Pierre Fayolle

This is all wrong, though. Britain got into WWI for essentially three hard security reasons: The competition with Germany over naval dominance in the North Sea, the concomitant fear that German militarization of the Channel coast by seizing Belgium would allow a staging area for an invasion (always a “hard ‘no’”), and the reality that Britain (through its “military conversations” with France) was already engaged in Continental balance of power politics and in fact needed to be for the preceding two reasons. Those are all excellent reasons to get involved in a war, and yet the amazing thing is that there was such a debate in the British government about intervention at the time of the July Crisis that historians still dispute which, if any, of them truly forced Britain’s hand (leading, ironically, to this very dispute). Britain was the consummate reluctant warrior - and yet its back was to the wall. British statecraft in the early 20C is actually a model for how to manage an increasingly tight imperial security situation - if they couldn’t stay out, you have to wonder if anyone could. And, in fact, while there is always a pull back and forth in British strategy between the Continent and global empire/naval affairs, every hegemonic war since 1492 has seen British power either deployed to the Continent or (rarely, but it happens) Continental power deployed against Britain. Here are the data points: —The Italian Wars saw fighting over Calais (which England lost) as well as a French-supported (per the Auld Alliance) Scottish invasion of England (turned back at Flodden, Britain’s answer to Antietam) —The War of Dutch Independence included the War of the Armada; the follow-on 30 Years War manifested in Britain as the English Civil War (and yes - they’re related - affairs on the Continent feature in the 19 Propositions, and Puritan fear that Charles’ Arminianism and absolutism amounted to crypto-Catholicism is a standard feature in histories of it) —The Spanish Succession War and the preceding wars of Louis XIV saw an Anglo-Dutch alliance and, famously, Marlborough’s army deployed to the Continent —The Napoleonic Wars, of course, featured Wellington’s army in Spain and then at Waterloo The World Wars were just one more instance. And in fact this was well-understood by British leaders at the time and even by the British public. The “it was all for nothing” narrative is a (very) latecomer - it’s a recycling of German war angst (of the All Quiet On The Western Front variety, double-distilled by “nie wieder Krieg” after they got beaten the second time) via EU propaganda (have to marry your neighbor to avoid fighting them, you see). Britain still, to this day, doesn’t really buy it - the tone of Remembrance Day ceremonies tends to be solemn, but the dominant themes are gratitude and memory, not cynicism or disgust. As they should be.