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When China finally wins her independence then legitimate foreign trading interests will enjoy more opportunities than ever before. The power of production and consumption of 450,000,000 people is not a matter that can remain the exclusive interest of the Chinese, but one that must engage the many nations. Our millions of people, once really emancipated, with their great latent productive possibilities freed for creative activity in every field, can help improve the economy as well as raise the cultural level of the whole world. Mao Zedong, July 13, 1936.Under WTO rules, America faces a policy dilemma.The per capita income disparity between itself and China sends jobs to China, but rising Chinese income–which slows the job drain–raises China’s aggregate national wealth and threatens US economic world dominance. The entire affair may turn out to be, as Omar Bradley might have said, the wrong trade war in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong enemy. Here’s a freeze-frame of the process:A NEGOTIATING DILEMMANegotiating skill is widely admired in China and one of its great practitioners, Xi Zhongxun–a civil war general at seventeen and provincial governor at twenty-three–would ride into the hills alone and emerge with entire rebel armies trotting behind him. Mao compared him to a famous negotiator in Dream of The Red Mansions and Xi coached his son, Jinping, until his death in 2002. Piquantly, Xi Junior’s first major negotiation is with an America’s leader who, by his own admission, is a great negotiator. This summarises the current state of play.Xi is offering to reshuffle China’s trade preferences if Trump publicly recognizes China as a peer–a fellow Great Power. Vice Premier Liu He spelled out Xi’s terms:All punitive, non-WTO tariffs, embargoes, and bans must be lifted before the agreement is finalized.All conditions in the agreement must apply equally to both parties.Xi’s original 2018 offer may be embellished but not substantively changed.China has twenty years to implement the terms of the agreement.Xi is offering Trump a tactical win in exchange for a strategic victory: If Trump fails to reach agreement, he dims his reelection hopes but, if he agrees to Xi’s terms and reverses his existing embargoes, he recognizes China as a peer and damages American credibility with the world.Remember that US officials repeatedly warned allies that dealing with Huawei endangered their security ties. If Trump withdraws its ban on Huawei, governments like Australia’s and New Zealand’s (both of which depend disproportionately on China’s good will and both of which capitulated and insulted China), will look like ungrateful weaklings and fools.COSTS AND BENEFITSAmerica is only China’s #3 trading partner (after the EU and ASEAN), though neither nation is a big trader: America’s trade accounts for only 26% of her GDP and China’s accounts for 37%, compared to 86% of Europe’s. And China’s economy is much bigger than America’s and growing much faster.Chinese imports in 2018 were 18.7% of GDP; US imports were 14.6% of GDP.Since this contest started, China has been reducing her reliance on trade with America (exports to the US fell 4.8% in 1H 2019) and increasing reliance on other trading partners.ASEAN replaced the US as China’s second-largest export market last year and the signing of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership later this year will boost the area’s trade significantly, while trade with Belt and Road countries is rising 17.2% annually.Exports to the EU rose 14.2% in 2018 and, though the EU-China Bilateral Investment Agreement was not due to come into force until next year, China has already granted all its benefits to European investors without demanding reciprocity.In Bloomberg’s worst-case scenario, China’s US trade would fall by 0.8% of GDP, or $126 billion, and US trade would fall by 0.5%, leaving the global pecking order unchanged. However, since Xi warned China in 2016 to prepare for this possibility–and since the Chinese heed their presidents’ words–the cost may be less severe than Bloomberg anticipates. Some mitigating factors:Huawei’s YOY handset shipments rose 50% in H1 2019 while Apple’s fell 30% and Samsung’s dropped 8%.Huawei has 65% of the world’s 5G equipment market. All four of the UK's wireless providers (EE, O2, Three, Vodafone) are using Huawei for their 5G networks.Two-thirds of the largest exporters in China are foreign-owned.There are thousands of US Corporations in China and Boeing sells more airplanes in China than anywhere else in the world and Walmart produces more goods from China than any other company in the world.US companies in China sell $600 billion annually into the Chinese domestic market–$100 billion more than China exports to the US–and generate net profits of $50+ billion annually.Tesla, Boeing, BMW of America, Exxon Mobil and Wal-Mart have announced new investments and factories in China since the trade war began and Japanese, South Korean, and European companies are expanding their footprints because their Chinese sales are growing six percent annually and American sales are flat.Of the production facilities operated by Apple's top suppliers, 357 are in China and 63 are in America and, next month, Apple will shif manufacturing of its new Mac Pro from Texas to China.The average Chinese