Maybe Derb can finally explain to me exactly what WWI was about…
Treaties aside, Britain’s decision to go to war can be seen in the long context of that nation’s ancient fear of a single power controlling continental Europe: Spain in the 16th century, France in the 18th, Russia in the Cold War. Any power that attained European supremacy, the British reasonably believed, would soon turn on them.
Even the German and Austrian decisions that got the war rolling were based on reasonable, or not wildly unreasonable, premises.
For all that, though, and with due allowance for the well-known optometric precision of hindsight, WWI was by any rational assessment of costs and benefits a monumentally stupid war; though the stupidity was general, not restricted to any section of society
