The Folly of War: Europe 1914, Ukraine 2014
This year marks the centennial of the beginning of World War I. Some observers believe we humans are close to beginning another war—in Ukraine. Historian Stephen Cohen, a long-time critic of U.S. policy toward post-Soviet Russia, has stated, “I think that we are three steps from war with Russia, two steps from a Cuban missile crisis.” Perhaps Cohen is being too alarmist. A hundred years ago, however, when in late June Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian of Serbian nationality, assassinated the Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand, many Europeans did not think it would lead to war. But it did.
Soon before the Cuban missile crisis, which President Kennedy estimated had a one-half to one-third chance of leading to a Soviet-U.S. war, he benefitted from reading about the folly of starting WWI. According to Robert Kennedy in his book Thirteen Days, “A short time before, he [the president] had read Barbara Tuchman's book The Guns of August, and he talked about the miscalculations of the Germans, the Russians, the Austrians, the French and the British. They somehow seemed to tumble into war, he said, through stupidity, individual idiosyncrasies, misunderstandings, and personal complexes of inferiority and grandeur.” Although some of his military advisors urged the bombing of Soviet missile installations in Cuba, the president took the less risky step of imposing a naval blockade. War was averted.
When we look back at the origins of WWI, we do indeed see all the stupidities and complexes referred to by President Kennedy. Yet, all of the European powers who entered the war had a reason for doing so. Austria-Hungary issued an ultimatum to Serbia because it had good reason to think the Serbian government was implicated in the crime, and that the extreme Serbian nationalism it represented posed a major threat to its empire, which contained more Slavs, including Bosnian Serbs, than either Austrians or Hungarians. The Germans backed the Austrians because Austria-Hungary was its only reliable ally in Europe. The Russians backed the Serbians because Serbia was its last bastion of influence in the Balkans and they feared that the harsh Austrian ultimatum would end that role and leave their western border, north and south, dominated by Germany and the Germanic Austrians. France supported its ally Russia partly because it wished to regain the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine, lost to Germany in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. Great Britain entered the war because of an increasing industrial and military competition with Germany and because the latter invaded neutral Belgium, just across the English Channel from Britain. And Germany attacked Belgium, en route to France, because of a war plan that aimed to minimize the consequences of having to fight a two-front war against France and the Russian Empire.
Historians ever since have debated the degree of “war guilt” that should be attributed to each of the powers. But was the war worth it for any of them, even the European victors? The Russian Emperor, Nicholas II, who ordered full mobilization against the Germans and Austrians in 1914, ended up losing his life in 1918 because the communists responsible had come to power the previous year, partly because of the war. And the Russian Empire, despite being on the winning side, collapsed, and the new Soviet Russia was considerably smaller until WWII brought new gains. It’s true that France did regain Alsace-Lorraine, but was it worth the loss of 3 of every 10 French men between the ages of 18 and 28?
http://hnn.us/article/155260
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From Wikipedia:
During August 1914, immediately after the outbreak of the war, British author and social commentator H. G. Wells published a number of articles in the London newspapers that subsequently appeared as a book entitled The War That Will End War.[3] Wells blamed the Central Powers for the coming of the war, and argued that only the defeat of German militarism could bring about an end to war. Wells used the shorter form, "the war to end war", in In the Fourth Year (1918), where he noted that the phrase had "got into circulation" in the second half of 1914. In fact, it had become one of the most common catch phrases of the war.
In later years, the term became associated with Woodrow Wilson, despite the fact that Wilson used the phrase only once.[6] Along with the phrase "make the world safe for democracy," it embodied Wilson's conviction that America's entry into the war was necessary to preserve human freedom.
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Even during World War I, the phrase met with some degree of skepticism; David Lloyd George is reputed to have said, "This war, like the next war, is a war to end war." As it became apparent that the war had not succeeded in ending war, the phrase took on a more cynical tone. Field-Marshal Earl Wavell said despondently of the Paris Peace Conference: "After the 'war to end war', they seem to have been in Paris at making the 'Peace to end Peace'". Wells himself used the phrase in an ironic way in the novel, The Bulpington of Blup (1932). Walter Lippmann wrote in Newsweek in 1967, "the delusion is that whatever war we are fighting is the war to end war", while Richard Nixon, in his Silent Majority speech, said, "I do not tell you that the war in Vietnam is the war to end wars".
My favorite expression of the absurdity that is war comes from the song Green Fields of France by Eric Bogle, where a weary traveler rests by the gravestone Private William McBride, age 19, who died in 1916. The last two verses eloquently make the point:
The sun's shining down on the green fields of France;
The warm wind blows gently, and the red poppies dance.
The trenches have vanished long under the plow;
No gas and no barbed wire, no guns firing now.
But here in this graveyard it's still No Man's Land
The countless white crosses in mute witness stand
To man's blind indifference to his fellow man.
And a whole generation who were butchered and damned.
And I can't help but wonder, now Willie McBride,
Do all those who lie here know why they died?
Did you really believe them when they told you 'The Cause';
Did you really believe that this war would end wars?
Well, the suffering, the sorrow, the glory, the shame
The killing, the dying, it was all done in vain,
For Willie McBride, it all happened again,
And again, and again, and again, and again.
I dunno about you, but this honestly appears to be much more of Hungary '56 and Czechoslovakia '68, than Austria-Serbia 1914 as far as conflicts go.....this isn't going to turn into another World War no matter how fascinating the idea might be to the Harry Turtledove or Tom Clancy set out there.
We have more important things to worry about.....like getting the far-right out of Congress, for example. 
