How "Great" Britain Started a Century-Long Unprovoked War on Germany

How a Spiteful Fading Empire’s Unprovoked Naval Blockade Plunged Europe into a Bloodbath to Fix Its Imperial Insecurity.

TL;DR: This article exposes how the British elite’s arrogance sparked WW1, drawing chilling parallels to their actions today.

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London, October 4, 1911, and the fog is a silent accomplice, curling through the city’s arteries like a spy for the empire’s darkest secrets. In the gilded cage of Orchard Lea, Lord Reginald Baliol Brett—Viscount Esher—sits in his study, a sanctum of mahogany and malice. The fire hisses, casting shadows that writhe like the ghosts of wars to come.

Esher, lean as a switchblade, his eyes glinting with the cold glee of a man who plays God, opens his diary. On the first page of its third volume, Benjamin Disraeli—Lord Beaconsfield, the Tory sorcerer who spun empire into legend—grins in ink: “The most powerful men are not public men: a public man is responsible, and a responsible man is a slave. It is private life that governs the world.”¹ Esher smirks. He’s the avatar of that creed, a shadow-emperor orchestrating a coming slaughter to choke the globe.

The door creaked, and Herbert Asquith, the Liberal Prime Minister whose earnest face masked a wavering spine, stepped in. His broad shoulders seemed to slump under the weight of his ideals, a man who believed in democracy but was about to learn its limits. Asquith’s eyes flicked to the diary, then to Esher. “Herbert,” Esher said, his voice smooth as poison, “we must settle the Admiralty’s business. And the war.”

Asquith’s jaw clamps shut. “The General Staff’s mania for landing an army in France is unhinged. I’ve told Secretary Richard Haldane four divisions, no more. We’re not diving into a continental meat grinder because some generals got an itch.”

Esher’s laugh is a splinter of glass, shredding Asquith’s piety. “Oh, Herbert, clutching your rosary of principles again, I see. You think you can muzzle the apocalypse? The War Office and French General Staff have been rutting in secret for years—train schedules, landing zones, the whole filthy ballet of death. It’s done.” He slaps a stack of papers, each a cornerstone of his decade-long conspiracy.

“Our officers have scripted every scene, and your Cabinet? They’re blind as bats. Tell me, do you honestly believe we can’t have a British army in France seven days after the shooting starts, just because your colleagues are playing hide-and-seek with the truth?”

Asquith’s voice is a rasp, fraying like cheap rope. “It’s impossible. The Cabinet hasn’t been consulted. Parliament would never stand for it. This is a democracy, Esher, not your personal empire.”

“Democracy?” Esher’s sneer could sour the Thames. “Don’t hawk that swill here. The state’s a slaughterhouse, Herbert, and we’ve been honing the blades since 1906. Hankey, Wilson, Bell; they are all in it. Tell them Britain tripped into war unprepared, and they’d laugh you out of the room for spitting on their bloody masterpiece.” He leans in, eyes like flints. “The Admiralty and War Office plans are fused now, waiting to gut your spineless Cabinet when the curtain lifts. You think Parliament will scream? They’ll chant glory, you’ll see. All they need is the right … ‘motivation’.”

Asquith collapses into a chair, the firelight sketching his defeat in flickering despair. He’s a man who dreams of shepherding the flock, but Esher’s words are a flamethrower, torching the delusion of a state that kneels to its people. The plans, Esher gloats, aren’t illusions of a megalomaniac—they’re set in stone, later bragged about in the smug diaries of Maurice Hankey, Henry Wilson, and Archibald Bell, whose paper trails sneer at the lie of Britain’s bumbling war entry. They’re a confession—a sneering boast to the fools who think wars stumble into being.

Disraeli chuckles in the dark: the private men, not the public drones, write the world’s epitaph. The Committee of Imperial Defence (CID), Esher’s personal Colosseum, is the forge where this cataclysm was smelted. Asquith sees the trenches, the boys who’ll rot, the voters who’ll never know their doom was sealed in this viper’s nest. Esher, unmoved, scrawls in his diary: “The Premier squirms, but he’ll bow. They always do.”²

Fast-forwards to February 26, 1923, and Esher, now a silver-haired ghoul, haunts the same study, pawing through his relics. To his wife, he writes like a child who wants a pat on his back: “I'm going through all my papers regarding preparations for the Great War. It began in 1905/1906. By 1908, we were already making great progress. I can prove it with documents.”³

The Great War wasn’t a tragedy; it was a stickup, pulled by men who saw the globe as their poker table and its people as chips. His diaries, later published, brandish Disraeli’s quote like a gangster’s tattoo, proof of the shadow power that choreographed a massacre while the masses genuflected to what today is branded “our liberal democracy”.

But back in 1911, Asquith stumbles into the fog, his ideals dissolving like ash in a storm. He’ll fight, he swears, snatch the reins from Esher, Hankey, and Wilson, who are about to play war like it’s a country club bet. But the machine is a leviathan, its cogs slick with a decade of deceit, and it’s already rolling.

The Admiralty and War Office have welded their schemes, a hydra coiled to strike, and Parliament, a cathedral of self-deception, will grovel when the spotlight hits. Esher’s study is a crucible, forging a future where millions will die for their greed, and Asquith, for all his puffery, is merely a gnat ensnared in Disraeli’s grim oracle.

Then, in August 1914, Britain trumpeted its march to war in the name of “democracy”—a hollow shibboleth that, 111 years on, echoes with the chilling familiarity of a lie recycled through history’s meat grinder.