tariff on US-made products is now 20.7%, compared to 6.7% on competing products from WTO-compliant countries.151 countries have filed WTO complaints against the US and 85 have filed against the EU, but only 43 have filed against China.By shortening its negative list for foreign investment from 63 items to 48 last month, China widened access to its primary, secondary and tertiary sectors and detailed 22 opening-up measures in finance, transportation, professional services, infrastructure, energy, resources and agriculture.China’s $7 trillion domestic consumer market has passed the US’s $6.94 trillion domestic market.Investors are flooding into China’s new Nasdaq-style high-tech board shares, making more startup capital available.Chinese cross-border e-commerce consumers bought $100 billion of goods from foreign sellers in 2017 and $128 billion in 2018.China Mobile, with one billion customers, awarded 34% of its 5G equipment contract to Ericsson and Nokia and 5% to state-owned ZTE.Since 2007 China’s global current-account surplus has fallen from 10% of GDP to 1.4%, yet America’s deficit is unchanged.FUN FACTSThe US Air Force plans to award China's DJI a contract for consumer UAVs for its 11th Security Forces Squadron at Joint Base Andrews, Md.The Holy See urged Chinese priests to get with the program and register with the Communist Gov't. It is possible that the next Pope will be a Chinese...Communist. I kid you not.THE CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONSTwenty years ago Samuel Huntington observed, “Civilizations grow because they have an instrument of expansion, a military, religious, political, or economic organization that accumulates surplus and invests it in productive innovations and they decline when they stop the application of surplus to new ways of doing things. In modern terms we say that the rate of investment decreases. This happens because the social groups controlling the surplus have a vested interest in using it for non-productive but ego-satisfying purposes which distribute the surpluses to consumption but do not provide more effective methods of production.”As this chart makes clear, the social groups controlling America’s surplus used it for non-productive, ego-satisfying purposes and distributed the surpluses to consumption but did not provide more effective methods of production:America cut R&D investment, shuttered its great corporate labs and fell from first to thirty-first in the world’s education rankings since 1974, while China did the opposite (that’s why, in the movie Crazy Rich Asians a father urges his kids to finish their dinner saying, “Think of all the starving children in America”). By mid-2021 every Chinese will have a home, a job, plenty of food, education, safe streets, health and old age care and there will be more suicides and more homeless, poor, hungry children and imprisoned people in America than in China. In absolute numbers.BITCHING AND MOANINGThough Trump charges that China infringes American IP rights, China's payments of licensing fees and royalties for the use of foreign technology have reached $30 billion annually, nearly a four-fold increase over the last decade. Court filings show that China is a minor IP infringer and, domestically, China's Progress on Intellectual Property Rights has been swift and substantial. Complaints about ‘forced’ contributions of IP to joint ventures are simply daft: US companies sign them voluntarily to make profits and open markets.SUBSIDIESThe US Government spends $4.5 billion annually to subsidize a cotton crop that’s sold for $6 billion and would otherwise be priced at $12 billion, allowing US growers to profitably export three quarters of their output and to control 40% of the world cotton trade. What the US loses in textile manufacturing it regains in subsidized cotton exports, high returns on investment from its overseas textile mills, and low-cost consumer cotton goods. The subsidy also ruins the economies of the world’s poorest nations. There are dozens of examples of this practice.There is an economic basis behind America’s antagonistic militancy towards China: the US won both previous world wars primarily by its war-time productive power, a fact that has not been forgotten by US policy-planners. While US manufacturing base has been seriously eroded by neo-liberal global trade in the last two decades, the prospect of a shooting war with China will relocate much of the lost manufacturing back to the US in short order. Regional Integration Without Empire. By Henry C.K. LiuTIMELINEChina is lowering tariffs and opening domestic markets to attract multinationals and foreign products in order to force domestic companies to innovate, which is why it is the world’s largest recipient of foreign direct investment. The most exciting activity has been on the hottest battleground, technology. Here’s a timeline:August, 2012, Huawei’s CEO, “It is out of strategic concern that we have decided to develop our own device OS. If they forbid us from using Android and Windows Phone 8 one day, will we be caught empty-handed and have nothing to do? When they refuse to sell things to us, our products can also be used as backups even though the quality is not as good as theirs.”August, 2015: US blocks Intel’s Xeon and Xeon Phi export license fearing their use in Chinese supercomputers.March 2016. China unveils