The centennial of the July Crisis that led Europe down the perilous path to World War I has given many historians and scholars of war an occasion to revisit the question of how the European powers managed to blunder into such a bloody fiasco. Stephen Walt asks an equally interesting question: Why on did it take more than four years to correct what was obviously a huge mistake?
Ending the war was difficult because each side’s territorial ambitions and other war aims kept increasing, which made it harder for them to even consider some sort of negotiated settlement. War aims continued to expand in part because each side kept recruiting new allies by promising them territorial gains after the war, which both increased the total number of combatants and widened the geographical scope of the war. Germany promised the Ottoman Empire slices of Russian territory to get it to join the Dual Alliance; in response, London promised several Arab leaders independent kingdoms if they revolted against the Ottomans. The British also bribed Italy to realign by offering it territory along the Adriatic Sea. But all these war-time promises required each side to try to win an even bigger victory, which in turn just spurred their enemies to fight even harder to prevent it.
Each side’s ambitions also grew because politicians had to justify the enormous sacrifices their countrymen were making. The tyranny of “sunk costs” quickly sank in: the more each side lost, the more it had to promise to deliver once victory was achieved. By 1916, therefore, German war aims included annexing Luxemburg, substantial portions of France, making Belgium a vassal state, gaining new colonies in Africa, and carving out a vast new empire in Eastern Europe. For their part, allied war aims included a complete German withdrawal from the territory it had conquered, plus “national self-determination” and the establishment of democratic rule, which implied the dismemberment of the Austrian empire and the reshaping of Germany’s political order, something neither country would agree to until it was totally defeated.
(Photo: A memorial cross and poppy lays on the floor on a blanket of fallen pine needles at the National Memorial Arboretum on November 5, 2013 in Alrewas, Staffordshire. The National Memorial Arboretum is observed a two minute moment silence on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the year, marking the exact time when guns fell silent at the end of World War I in 1918. By Christopher Furlong/Getty Images)
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