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“Germany in 1914 hardly cared about Britain at all, and quite reasonably could not understand why London entered the war. It was more or less incomprehensible. To this day it is hard to see any British interest that was served, and dozens that were damaged.”

I'm not so sure about that. Up to the first war, there was a race going on between Germany and England.

All over the world, navies were switching from coal to oil power. In nations where resources were available, dreadnoughts were replacing coal burning ships at an incredible speed. The militarism of Germany could not be ignored by a country like England whose security and stability owed SO much to it's navy.

Kaiser Bill HAD to be contained and for the most part, the Imperial Navy was kept off the major oceans. German dreadnought's were more or less bottled up in the northern ports and German submarines were challenged when and where ever the British navy could find them.

It was do or die for the Brits. The British hung on by a thread for a very long time and finally won out.

Hitchens has a point of view, which I think I'm summarizing fairly, that Britain exhausted itself needlessly in WWI (and then out of necessity in WWII), trying to prevent German hegemony on the continent, and he lays out his case thoughtfully and with considerable merit.

The problem with this view is that it runs counter to Britain's foreign policy on the continent since Tudor times, which was that Britain would resist the creation of a Continental hegemon, because a hegemon in Europe would be in a position to thwart Britain's mastery of the seas on which her colonial empire was founded.

It's true, as Hitchens states, that Britain stayed out of the wars of German unification. But the chauvinistic and bellicose Germany of 1914 was seen in many circles as an aggressive power (which it was) that had become unmoored from Bismark's judicious realpolitik. Germany had come to be viewed as the most serious challenge since Napoleonic France.

With support from the US, Britain prevailed (sort of), but Hitchens asks whether it was worth the tremendous cost. Which is a question forth asking, even thought it can never be answered.

The Boer War presaged the end of the British Empire, but WWI doomed it. Britain spent its future on the Great War, and was finally exhausted by WWII. America’s Boer War equivalent was Vietnam, which demonstrated to the world that we were not invincible, and two decades of war in Southwest Asia have taken our treasure and our resolve but left our enemies standing for another, bigger round. Only the devil is truly satisfied by war.