Were the world wars unnecessary?

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 Europe’s great powers, Britain sided with the United States in its 1898 war with Spain. London then settled the Alaska boundary dispute in America’s 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 America’s 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.”

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.”

With America appeased, Britain turned to Asia.

With a Russian army in Manchuria menacing Korea and the Czar’s warships at Port Arthur and Vladivostok, Japan needed an ally to balance off Russia’s 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 world’s 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 Russia’s 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, Britain’s great nineteenth-century rival, was pressing down on China, India, Afghanistan, the Turkish Straits, and the Middle East. France was Britain’s 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 Salisbury’s 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.

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, and Britain agreed to support France’s preeminence in Morocco.  Centuries of hostility came to an end. The quarrel over Suez was over. Fashoda was history.

The entente quickly proved its worth. After the Kaiser was persuaded to make a provocative visit to Tangier in 1905, Britain backed France at the Algeciras conference called to resolve the crisis. Germany won economic concessions in Morocco, but Berlin had solidified the Anglo-French entente. More ominous, the Tangier crisis had propelled secret talks already under way between French and British staff officers over how a British army might be ferried across the Channel to France in the event of a war with Germany.

Unknown to the Cabinet and Parliament, a tiny cabal had made a decision fateful for Britain, the empire, and the world. Under the guidance of Edward Grey, the foreign secretary from 1905 to 1916, British and French officers plotted Britain’s entry into a Franco-German war from the first shot. And these secret war plans were being formulated by Liberals voted into power in public revulsion against the Boer War on a platform of “Peace, Retrenchment, and Reform.” Writes historian Robert Massie:

"[O]n January 16 [1906], without the approval of either the Prime Minister or Cabinet, secret talks between British and French staff officers began. They focussed on plans to send 100,000 British soldiers to the Continent within two weeks of an outbreak of hostilities. On January 26, when Campbell-Bannerman returned to London and was informed, he approved."

As Churchill wrote decades later, only Lord Rosebery read the real meaning of the Anglo-French entente. “Only one voice — Rosebery’s — was raised in discord: in public ‘Far more likely to lead to War than Peace’; in private ‘Straight to War.’” While praising Rosebery’s foresight, Churchill never repudiated his own support of the entente or secret understandings: “It must not be thought that I regret the decisions which were in fact taken.”

In August 1907, Britain entered into an Anglo-Russian convention, ending their eighty-year conflict. Czar Nicholas II accepted Britain’s dominance in southern Persia. Britain accepted Russia’s dominance in the north. Both agreed to stay out of central Persia, Afghanistan, and Tibet. The Great Game was over and the lineups completed for the great European war. In the Triple Alliance were Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy. Opposite was the Franco- Russian alliance backed by Great Britain, which was allied to Japan. Only America among the great powers remained free of entangling alliances.

Excerpted with permission from Crown Publishing Group from "Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War" by Patrick J. Buchanan.

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