Watching the twists and turns of American foreign policy while reading Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 is an unnerving experience.
Clark’s history, unlike many on the outbreak of World War I, starts not with the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in June 1914, but a dozen or so years earlier. He examines the muddled internal politics behind the foreign policies of major and minor powers—and how often they were incomprehensible to each other.
Continue reading this piece from National Review here.