Product Description

Were World Wars I and II—which can now be seen as a thirty-year paroxysm of slaughter and destruction—inevitable? Were they necessary wars? Were the bloodiest and most devastating conflicts ever suffered by mankind fated by forces beyond men’s control? 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 blunders 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 muti- lated 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 1935 sanctions that drove Italy straight into the Axis with Hitler
• The greatest blunder in British history: the unsolicited war guarantee to Poland of March 1939—that guaranteed the Second World War
• Churchill’s astonishing blindness to Stalin’s true ambitions.

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #14131 in Books
• Published on: 2008-05-27
• Released on: 2008-05-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 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 nine other 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. He is now a senior political analyst for MSNBC.

Customer Reviews

Churchil / Hitler
Pat Buchanen has hit it right but for most people they cant handle the truce. Its to bad because they are running through life with their head in the sand like an ostrich. Often the truce hurts but one can not get away from it.
At least now I know that I am not the only one who things that way

Herb Voigt

Stirring the Pot
Buchanan stakes out some pretty controversial positions here. But, agree or not, he raises questions seldom dealt with in public, and ones that go to the heart of the West's presumed moral authority in its two wars with Germany. Crucially, his is not an apologia for Hitler or the Third Reich. Their wretched horrors during WWII are acknowledged without reserve. Rather, it's an effort to put the diplomatic moves preceding WWII into a more balanced and accurate perspective than the American public is accustomed to. The results amount to a much more ambiguous mix than the history books usually allow, and should come as an eye-opener, particularly regarding Churchill's punitive role.

Churchill is often treated as a god, and not a minor one at that. A reckoning with the British politician's career is long overdue. I doubt that any non-American head of state has been more lionized in our press than the former prime minister. Of course, the focal point of hagiography is Churchill's undeniable role as a wartime leader. It's a role the author Buchanan doesn't dispute. What the author does dispute is the wider context, particularly Churchill's vaunted reputation as a statesman. It's here within an unfolding sixty-year period that Buchanan lays bear the actual record--and contrary to legend, a dismal one it is. From the British politician's earliest service through 1955, the author records again and again gross errors of judgment that helped propagate WWI, instigate WWII, facilitate Soviet expansion, and finally terminate the British Empire. It's a sobering account, to say the least, darn near the equivalent of saying Jesus erred on the Mount of Olives. Nonetheless, it's an account that can't be ignored.

Then too, Hitler is viewed less as a demonic force than as a rabid nationalist intent on retrieving German lands wrongfully expropriated by the treaty of Versailles, and as a dictator ultimately backed into a corner by Britain's reckless guaranteeing of Poland's 1939 borders. Contrary to received wisdom, Buchanan asserts that war with Hitler's Reich was not made necessary by mad global designs, the usual formula for blame. Instead, primary blame is laid on a series of British missteps originating at the ministerial level. The author's thrust here depends on accepting the view that the German Chancellor was interested only in extending influence eastward as a bulwark against the Reich's true enemy, the Soviet Union, leaving the West and their colonial holdings basically intact. This too amounts to a revisionist account and a more difficult one to substantiate. Nonetheless, the author forces a key question usually passed over as an article of faith, viz. was war with the Reich in some sense inevitable or rather the unfortunate result of diplomatic blunder.

Now, all of this would remain academic were it not for the lessons drawn from that 40-year period. Most notably, Britain's empire collapsed from accumulated reversals brought about by blundering diplomacy and the two global disasters that resulted. Britain could no longer support her maritime holdings, resulting in a loss of global primacy and a junior partnership with an ascendant USA. Pivotal in this chain is a myopic vision of where Britain's vital interests lay. They certainly didn't lie in meddling in the disposition of Central Europe, the traditional sphere of Russo-German rivalry. Yet Britain fought two debilitating wars over that disposition, when a truer view of vital interest would have counseled a more detached policy. Wisdom here would appear to lie in being able to separate the essential from the inessential, a distinction apparently muddled by several generations of British leaders.

Now, Buchanan draws lessons from this for American policy. Is meddling in such non-traditional spheres as Central Asia, Russian border regions, and across the Mid-East, producing a distinctly American brand of imperial over-stretch. A pretty strong case is made for viewing America's strength as resting on the wisdom of her forefathers in avoiding foreign adventures. It's not a return to isolationist policy that he's advocating; rather, I take it as a return to separating essential interests from non-essential and not confusing the two in fits of bravado or imperial hubris. Certainly the disastrous adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan suggest an over-stretch with the ominous consequences that follow. Nonetheless, the distinction raises the complex question how to define `vital interests' and how to calibrate them in a world of perhaps unprecedented flux following the Soviet collapse. Add to that an economic dimension surely a big part of vital interest and we glimpse the quandary of current American policy.

Understandably, the book doesn't take up the economic dimension. On the other hand, sacrificing commercial factors remains a pitfall for any purely diplomatic history such as Buchanan's. In short, to what extent were the blunders of the book the result of economic imperative rather than the ministerial myopia emphasized here. After all, a financial dimension has the potential of converting the seemingly reckless into the understandably rational, particularly where national self-interest is at stake. Nonetheless, the author has produced a provocative and worthwhile work, deserving of wide readership.

Generally Excellent and Thought-Provoking
I've read enough about WWII and National Socialist Germany to know that Mr. Buchanan is well-informed on these subjects. He has done his work in researching Churchill's history, especially as regards diplomatic and military decisions. The result is not flattering to Winston.

He has definitely made his case that WWI was unnecessary, avoidable, and a disastrous blow to Western Europe...with the most significant damage accruing to Germany. He documents how it was not the Kaiser's intent to have a war of conquest, and he clearly shows how a not-at-all-funny comedy of errors resulted in the greatest military catastrophe the world had known to that time.

His treatment of the course to the Second World War is similarly well-documented, and his arguments are clear and coherent. One of the major points developed by Mr. Buchanan is that Hitler's ultimate decision to annihilate the Jewish "race" was only arrived at in 1942, at the time Germany was locked in struggle against the Soviet Union. Up to that time, there had been a significant range of viewpoints within the Nazi party, even including some support for a Zionist homeland.

He goes over this understandably sensitive matter at some length, because he argues not only that WWII could have been avoided, but that even a more limited conflict did not have to draw in other European powers. It is his view that Hitler, far from having a Grand Plan that he implemented once power was his, operated very much as an opportunist, responding to whatever situations presented themselves. His attitude towards the East (meaning, Russia) as the natural "living space" for Germans did not constitute a plan, and the actual time and circumstances of the attack upon the Soviet Union were not optimal for the Nazi regime. Again, it was circumstances that decided many of Hitler's actions, rather than priciples set in stone.

Finally, and most tellingly, Mr. Buchanan devotes his last, shortest, chapter to comparing the United States today with the Great Britain that was losing its empire. A theme he has developed in other volumes--such as A Republic, Not An Empire--is that the United States was neither founded nor foreseen at its inception to have a de facto empire with military bases all over the world...with resultant entanglements in almost every location. This, he argues, is a prescription for national disaster, one that we would do well to avoid by learning from the example of what happened to an overstretched United Kingdom.