Jan Olof Bengtsson

How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World

Crown Publishers, 2008     Amazon.com

Back Cover:

In this explosive book, Pat Buchanan sheds new light on the causes of the two world wars that made the twentieth century the bloodiest in history and brought the end to 500 years of Western dominance – and asks:

– Were these two world wars of necessity – or the inevitable consequences of colossal failures of judgment and diplomacy?

– Was the British Empire fated to collapse in ruins as it did, or was this the result of strategic blindness and blundering on a historic scale?

– Should Winston Churchill, Man of the Century and hero to hundreds of millions, be castigated as well as celebrated for his indispensable role in the decline and fall of his beloved British Empire?

Churchill, Hitler, and the “Unnecessary War” is a masterful, contrarian work of historical analysis.

Drawing on the work of more than a hundred historians, Buchanan’s insight to the true cause of Britain’s collapse has been embraced by strategic experts, among them the dean of Cold War diplomacy George Kennan, who concurred with Buchanan’s central argument, at the heart of this book, that it was Britain’s 1939 war guarantee to Poland that sealed their fate and doomed the Empire.

Dear Mr. Buchanan:

…you make a strong case, in my view, for the thesis that the British guarantee to Poland…was neither necessary nor wise. The British government could not impose anything by offering to the Poles a support they were quite unable to give. They would have done better to shut up, to rearm as speedily as possible, and to avoid further formal commitments of any sort, while waiting the further turn of events.

George Kennan

Front Flap:

Were World Wars I and II – which can now be seen as a thirty-year paroxysm of slaughter and destruction – inevitable? where 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 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 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.