Could Russia have won after Tsushima?

[Jean-Paul Binot]

In "Europe's Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914?" David Fromkin outlines a very plausible explanation to the events that started WW1.

In essence, there were two separate but interconnected struggles for domination, one localized to the Balkans and involved only Austria Hungary, that saw this area as the last ditch to defend its status as a great power. The other was European and involved mostly Germany that had the irrational feeling it was surrounded, threatened by Russian power surge, convinced of an imminent national demise from which only war could save it.

Neither Austria-Hungary nor Germany could hope to go on with their own scheme without the full support of the other. Berlin was convinced that Vienna could only be expected to back Germany against Russia if Vienna was then in need of Berlin's support for a war in the Balkans. That is what happened in 1914.

For Fromkin, the case is clear: Germany was the global warmonger, Austria-Hungary the local one. With such a team, war was, if not inevitable, at least very likely. True, the Kaiser got cold feet at some point, but once committed, the Kafkaesque Dual Monarchy could hardly be stopped, as the Austrian leadership was at their wits' end about what to do next short of war. The German High Command desperately wanted war sooner rather than later and Moltke pushed ahead as strongly as he could bullying both the Kaiser and the Austrians.

[Michael Potter]

Anyone who is interested: PM me for an excerpt from Professor Dale Copeland, The Origins of Major War (Cornell, 2000), with his theory of the origins of WW1. I found this an interesting alternative to the common narrative that WW1 arose from random events that nobody could control. My daughter read Copeland's book at the University of California at San Diego, where she earned her B.A. degree in political science.