrecked what was left of the world from the previous struggle."[37]
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