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Britain Should Not Have Fought in the First World War
Intelligence Squared
The Importance of Fighting to Protect the Empire
In 1905, the foreign office's legal team reported to the government that Britain did not in fact have an obligation to defend Belgium if it were attacked by a foreign power. As Lloyd George himself said, we could in fact have slithered out of intervening in Belgium if we'd wanted to. But I would argue that nothing loosened our grip on the empire more than the fact that we had exhausted ourselves in the fields of Flanders. We all agree that Britain was weakened financially by both wars, but that's not why they went in. They were not fighting for financial gain. And at the end of the Second World War, and we should remember this, they thought the cost had been worth
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