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Germany has no interest in the Balkans which is worth the healthy bones of a single Pomeranian grenadier. Prince Otto von Bismarck --December, 1876

Does anybody remember Kosovo? Does anybody know what happened to it and to the people there? I am referring to the Washington-orchestrated war, employing NATO as cover, which took place in Kosovo and Serbia from March to June in 1999, during the closing days of the Administration of Bill and Hillary Clinton.

The “war” in which no U.S. or NATO ground troops were involved, was under the direction of Bill Clinton, his Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, and NATO Supreme Commander, U.S. General Wesley Clark. The operation made little sense at the time. The outcome probably makes even less sense today. Washington would be glad if the world were to forget about the entire matter, and the world has complied. The subject is never brought up, at least not in America. The episode has all but been forgotten, vanished from the radar screen.

In the land of the bogus, the banal, and the brainwashed, the confidence man is king, especially if he sits inside the White House. That circumstance is but one negative aspect of U.S. foreign policy—and is a serious danger for humanity at large. In the worst case scenario it can get innocent people killed overnight almost anywhere on the planet. The 1999 crisis over Kosovo, a province of Yugoslavia, made up mostly of ethnic Albanians, was a case in point. The U.S. conquest of Iraq four years later is another clear and odious example.

On March 24th, 1999, at the start of the U.S.-directed air attacks against Serbia, the occupant of the White House was an admitted serial liar and a convicted perjurer, a fact well known to all concerned. Can an American President who has lied under oath numerous times, in two separate Federal judicial proceedings, lead the world’s only “Superpower” into an undeclared war entirely on his own authority? Yes, he can.

He can do it with impunity, for the simple reason that the legislative branch of the U.S. Government has walked away from its responsibilities as outlined in the U.S. Federal Constitution, the presumed law of the land. In the aftermath of the Cold War, the White House can do just about anything the President and his advisors set their minds to do.

The idea of the U.S. President initiating hostilities against a country which poses no conceivable danger to America would have been astonishing to George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, for the simple reason that the Constitution which they created—and which we are suppose to believe still is in force today—explicitly gave Congress—not the President—the power to declare war and the control over the money needed to wage war.

Indeed, a military crusade in Europe, similar to Bill Clinton’s aerial assault upon Serbia, without express Congressional authorization, would have been an impeachable act prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor.

What do Operation Desert Storm (1991), the failed impeachment of Bill Clinton (1998), the U.S.-NATO attack upon Serbia (1999), and now the U.S. conquest of Iraq (2003) have in common? They signify absolute triumph of the Imperial Presidency. As a practical matter, thanks to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the lack of will and imagination in Europe, and the abdication of the U.S. Senate, there are now no effective limits to American Presidential power in the realm of foreign affairs. None. For better or worse, The Executive Branch of the U.S. Government is the reincarnation of Imperial Rome.

When the Senate of Rome became a nonentity, the Republic was doomed. In the last decade of the Second Millennium, a majority of the U.S. Senate demonstrated that it was too lazy and too intellectually bankrupt to interfere in whatever extra-Constitutional activity the President decided to engage in, be it the subversion of the judicial branch of the American Government (Clinton) or the launching of Presidential wars in exotic territories like Kuwait (Bush Sr.) and Kosovo (Clinton), which territories not one in ten thousand Americans could locate on a map, even if that individual’s life depended upon it.

Bill Clinton was a Chief Executive who was contumacious of the rule of law. He engaged in a conspiracy to deceive the Federal Courts—to say nothing of the public at large. Such a President poses a danger for U.S. foreign policy, because it is a waste of time to listen to anything he has to say. He may be telling the truth; then again, he may not be. It is anybody’s guess.

Under the Imperial Presidency—ushered in by Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930’s—it has become fashionable to become involved in warmongering intrigue and to undertake unilateral foreign initiatives, including full-scale wars, justified entirely by lies. The more a President is in the habit of lying, as Roosevelt was, the more apt he is to go to war for fraudulent reasons.

In the case of Operation Allied Force, the code name for the attack on Serbia, we must take into account the possibility—due to his track record--that Bill Clinton had ulterior motives in launching it. We can reasonably speculate that the President’s actual motivation may not have been to do a good deed, which is how the war was portrayed, but was instead to distract the country from his sexual escapades and from his Administration’s on-going political scandals—in particular, the illegal Chinese Government funding of his 1996 Presidential campaign, another all-but-forgotten outrage.

