Description: Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World by Patrick J. Buchanan In this monumental and provocative history, 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 might have been avoided. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description Were World Wars I and II inevitable? Were they necessary 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 might have been avoided and the British Empire might never have collapsed into ruins. Half a century of murderous oppression of scores of millions under the iron boot of Communist tyranny might never have happened, and Europe's central role in world affairs might have been sustained for many generations.Among the British and Churchillian errors were:The secret decision of a tiny cabal in the inner Cabinet in 1906 to take Britain straight to war against Germany, should she invade FranceThe vengeful Treaty of Versailles that mutilated Germany, leaving her bitter, betrayed, and receptive to the appeal of Adolf HitlerBritain's capitulation, at Churchill's urging, to American pressure to sever the Anglo-Japanese alliance, insulting and isolating Japan, pushing her onto the path of militarism and conquestThe greatest mistake in British history: the unsolicited war guarantee to Poland of March 1939, ensuring the Second World WarCertain to create controversy and spirited argument, "Churchill, Hitler, and "the Unnecessary War"" is a grand and bold insight into the historic failures of judgment that ended centuries of European rule and guaranteed a future no one who lived in that vanished world could ever have envisioned. Author Biography Patrick J. Buchanan, Americas leading populist conservative, was a senior adviser to three American presidents, ran twice for the Republican presidential nomination, in 1992 and 1996, and was the Reform Party candidate in 2000. In his 1992 challenge to President George H. W. Bush, Buchanan was the first national leader to put the issue of Americas broken and bleeding Mexican border and the Third World invasion of the United States onto the national agenda. No figure in politics or journalism has done more to alert the nation to this existential crisis. The author of seven other books, includ Excerpt from Book Chapter 1 The End of "Splendid Isolation" [T]he Queen cannot help feeling that our isolation is dangerous.1 --Queen Victoria, January 14, 1896 Isolation is much less dangerous than the danger of being dragged into wars which do not concern us.2 --Lord Salisbury, 1896 For as long as he had served the queen, Lord Salisbury had sought to keep Britain free of power blocs. "His policy was not one of isolation from Europe . . . but isolation from the Europe of alliances."3 Britannia would rule the waves but stay out of Europes quarrels. Said Salisbury, "We are fish."4 When the queen called him to form a new government for the third time in 1895, Lord Salisbury pursued his old policy of "splendid isolation." But in the years since he and Disraeli had traveled to the Congress of Berlin in 1878, to create with Bismarck a new balance of power in Europe, their world had vanished. In the Sino-Japanese war of 1894-95, Japan defeated China, seized Taiwan, and occupied the Liaotung Peninsula. Britains 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 Olneys 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 Britains 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."6 London was jolted anew in January 1896 when the Kaiser sent a telegram of congratulations to Boer leader Paul Kruger on his capture of the Jameson raiders, who had invaded the Transvaal in a land grab concocted by Cecil Rhodes, with the connivance of Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain. These two challenges, from a jingoistic America that was now the first economic power on earth, and from his bellicose nephew in Berlin, Wilhelm II, revealed to the future Edward VII that "his country was without a friend in the world" and "steps to end British isolation were required. . . ."7 On December 18, 1897, a Russian fleet steamed into the Chinese harbor of Port Arthur, "obliging British warships to vacate the area."8 British jingoes "became apoplectic."9 Lord Salisbury stood down: "I dont think we carry enough guns to fight them and the French together."10 In 1898, a crisis erupted in northeast Africa. Captain Jean-Baptiste Marchand, who had set off from Gabon in 1897 on a safari across the Sahara with six officers and 120 Senegalese, appeared at Fashoda in the southern Sudan, where he laid claim to the headwaters of the Nile. Sir Herbert Kitchener cruised upriver to instruct Marchand he was on imperial land. Faced with superior firepower, Marchand withdrew. Fashoda brought Britain and France to the brink of war. Paris backed down, but bitterness ran deep. Caught up in the Anglophobia was eight-year-old Charles de Gaulle.11 In 1900, the Russian challenge reappeared. After American, British, French, German, and Japanese troops had marched to the rescue of the diplomatic legation in Peking, besieged for fifty-five days by Chinese rebels called "Boxers," Russia exploited the chaos to send a 200,000-man army into Manchuria and the Czar shifted a squadron of his Baltic fleet to Port Arthur. The British position in China was now threatened by Russia and Japan. But what awakened Lord Salisbury to the depth of British isolation was the Boer War. When it broke out in 1899, Europeans and Americans cheered British defeats. While Joe Chamberlain might "speak of the British enjoying a splendid isolation, surrounded and supported by our kinsfolk, the Boer War brought home the reality that, fully extended in their imperial role, the British needed to avoid conflict with the other great powers."12 Only among Americas Anglophile elite could Victorias nation or Salisburys