The Committee of Imperial Defence was the dark womb where Britain’s war on Germany was birthed in the cesspit of jealousy. Conceived in 1902 by Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, a Tory aristocrat with a nose for empire’s pulse, it was Esher’s bastard child.

On September 4, 1903, Balfour dangled the War Secretary’s post before Esher, who swatted it away like a fly—public office was for chumps. Instead, he fed Balfour a stream of letters, each a stiletto carving through the wreckage of Britain’s Boer War debacle.

From that correspondence slouched the CID, a shadow cabinet that let Esher pull the War Office’s strings without the stink of scrutiny. Balfour slipped him secrets like a bookie passing tips; Sir George Clarke, the CID’s first secretary and a bureaucrat with a hard-on for order, was his eager bagman.

The Committee’s first report, belched out in January 1904, was a war cry cloaked as reform, demanding “a definitive war policy grounded in solid data.”⁴ Sounds familiar? It should. It was a blueprint for apocalypse, drafted by men who’d been plotting carnage while the public hummed anthems of peace.

For eighteen months, the CID languished in embryonic limbo, a half-formed idea kicking weakly in the shadows. Then, on May 4, 1904, Arthur Balfour, with the flourish of a man signing a devil’s pact, breathed official life into it. The CID was no longer a whispered conspiracy but a state organ, complete with a permanent secretariat stuffed with army and navy brass. Their mission was to forge a unified policy, a seamless war machine cloaked in the bland rhetoric of efficiency.

Balfour’s gambit was meant to shield the CID from meddling liberals who might dare to question its imperial ambitions. But he needn’t have worried. When power shifted in 1905-1906 to Henry Campbell-Bannerman’s cabinet, the liberal-imperialist wolves—Richard Haldane and Edward Grey—slipped effortlessly into the key roles of War and Foreign Secretaries.

The protracted dance of elections and government formation left the state free to maneuver, unhindered by the pesky oversight of democratic process. At the heart of this machination was Lord Esher, a political puppeteer who ensured the “right” people—those who salivated at the project’s imperial promise—were hoisted into the "right" offices to grease the wheels of war.

Balfour may have laid the CID’s cornerstone, but it was the liberal-imperialists who chiseled its true shape. At its inception, France loomed as Britain’s chief European rival, a convenient bogeyman. Yet the committee’s gaze was soon redirected to Germany, a shift the liberal-imperialists had championed even from the opposition benches. Esher, with the clairvoyance of a prophet drunk on power, saw the future clearly.

On September 7, 1906, he wrote to the Duchess of Sutherland, invoking the “laws of historical and ethnographic evolution” to declare war against “one of the mightiest military empires ever known”⁵ not just inevitable but imminent. Time, he warned, was running out. The CID, he boasted, was no mere advisory body but an “organ” designed to prepare the ruling elite for the “best possible conduct of a prospective war.” He likened it to Lazare Carnot’s role under Napoleon, a comparison dripping with hubris and menace.

Barely a year after the Entente Cordiale of 1904, the CID was already warming to the idea of British troops fighting alongside their erstwhile French foes. For France, the agreement was a gilded invitation to a military pact aimed squarely at Germany—a chance to claw back provinces lost in the 1870 Franco-Prussian War.

After Lord French orchestrated joint military maneuvers in France, Esher, writing to his son Maurice on September 4, 1906, could barely contain his glee. The Entente was “progressing,” and not a moment too soon. A “gigantic confrontation” loomed, he predicted, a struggle for European supremacy that would echo the Napoleonic Wars, only with Germany, not France, as the “aspiring hegemon.”

Germany’s 70 million souls, pulsing with industrial hunger and technological prowess, loomed like a colossus over the measly 80 million of France and Britain combined—a real-world Civilization endgame where the Kaiser’s utopia outclassed the tea-slurping Brits and baguette-munching French in every metric that mattered.

The outcome, Esher admitted, was far from certain. He fretted over the Low Countries, no longer a buffer against France but a bulwark against a “far more dangerous” Germany. The specter of war before Britain’s readiness haunted him. Conscription, he estimated, would take five years to sell to a public still naive enough to believe in peace. Familiar?

This was Britain’s “balance of power” doctrine, a cynical game of continental chess played since 1688. Officially, it was about preventing any single power from dominating Europe. In truth, it was a mechanism to keep the continent fractured, embroiled in endless wars, while Britain, the aloof island puppeteer, tightened its grip on global dominance.

The argument was always “dominance,” but by what right did Britain presume to dictate Europe’s destiny? The real aim was to kneecap the strongest power, ensuring Europe never stabilized, never united, never rivaled Britain’s empire.

The Netherlands and Belgium were mere pawns, deployed as buffers or battlegrounds as needed. Britain’s strategy was elegantly parasitic: align with the second-strongest power or bloc, cripple the leader, then watch the new victor stagger into the crosshairs. Rinse, repeat, ad infinitum. And repeat they would.

Through this balance-of-power alchemy, Britain kept Europe divided, bleeding, and distracted, while it plundered the globe. As an island fortress, Britain enjoyed a unique advantage, its naval supremacy a moat that shielded its parliamentary pretensions, fueled its economic gluttony, and secured its stability. For over two centuries, from 1688 to 1914, this formula worked with diabolical precision, allowing Britain to play the world’s policeman, merchant, and executioner all at once.

Drunk on their storied triumphs over a faltering France, they strutted as Europe’s unchallenged titan, the world’s swaggering empire, soaring to the heavens. But in their arrogance, they chose an enemy who—shock of shocks—couldn’t be crushed by ships and bravado alone.