It is not unreasonable to suggest that Operation Allied Force was an opportunistic diversion, and therefore another outrage. Wag the dog? Indeed.

Everything written about the policies and reputation of the then-President of Yugoslavia, Slobodan Milosevic, is beside the point. I don’t particularly care, one way or the other, about the President of Yugoslavia, whoever he may be. Do you? A civil war in the Balkans among sundry ethnic groups is not a danger to U.S. national security, and therefore cannot be considered a direct concern of U.S. foreign policy.

Obviously, the Balkans is Europe’s backyard and Europe’s affair. Let Europe deal with it via NATO or the EU or otherwise. A conflict within the former Yugoslavia—even a cross-border conflict—should not be a cause célèbre requiring an American-led intervention and the launching of cruise missiles, cluster bombs, and the use of radioactive depleted-uranium explosives.

But President Clinton and his advisors deliberately went out of their way to make it a cause célèbre after their high-handed diplomacy through Diktat failed. When Belgrade declined to swallow the Rambouillet Accord, a draft dated February 23rd, 1999 cooked up by Clinton’s foreign policy team at a NATO meeting in Rombouillet, France, which document required that Kosovo become a NATO protectorate, White House egos took over.

It was a foregone conclusion that such a Diktat could not be accepted by the authorities in Belgrade, and Clinton’s Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, knew that full well. So the bombs started dropping on March 24th, and continued non-stop until June 10th.

From the American/NATO side, the war consisted exclusively of air strikes, which would run into the thousands. Some of the targets were military, many were not—like pharmaceutical factories, power plants, and petrochemical complexes. Collateral damage was widespread, including, hospitals, embassies, busses, trains, and office buildings. The Pentagon took credit for killing 5000 Yugoslavian soldiers; Belgrade claimed that the bombings had killed 1200 innocent civilians. On the American/NATO side, there was not a single casualty.

With total, uncontested air supremacy and with no counter-balancing Russian “Superpower” to worry about, it was a re-run of Operation Desert Storm in Iraq in 1991, but without the ground troops. No risk, no qualms. NATO had been hijacked by Washington and retargeted from containing the Soviet Empire to bombing a small European country which had not attacked or threatened any NATO member.

Military intervention was justified on humanitarian grounds. This was to be a war for humanity, yet again. Tragically, not to say ironically, from the moment it started, the air war created a humanitarian disaster in Kosovo for the presumed victims on whose behalf the air strikes had purportedly been launched. The scenario was surreal. The war triggered the wholesale victimization of the very people it was supposedly trying to help. Operation Allied Force generated its own victims who then instantly became the war’s justification.

Did no one in Washington, no one at NATO headquarters in Europe, foresee that the Serb military machine would go after the Albanian ground troops, the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army, and their civilian supporters inside Kosovo? In a broad sense but also in a very real way, the U.S. Air Force was acting as the high-tech artillery for that guerrilla army. Incapable of shooting down the fighter jets and laser-guided cruise missiles, the Serbs went after the enemy Albanian soldiers on the ground instead.

Meanwhile, utilizing NATO as a fig leaf, the United States was bombing the hell out of Serbia, which was powerless to defend itself. Again, as with the Iraqi adventures of the Bush Presidents, father and son, both in 1991 and 2003, this was not a war. This was a shooting gallery. It should be instructive that Washington’s much-vaunted, alleged concern for human rights, and America’s willingness to correct the wrongs of this world, seems to encompass only those countries or regions which are incapable of defending themselves.

On a personal note, I must confess to becoming uncomfortable at the time and, yes, even sick to my stomach, while watching on television the U.S. Air Force blast to kingdom come the civilian infrastructure and national assets of Serbia—a small, faraway country which posed no conceivable threat to the people of the United States and which had no means at its disposal to ward off such unprovoked attacks. Under normal circumstances, the sanctimonious U.S. President ordering these attacks would have been incarcerated inside a Federal penitentiary for witness tampering and perjury.

U.S. Congressman Dennis Kucinich of Ohio wrote a most informative article in the July, 1999 issue of The Progressive (Madison, Wisconsin) entitled “What I learned from the War”. He stated therein: “I did not anticipate that the U.S. and NATO, in the name of a humanitarian cause, would undertake the bombing of Serbia and thereby violate the U.N. Charter, the NATO Charter, the Congressional intent in approving the North Atlantic Treaty, the U.S. Constitution, and the War Powers Act.

