Each week, The Gaggle Book Club recommends a book for Gagglers to read and—most important—uploads a pdf version of it.

Our practice is that we do not vouch for the reliability or accuracy of any book we recommend. Still less, do we necessarily agree with a recommended book's central arguments. However, any book we recommend will be of undoubted interest and intellectual importance.

Today's book club selection is Patrick J. Buchanan’s "Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World." Published in 2008, Buchanan's book argues that Great Britain’s involvement in both World War I and World War II was not only unnecessary but catastrophic — not just for Britain, but for Western civilization as a whole.

Patrick J. Buchanan is a paleoconservative American political commentator, historian, journalist and speechwriter, having worked for presidents Nixon and Reagan. Buchanan also ran for president in 1992, 1996 and 2000. Following the end of the Cold War, he emerged as one of America's most vigorous and cogent opponents of foreign military interventions.

In this book, Buchanan delves into history to find examples of ruinous and foolish wars waged on ill-thought out moralistic grounds that led to ruin, penury and ultimately strategic defeat for the powers that rushed into those wars.

According to Buchanan, Britain’s entry into the World War I against Germany over the issue of the violation of Belgian neutrality was not only unnecessary but a strategic blunder. Britain emerged from the war in a much weakened condition. Entry into World War II was also unnecessary, and even more ruinous, for it led to the destruction of the British Empire. The two wars together, Buchanan argues, precipitated the decline of the West: decolonization, Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and the rise of Communist China.

Buchanan claims that Britain’s issuance of a guarantee to Poland in March 1939 was one of the greatest strategic errors in British history. The fate of Danzig and the Polish corridor involved no British national interests. Without the British guarantee, Poland would have had to make the necessary concessions to Germany, and Britain would have avoided a war with Germany that it lacked the means to fight. Hitler posed no threat to the British Empire. To the contrary: Hitler wanted an alliance with Britain. His ambitions were limited to Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.

Buchanan argues that Hitler's remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936 was a defensive move. Hitler sought to reassert sovereignty over Germany's own territory. Moreover, in light of France's especially since France's mutual assistance pact with the USSR, Hitler was well within his rights to secure Germany's backyard in order to pre-empt a possible French invasion. While Hitler's move may have dealt a blow to the Versailles treaty, which in any case was inherently unjust, it was not necessarily a step toward wider aggression.

When it comes to the 1938 Anschluss with Austria, Buchanan argues that almost all Austrians greeted the move with wild enthusiasm. Moreover, Buchanan asks, what did it have to do with England and France? It was a matter to be settled to be settled among the Germans and the Austrians.

Not surprisingly, Buchanan is a big fan of Neville Chamberlain. He argues that the much-maligned British prime minister was pursuing responsible statecraft in seeking to avoid war between Great Britain and Germany. Buchanan is at his most forceful when he defends Chamberlain's performance at Munich. He argues that the German-speaking Sudetens were genuinely oppressed by the newly-created Czechoslovak state, and that Britain had no treaty obligation to defend the territorial integrity of Czechoslovakia. The Munich agreement, in Buchanan’s view, was the high point of interwar peace diplomacy: it prevented the outbreak of war and honored national self-determination. Churchill’s denunciation of Munich, on the other hand, served to destroy appeasement as a viable policy, and led to Britain’s foolish rush to war one year later.

Hitler's demand for the Sudetenland was not an unreasonable one, according to Buchanan, as was his insistence that Danzig be returned to Germany and that Germany be allowed to build a corridor across the Polish Corridor. Poland's flat refusal to accede to Germany's demands was reckless and irresponsible; however, Britain's blanket guarantee only served to encourage Polish intransigence. In the absence of the guarantee, Poland would have had to make some territorial adjustments, but war would have been avoided. The guarantee ensured world war.

Buchanan reserves his most fierce criticism for Winston Churchill, portraying him not as a heroic wartime leader but as one of the principal architects of unnecessary bloodshed and imperial decline. Buchanan sees Churchill as a man with a lifelong affinity for war. He portrays him as a glory-seeker who exaggerated threats, distrusted diplomacy and saw conflict as a tool for maintaining British imperial supremacy.

Buchanan takes Churchill to task for helping to push Great Britain into World War I, the terrible event that set off a chain of disasters culminating in World War II. Buchanan also blames Churchill for supporting the harsh Treaty of Versailles, which stoked German nationalism and led to the rise of Nazism. Buchanan is also harshly critical of Churchill's refusal to consider Hitler's peace overtures, which the German leader made following his early victories in 1939–40. Hitler admired the British Empire, and wanted to forge a partnership with it.

More controversially, Buchanan argues that Hitler was largely driven by anti-Communism, and that Communism posed a greater threat to Western civilization than Nazism ever did. Buchanan denounces Churchill for his cozy relationship with Stalin, and for presiding over the division of Europe and the enslavement of Eastern Europe behind the Iron Curtain.

Churchill was instrumental in getting Great Britain into World War II, a war it couldn't win without appeasing the Soviet Union and the United States. It led bankruptcy for Great Britain and the loss of its empire. led to decolonization. Worse: it had to endure becoming junior partner in the enforcement of a Pax Americana.

Patrick J. Buchanan’s "Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War" is a provocative, entertainingly-written, revisionist history questioning many of the shibboleths of World War II. Neo-conservatives continually invoke World War II as the exemplar of the necessary war that had a successful outcome. As Buchanan shows, those claims are the furthest from the truth.