government find support. When Bourke Cockran, a Tammany Hall Democrat, wrote President McKinley, urging him to mediate and keep Americas distance from Great Britains "wanton acts of aggression," the letter went to Secretary of State John Hay.13 Hay bridled at this Celtic insolence. "Mr. Cockrans logic is especially Irish," he wrote to a friend. "As long as I stay here no action shall be taken contrary to my conviction that the one indispensable feature of our foreign policy should be a friendly understanding with England." Hay refused even to answer "Bourke Cockrans fool letter to the president."14 Hay spoke of an alliance with Britain as an "unattainable dream" and hoped for a smashing imperial victory in South Africa. "I hope if it comes to blows that England will make quick work of Uncle Paul [Kruger]."15 Entente Cordiale So it was that as the nineteenth century came to an end Britain set out to court old rivals. The British first reached out to the Americans. Alone among Europes great powers, Britain sided with the United States in its 1898 war with Spain. London then settled the Alaska boundary dispute in Americas favor, renegotiated the fifty-year-old Clayton-Bulwer Treaty, and ceded to America the exclusive rights to build, operate, and fortify a canal across Panama. Then Britain withdrew her fleet from the Caribbean. Writes British historian Correlli Barnett: "The passage of the British battlefleet from the Atlantic to the Pacific would now be by courtesy of the United States," and, with Americas defeat of Spain, "The Philippines, Cuba and Puerto Rico, now American colonies, were gradually closed to British merchants by protective tariffs, for the benefit of their American rivals."16 Other historians, however, hail the British initiative to terminate a century of U.S.-British enmity as "The Great Rapprochement," and Berlin-born Yale historian Hajo Holborn regards the establishment of close Anglo-American relations as probably "by far the greatest achievement of British diplomacy in terms of world history."17 With America appeased, Britain turned to Asia. With a Russian army in Manchuria menacing Korea and the Czars warships at Port Arthur and Vladivostok, Japan needed an ally to balance off Russias ally, France. Germany would not do, as Kaiser Wilhelm disliked Orientals and was endlessly warning about the "Yellow Peril." As for the Americans, their Open Door policy had proven to be bluster and bluff when Russia moved into Manchuria. That left the British, whom the Japanese admired as an island people and warrior race that had created the worlds greatest empire. On January 30, 1902, an Anglo-Japanese treaty was signed. Each nation agreed to remain neutral should the other become embroiled in an Asian war with a single power. However, should either become involved in war with two powers, each would come to the aid of the other. Confident its treaty with Britain would checkmate Russias ally France, Japan in 1904 launched a surprise attack on the Russian naval squadron at Port Arthur. An enraged Czar sent his Baltic fleet to exact retribution. After a voyage of six months from the Baltic to the North Sea, down the Atlantic and around the Cape of Good Hope to the Indian Ocean, the great Russian fleet was ambushed and annihilated by Admiral Heihachiro Togo in Tshushima Strait between Korea and Japan. Only one small Russian cruiser and two destroyers made it to Vladivostok. Japan lost two torpedo boats. It was a victory for Japan to rival the sinking of the Spanish Armada and the worst defeat ever inflicted on a Western power by an Asian people. Britain had chosen well. In 1905, the Anglo-Japanese treaty was elevated into a full alliance. Britain now turned to patching up quarrels with her European rivals. Her natural allies were Germany and the Habsburg Empire, neither of whom had designs on the British Empire. Imperial Russia, Britains great nineteenth-century rival, was pressing down on China, India, Afghanistan, the Turkish Straits, and the Middle East. France was Britains ancient enemy and imperial rival in Africa and Egypt. The nightmare of the British was a second Tilsit, where Napoleon and Czar Alexander I, meeting on a barge in the Neiman in 1807, had divided a prostrate Europe and Middle East between them. Germany was the sole European bulwark against a French-Russian dominance of Europe and drive for hegemony in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia--at the expense of the British Empire. With Lord Salisburys blessing, Joe Chamberlain began to court Berlin. "England, Germany and America should collaborate: by so doing they could check Russian expansionism, calm turbulent France and guarantee world peace," Chamberlain told future German chancellor Bernhard von Bulow.18 The Kaiser put him off. Neither he nor his advisers believed Britain could reconcile with her old nemesis France, or Russia, and must eventually come to Berlin hat-in-hand. Joe warned the Germans: Spurn Britain, and we go elsewhere. The Kaiser let the opportunity slip and, in April 1904, learned to his astonishment that Britain and France had negotiated an entente cordiale, a cordial understanding. France yielded all claims in Egypt, Details ISBN0307405168 Author Patrick J. Buchanan Short Title CHURCHILL HITLER & THE UNNECES Pages 544 Language English ISBN-10 0307405168 ISBN-13 9780307405166 Media Book Format Paperback DEWEY 940.531 Year 2009 Publication Date 2009-07-31 Residence McLean, VA, US Birth 1938 Publisher Crown Forum Imprint Crown Forum Subtitle How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World Audience General/Trade UK Release Date 2009-07-28 We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:43650200;
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Book Title: Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost It