“The U.N. Security Council was the proper forum for debating such offensive action. In the 1949 Senate debate on the founding of NATO, Senator Forrest C. Donnell, Republican of Missouri, worried that such an organization could supersede the War Power of the U.S. Congress. Now, U.S. planes were dropping U.S. bombs on Serbia in the name of my country, in the name of NATO, but without the approval of the U.S. Congress.”

Time out for some history. It appears that the upper Balkans became a contending Hapsburg/Russian/Italian sphere of interest at some point in the mid-19th Century and remained so until the end of World War I and the liquidation of the Ottoman Empire. Be advised that the Ottoman Turks held sway over the entire Balkan Peninsula for almost 500 years.

The Turkish conquests in Europe began around 1360 with the Slavic peoples of the Balkans, the Bulgars and the Serbs. In 1389 the Turks defeated the Serbs at the battle of Kosovo. In the following century, Mahomet II entered Constantinople (1453) and brought the curtain down on the thousand-year-old Byzantine Empire, the last link to the ancient world of Greece and Rome.

In the next century, Soliman I conquered Hungary (1552) but failed to take the German city of Vienna. In the great naval battle of Lepanto (1571) the Venetian fleet, in service to the Crusaders and commanded by a Hapsburg prince, defeated the Turkish fleet south of Corfu. This setback to Turkish sea power had little impact on land. By 1600 the Caliphate’s European domains stretched from the Greek islands north to the outskirts of Vienna. This was the high water mark. In 1683 a second siege of Vienna failed, and in 1699 the Sultan ceded Hungary and Transylvania to Austria.

The Turks held their own in the 1700’s. But in 1821, the Greeks rose up and established the Kingdom of Greece. In 1830 the Serbs formed a quasi-independent Principality of Serbia. In 1877 the Czar sent an army into the Balkans to aid the Christian Bulgarians; the Russians may have entered Constantinople, which was their goal, but for the intervention of England.

Prince Otto von Bismarck, the German chancellor, masterminded the Congress of Berlin (1878) to clarify the Balkan landscape. Serbia, Rumania and Montenegro were recognized as independent kinglets. Bulgaria became a principality ruled by a nephew of the Czar. Bosnia Herzegovina, along the Adriatic coast, became a protectorate of Austria. England, never at a loss, got the island of Cyprus, to keep an eye on the Bosporus. Macedonia remained the property of the Sultan as did Albania, which was largely Muslim. The carve up of “The Sick Man of Europe”, the Ottoman Empire, was well underway.

The formal annexation of Bosnia Herzegovina by Austria—that is, by the Austro-Hungarian Empire—did not come about until 1908. The move was sparked by a revolution of the Young Turks in Constantinople. Croatia and Slovenia, to the north of Bosnia, had already been incorporated into the Hapsburg domains. As for Italy, its sphere of interest was confined to the Dalmatian coast, which had formerly been part of the Roman and later the Venetian Empires, a region never ruled by Slavs.

Very roughly, that’s where matters stood when Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, paid a ceremonial visit to Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, in June of 1914. The Great War, The War to End All Wars, The War to Make the World Safe for Democracy, etc. was precipitated by the assassination of this Austrian future Emperor and his wife during a parade in this picturesque Balkan town on June 28th, 1914. The resultant European war became the greatest catastrophe to hit Europe since the Black Death of the Middle Ages.

The assassins were Serbian fanatics seeking to create a Greater Serbia by the transfer of Slav provinces, then under Hapsburg rule, over to the independent Kingdom of Serbia. The conspiracy emanated from Belgrade, the Serbian capital next door to Bosnia. The father of the murdered Archduke, Emperor Franz Josef, made certain demands upon Belgrade in the aftermath of the murder, one of which was that Austrian police inspectors be allowed to take part in the investigation inside Serbia. When this not-altogether-outrageous demand was refused by Serbian officials, Austria declared war upon Serbia and commenced an artillery bombardment of Belgrade.

