by Patrick J. Buchanan – February 16, 1999

In “Great Contemporaries,” Winston Churchill wrote that when Britain abandoned “splendid isolation” to create the Anglo-French alliance in 1904, “only one voice was raised in discord” — the earl of Rosebury. In public, Lord Rosebury said the pact was far more likely to lead to war than peace. In private, he muttered, “Straight to war.”

Rosebury was a prophet. Britain’s plunge into World War I to honor that French alliance would bring her empire to ruin.