How Wars Begin

I posted this on 1 March 2023 and alas it is now even more topical. I corrected some mistakes. Joseph Kennedy was nether a bootlegger nor an anti-Semite. I took out the phrase 'nihilistic terrorists' because the word terrorist is best avoided, like genocide.



I re-watched most of AJP Taylor's lectures on How Wars Begin recently and strongly recommend them. I am afraid I saw them when he first gave them in 1978, live without a timer or autocues, something that was absolutely antediluvian then. (I was very young.)

In brief, all the wars happened by mistake, pretty much on all sides except when Cavour or Bismarck were involved. Hitler was not nearly so brilliant as them. As Norman Stone said of the fall of France in 1940, "A Bismarck or a Churchill could control success of this order, a Hitler not".

The Franco-Prussian war in particular was completely unnecessary: an elephant trap, set by Bismarck against the wishes of his master William I, into which Napoleon III walked.

Some think Putin walked into a comparable American trap when he invaded Ukraine, but I do not. The State Department did not expect it till December 2021 nor expect Ukraine to withstand the invasion when it happened.

The lecture on the Second World War makes clear the extent to which America provoked Pearl Harbor.

That is a partial analogy with US policy towards Ukraine from 2008 onwards.


It does not justify Pearl Harbor or Putin's attempt to topple the Ukrainian government, of course, but may (help) explain both.

(By the way, US Ambassador Joseph Kennedy, father of John and Robert,
The prediction with which Taylor ends the last lecture, that nuclear war will happen, seemed to have been disproved by events till the Ukrainian war began.


I do not believe Russia will use nuclear weapons, though the fact that the left does not worry about this is shocking, but non-state actors probably one day will.