In due course, Nicholas II, Czar of all the Russians (and a good chunk of Asia), came to the aid of his Slavic brother, Serbia, by ordering a general mobilization of the Russian army and navy. As historians will tell you, in those bygone days in Europe, mobilization meant war. It was not a change of alert status. For logistical reasons, rival countries were obliged to respond in kind. In Berlin, Kaiser Wilhelm II decided to assist his Germanic brother, Austria, by declaring war upon Russia when the Czar, the Kaiser’s cousin, refused to demobilize.

France, with no Balkan interests to speak of, but always on the lookout for a way to create problems for Germany, then joined up with its Russian ally under the terms of a pre-existing formal alliance which required a joint attack upon Germany. In a calculated gamble to escape encirclement, Germany felt compelled by military necessity to make a preemptive attack upon France through neutral Belgium.

England, then as now, off to the side and with no direct interests at stake, nevertheless swung alongside France so as to maintain—what else?—the Balance of Power. Many months and millions of lost lives later, America was railroaded by various intrigues to come to England’s rescue, thereby ensuring the collapse of the Hohenzollern and Hapsburg Empires.

The path of these fallen dominoes leads right back to Belgrade and the Serbs. Nowhere else. But in the grand scheme of things, it was the pan-Slavism of Russia, French revanchism aimed at Germany due to the Franco-Prussian war of 1871, combined with the usual Balance-of-Power fixation of Whitehall, which bears prime responsibility for the Great War.

If only Sir Edward Grey, the enormously influential British Foreign Secretary, had taken another cup of tea, preferably the tea named after his great grand uncle, things may have turned out quite differently.

If Grey in the summer of 1914 had the presence of mind and fortitude, first, to tell the Czar’s ministers to temporize and, second, to show French revanchist politicians and his own jingoist countrymen the door, then the conflict could have been localized south of Vienna. It should have happened, and Sir Edward Grey was the key to make it happen.

Grey was an honest Englishman, proud yet devoid of personal ambition and not prone to outside pressures. Alas, he could not escape his surroundings, the intrigues, and the mind-set of his day. So he joined hands with France and Russia. If Emperor Franz Josef had been afforded the time and opportunity to confront Belgrade single-handedly, free of outside interference, there would have been no general European war.

As a consequence, both world wars would have been avoided. And an American president would not have been in position to attack Belgrade at the tail end of the Twentieth Century.

What happened instead? A stupendous massacre on the European continent ensued, and the assassins of Sarajevo were rewarded by the Western Powers at the conclusion of the war. At the peace conference in Paris in 1919, the Serbian fanatics got what they wanted: Serbia became Greater Serbia—an entirely new state was brought into being under the domination of the Serbs, to be known as Yugoslavia...a gerrymandered and jerrybuilt concoction comprising Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia itself (including the provinces of Vojvodina in the north and Kosovo in the south) and Macedonia—all under the leadership of Belgrade.

Was Yugoslavia another bright inspiration of President Wilson’s Fourteen Points like, say, Czechoslovakia, where millions of Germans, Slovaks, Poles and Hungarians were placed under Czech control? Yes and no. Both were distortions of the Fourteen Points, distortions engineered by Paris and London. The Wilsonian game plan for war-ravaged, old Europe called for equal rights, impartial justice, autonomous development, economic independence, territorial integrity, etc., etc.

Wilson was serious and sincere but utterly naive. At the 1919 Paris peace conference, he was caught in a power-politics riptide, way over his head. The French premier, Georges Clemenceau, and the English Prime Minister, Lloyd George, regarded Wilson as something akin to an embarrassing simpleton. The short-sighted English and French agenda remained the same after the war as before--Germania delenda est.

It is instructive that Wilson’s highfalutin American ideals were rigorously applied—or more correctly, misapplied—solely to the Continental rivals of England and France--the German and Austrian Empires of Central Europe—but never to the Empires of England and France outside Europe. What a glaring inconsistency. Were the actors in the drama too besotted to see it? It would appear so. Take the nearest and most striking example—Ireland.

What about the freedom, independence and territorial integrity of Ireland, for starters. Thanks to timorous and perpetually obtuse English politicians, the West must still cope with that problem today. Ireland is one island and one country. Is that reality so difficult for English minds in Whitehall to understand? Apparently, it is.

What about the rest of the gargantuan British Empire, stretching around the globe? London felt it needed those assets to maintain England in the life style to which it had long become accustomed and to which it felt entitled. Indeed, from the British point of view, that was the central point of the war.

