Description
How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World
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 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 path 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 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.
Softcover, 544 pages
About the Author
Patrick J. Buchanan 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. The author of more than a dozen books, including the bestsellers Right from the Beginning; A Republic, Not an Empire; The Death of the West; State of Emergency; and Day of Reckoning, Buchanan is a syndicated columnist and founding member of three of America’s foremost public affairs shows: NBC’s The McLaughlin Group and CNN’s The Capital Gang and Crossfire.
