How to avoid another world war

Henry Kissinger has died at the age of 100. He was the US Secretary of State under Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, and was one of the most powerful and influential people of the 20th and 21st century.

He wrote the following piece for The Spectator for our Christmas issue last year.

The first world war was a kind of cultural suicide that destroyed Europe’s eminence. Europe’s leaders sleepwalked – in the phrase of historian Christopher Clark – into a conflict which none of them would have entered had they foreseen the world at war’s end in 1918. In the previous decades, they had expressed their rivalries by creating two sets of alliances whose strategies had become linked by their respective schedules for mobilisation. As a result, in 1914, the murder of the Austrian Crown Prince in Sarajevo, Bosnia by a Serb nationalist was allowed to escalate into a general war that began when Germany executed its all-purpose plan to defeat France by attacking neutral Belgium at the other end of Europe.