John Maynard Keynes summarized the outcome of The War to Make the World Safe for Democracy in his famous book-length memorandum, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, published in 1920: “England had destroyed, as in each preceding century, a trade rival.” Empire builder Cecil Rhodes had spoken plainly on the subject a few decades earlier: “The Empire, I have always said, is a bread-and-butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.”

The Empire was about to be extended yet again, but now for the very last time, most notably in the Middle East. Thanks to agreements among the victors set forth in the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, collateral to Versailles, England picked up almost all Middle Eastern real estate of any value from the blown-apart Ottoman Empire, except Syria and Lebanon, these latter going to France. It was a tremendous land grab by the West at the expense of the Arabs.

Is it true that at the time of the Balfour Declaration of 1917--which document was largely composed in Washington by President Wilson’s advisors and approved by him—that the indigenous population of Palestine was 90% Arab and Muslim? No matter. In 1920 it became part of the British Empire—as a “protectorate”—and was then promptly handed over, as a gratuity, by Prime Minister Lloyd George and Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill, to the representatives of international Zionism.

Why? To recompense the Zionists for their assistance in dragging the crusading Woodrow Wilson and his anti-war countrymen into the abattoir on the side of jingo John Bull. America’s entry on the western front in France, after the Central Powers had defeated Russia on the eastern front, was a godsend and tipped the scales of victory. Without American intervention, England and France would have been forced to negotiate peace with Germany based on status quo ante.

President Wilson was useful, most useful, after the war as well. His idealistic Fourteen Points—a composite of “self-determination” and “democracy”—were a wonderful distraction and fig leaf, while the actual business of dividing up the spoils went on behind closed doors between England and France.

In Paris, Lloyd George and Georges Clemenceau hijacked Wilson’s idealistic agenda to spread the chaos of the Balkans northward—to Balkanize, as it were, the very heart of Europe itself. Not in pursuit of justice, democracy or self-determination, but to cripple German and Austrian power in Central Europe.

Part of this process involved the invention of Yugoslavia, whose artificial boundaries were reimposed after World War II. The edifice cracked for good with the downfall of Communism in the 1980’s. With Operation Allied Force in 1999, the victors of the Great War arrived back where they started in 1919. They demolished their Balkan bug house, because the occupants of that bug house could no longer stand one another and wanted to go their separate ways.

Would it not have been better, in retrospect, to allow the Hapsburgs in 1914 to deal with the Balkans? No doubt about it. The peace of the world and Old Europe would have been preserved.

Another history break. In 1989, at the close of the Cold War, which was also the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo, fought by the Christian Serbs against the Ottoman Turks, the indigenous population of Kosovo was 90% Albanian and Muslim. From that point on, may I suggest that Milosevic’s real crime was that he was in too big of a hurry.

He faced an ethnic dilemma in Kosovo in 1989, and in 1999 when NATO intervened, very similar to what the Zionists had faced in Palestine in 1920 and thereafter—namely, what to do with the inconvenient native inhabitants who had been there for many centuries.

The tragic circumstances of Kosovo and Palestine are remarkably congruent. The significant difference is that unlike the Zionists, Milosevic and his fellow Serb nationalists did not have the luxury of time. They attempted to achieve in a few years, starting in 1989, what it had taken the Zionist movement decades to achieve in Palestine. For his unsuccessful attempt, Milosevic was branded a war criminal, and he went on trial as such.

On the other hand, the Zionists have been anointed folk heroes in the popular imagination and their long-time leader, Ariel Sharon, although considered a war criminal by some, was hailed by the President of the United States, George Walker Bush, as a “good friend” and ally.

There has been a lot of talk about “ethnic cleansing” in the former Yugoslavia. Some of it is undoubtedly true. At the same time, just what, exactly, do educated, informed individuals in America and Europe think has been going on in and around Palestine since 1920, and most especially since 1948? Is the vast majority of editorialists and world leaders really so misinformed, so woefully ignorant—or do they have an inkling of the truth, but pretend otherwise and choose to remain silent?

Milosevic did not have the luxury of time because he was not being assisted and protected by powerful accomplices like the Zionists were—in the first place, by the British Empire and then, after the Empire self-destructed under Churchill, by Washington during the Cold War. The 1920 British takeover and subsequent transmogrification of Palestine, the very antithesis of Wilsonian ideals, was achievable only under such all-encompassing protective cover.

