https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2021/05/the-elusive-pursuit-of-world-peace/
The preservation of international peace and the problem of negotiated disarmament among nations have been a problem for humanity from biblical times at least. Turning spears into pruning hooks and swords into ploughshares was urged by ancient Jewish prophets in the Old Testament and echoed in the New Testament by Jesus of Nazareth in his Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5–7) by calling peace-makers “blessed”. That was an aspiration which the course of history has mocked. Wars and rumours of wars have plagued human history from time immemorial. Wars to end war have been fought and have succeeded only in the sowing of dragons’ teeth. The First World War led almost inexorably to the Second.
The great irony is that these most destructive wars in human history have been fought among avowedly Christian nations. The Florentine Machiavelli has triumphed over Jesus of Nazareth, the Prince of Peace. It is noted, however, that Machiavelli in his work The Prince of 1513 was only describing the behaviour of rulers at that time and what they did to stay in power. They all simply acted in their dynastic or national interest whenever they took up arms against a neighbouring state.
Nothing, it would seem, has really changed throughout history, despite the well-intentioned efforts of pacifists, who continue to recommend unilateral disarmament as if that were the magic formula to create a knock-on effect inspiring all other powers to risk doing the same. Peace, and hopefully justice on earth, would then prevail. Pacifists also accuse statesmen of duplicity and deceptive actions against their own people while in reality they are furthering their class interests.
During the great naval race between Britain and Germany, the English journalist and Nobel Peace Prize-winner Norman Angell published a book called The Great Illusion (1909). He had hoped to illustrate that modern warfare between great industrial powers would be so costly regardless of who actually won, that decision-makers would shy back from the risk. The naval build-up went on anyway and hostilities eventually broke out in August 1914 and lasted four horrifically ruinous years for all concerned.
The most reliable research on all this was carried out by the Hamburg-based Professor Fritz Fischer and more recently confirmed by his doctoral student Bernd Schulte in a number of detailed publications based on hitherto unexplored sources. The assertions made by Cambridge Professor Christopher Clark in his 2013 book The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 have created a furore, especially in Germany where liberals and social democrats have been outraged by Clark’s downplaying of the “guilt” of the imperial German power elite who were bent on war. Not a few Australasian historians have welcomed Clark’s assertions because it allows them to denigrate the imperial connection by arguing that the dominion contribution to that conflict was the result of a deception perpetrated by British decision-makers in Whitehall. In reality, so it is agued, the First World War had nothing to do with the Pacific dominions. Our leaders were simply duped into supplying cannon fodder for wicked British capitalists.