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I seem to recommend a lot of history podcasts here, but I'll plug When Diplomacy Fails's current series on the July Crisis. Covers a lot that popular accounts don't, including the historiography around the run-up to war.
Having had a British education, I mostly found it surprising how much British diplomacy appears to have been done by a small cabal acting behind the backs of the public, who intended to manipulate the country into a largely unnecessary rivalry with Germany. However, this seems to have been a general trend - the high diplomats of many of the Great Powers were effectively off the leash and playing all kinds of too-clever-by-half schemes which then blew up in their faces (and Germany was particularly guilty of letting Austria-Hungary do this).
My historical understanding is stronger on colonial politics than internal European diplomacy, but I will point out that the continuity of England's balance-of-power politics is generally overplayed (because her balance-of-power diplomacy in 1914 looks superficially similar to 1815). In reality, much of the century before Russia's defeat by Japan in 1905 was based on colonial rivalries, in particular with Russia in Asia and France in Africa - it was only when Russia was revealed as a paper tiger that British policymakers began to look around and realize that Britain's worldwide imperial politics may have been coming at the cost of security in her backyard. My reading is that the British mistakenly believed that aligning with France and Russia would provide a stable balance of power instead of creating two evenly matched blocs ready for war, and totally missed that, in trading off imperial security for European security, she would lose both to long-term rising powers on the periphery (the US and a revitalized Russia). The breakdown of the Dreikaiserbund/Reinsurance Treaty was also a symptom of myopia, with the Great Powers focusing on short-term concerns rather than the greater long-term dangers of revolution and irredentist nationalism.
So, I guess the takeaway is that policymakers have to think long-term. Which, uh, good luck.
Strudlhofs Gone Wild!
The image of the hilariously-named Hotzendorf and Bechtold von und zu Ungarschitz, Frättling und Püllütz just absolutely HOUSING pastries and getting flaky crumbs all over the draft ultimatum to Serbia is sadly ahistorical. It doesn't stop me giggling over it, though.
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