The facts are there to be examined. The Palestinians were betrayed by the British from the outset. The Palestinians, like all the Arabs led by Colonel T.E. Lawrence, the so-called “Lawrence of Arabia”, were used as cannon fodder to help bring about the destruction of the Ottoman Empire in the East.

Once that goal was achieved, instead of gaining some measure of freedom and independence in 1919—as they had every right to expect even before the Wilsonian blather—the Arabs were unceremoniously jettisoned. They got saddled not just temporarily with the British and the French imperialists, but subsequently, in the aftermath of World War II, with millions of Russian, Polish and European Jewish immigrants to boot, the latter permanently.

The wholesale fraud that the British and the French had perpetrated upon the world prior to, and in the aftermath of, the Great War was widely known, if not fully appreciated. Who could have imagined what further fraud the British and the French were about to perform upon their new ally, Poland in 1939, in the second round of the crusade against Germany? The track record of England was especially atrocious.

Whatever the cause and however it happened, the Palestinians lost Palestine thanks largely to decisions taken in London in 1917-1921. That much is clear. The British and French Empires are long gone. Also clear. By the same token, it is most unlikely at this late date that American politicians pontificating from Washington D.C. are going to direct Tel Aviv and/or the World Jewish Congress to give Palestine back to those dispossessed Arabs from whom it was taken.

There is absolutely no incentive for an American President or members of Congress to do that. There are no votes, no money to be gained thereby.

The disenfranchisement of the Palestinians was a unique and sordid affair, not an example of high European statesmanship to be emulated in the Balkans. In the first place, this is not 1920. Times have changed.

By the current enlightened standards, a Serbian minority of 10% in Kosovo ought not be allowed free reign by Europe to lord over this Balkan entity which is overwhelmingly Albanian and Muslim. Correct or not? It must be correct, because that is the logical and rational basis of NATO’s intervention in Kosovo.

However, on the other hand, if not correct, then in that case, Washington and the “International Community” would be obliged to accept the Serbian point of view and issue a unilateral Declaration (à la Balfour) emanating from London and/or Washington. Such a declaration would proclaim Kosovo to be the Holy Land of Serbia. Hence, its Albanian population (just like the erstwhile 90% Arab population of Palestine) would need to be displaced forthwith by a massive, uninterrupted influx of Serbs—in the same manner as Russian, Polish and American Jews have displaced the Palestinians over the past 80 years...

Perhaps the dictators of peace in 1919 and 1920 had the wrong priorities. Perhaps they should have taken common sense into account before manipulating the maps of Europe and the Middle East behind closed doors. In plain language, they ought to have considered the long-range consequences of playing God.

Obviously, by the logic of self-determination, the logic of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, Kosovo ought to be free, entirely free of the Serbian regime in Belgrade, and either be part of Albania proper or else wholly independent.

This is not to suggest that the Albanians are exemplars of virtue, anymore than the Serbs, but that’s another issue. In the first place, I have no definite idea. In the second place, it’s none of my business. I am in no position to sit in judgment upon anyone anywhere, but neither is Washington and certainly not the Administration of an impeached President who had a motive to distract the country with a foreign crusade. It was primarily the responsibility of Europe, not America, to come up with a solution for the problems in Kosovo.

From a wider perspective, the only point I want to make here is that if Vienna had been left alone to discipline Belgrade in 1914, the West would not be facing such complex injustices in the Balkans and in the Middle East today, injustices largely of the West’s own making. The Great War of 1914 could have been halted before it got started, in my view, by the British Foreign Office.

Once underway, however, there was no good reason for Woodrow Wilson to propel America into this horrible conflict on the side of the British Empire—especially when Wilson had repeatedly promised his fellow countrymen throughout his 1916 campaign for the White House to stay out of it. The controversy should have remained what it was at the outset: an affair between Austria, the aggrieved party, and Serbia, the upstart.

But English diplomacy, in the person of Lord Grey, stood by and let the dominoes fall, fall all the way to London’s doorstep. The consequences of this decision have been momentous, and are still unfolding. America eventually took over from an exhausted England on the world’s stage.

The British Empire greatly accelerated its own demise, which was finalized by Winston Churchill in the Second World War. The upshot was that Europe got stuck with the unnatural hegemony of Washington and Moscow.