the world's fastest computer, built entirely with domestic chips and IP.April, 2016: President Xi: “Core technology controlled by others is our greatest hidden danger.”September, 2017: Huawei unveils its Kirin 970 chipset with built-in AI, dedicated neural processing, 5.5 billion transistors/sq. cm., 25x performance and 50x efficiency of ARM’s quad-core Cortex-A73 CPU cluster, eliminating the need for optical fibre to link function blocks, drastically reducing cost, power consumption, weight & size of towers.December, 2017: China publishes 641 AI patents compared to America’s 13o in the preceding year, according to the US National Science Foundation, (NSF).January 3, 2018 “There are only two truly vertically integrated mobile OEMs who have full control over their silicon: Apple and Huawei. Huawei is more integrated due to in-house modem development. Huawei has been the one company to be competitive with current leader, Qualcomm”.January 18, 2018. China becomes the world’s largest producer of scientific research papers, 20% of total global output. (NSF)February 2, 2018: Intel allies with Tsinghua Unigroup Spreadtrum to develop 5G solutions using Intel’s XMM 8000 modems and Spreadtrum’s application processors targeting 5G modem chips for Chinese handset market by 2H19. Qualcomm shares fall 2 cents.February 14, 2018: US Congress labels Huawei “an arm of the Chinese government,” bans it from bidding on US government contracts.March 5, 2018: China’s IC industry grows 21% annually, from $13.6 billion in 2013 to $30 billion.March 11, 2018. Huawei owns 22.8% of 5G technology IP, the highest of any company in the world.March 22, 2018. China’s IP office received the highest number of patent applications in 2017, a record total of 1.38 million, followed by the USPTO (607,000), Japan (318,000), South Korea (205,000), and the European Patent Office (167,000). Those top five offices account for 84.5 percent of the world’s total recorded patent applications.Mar 27, 2018: Trump, Treasury block China investment in US tech firms, stocks, preventing Chinese investment in emerging technologies.April 16, 2018: US prohibits transactions with ZTE Corporation for seven years on the grounds that ZTE violated its 2017 Iran settlement agreement.April 26, 2018: Qualcomm begins layoffs.April 26, 2018: Huawei Criminally Investigated For Iran sales.May 1, 2018: Chinese partners take over ARM’s operations in China. ARM’s chip blueprint is used in ninety of mobile devices and Apple, Samsung, Huawei, Qualcomm, Broadcom and MediaTek license its technology to develop chipsets for smartphone, tablets, wearables and connected devices.July 8, 2018. Average senior managerial salaries reach $216,000 in China, competitive with Silicon Valley.July 12, 2018. More than three hundred senior Taiwanese engineers move to mainland chip makers, joining a thousand who already relocated.July 9, 2018 Chinese chipmaker Hygon manufactures Zen-based x86 CPUs under a licensing agreement it signed with AMD in 2016 that earned AMD $293 million in cash and will continue paying royalties on unit sales.August 28, 2018. USTR Section 301 reports China’s ‘unfair technology transfer regime’ and concentrates on transfers achieved through joint ventures, licensing agreements and Chinese purchases of foreign companies—all of which occurred because the foreign companies wanted to make the deals.September 3, 2018: Huawei unveils Kirin 980 CPU, the world's first commercial 7nm system-on-chip (SoC), with 40 percent less power consumption compared to 10nm systems and 20% more bandwidth and 22% lower latency than Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 845. Its L5 frequency GPS receiver delivers 10cm. positioning.September 5, 2018. China’s front-end fabs accounted for 16 percent of the world's semiconductor capacity and will capture 20 percent in 2020.September 15, 2018. China controls one third of 5G patents and has twice as many installations operating as the rest of the world combined.September 21, 2018. China has twelve of the world's top fifty IC design houses and 21% of global IC design revenues.October 2, 2018. Chinese research makes up 18.6% of global STEM peer-reviewed papers, ahead of America’s 18%.October 14, 2018. Huawei ships 7 nm Ascend 910 chipset for data centers, twice as powerful as Nvidia’s v100 and the first AI IP chip series to natively provide optimal TeraOPS per watt in all scenarios.October 8, 2018: Taiwan’s Foxconn moves its major semiconductor maker and five IC design companies to Jinan, China.October 22, 2018. China becomes world leader in venture capital, ahead of the US and almost twice the rest of the world’s $53.4 billion YTD. Crunchbase says the world’s entrepreneurial ecosystem is now driven by China.Oct 25 2018. Nokia confirms 'thousands' of job losses over the next two years after third-quarter profits drop.Oct. 31, 2018. Chinese airline reservations to the US dropped 42 percent for the first week of October and 102,000 fewer Chinese received business, leisure and educational visas from May through September, a 13 percent drop YOY.November 2, 2018. “The most valuable speech recognition companies, machine translation companies, drone companies, computer vision companies and facial recognition companies are all Chinese.”– Kaifu Lee.November 3, 2018. Apple announces it will not, and Huawei announces it will ship 5G handsets in 2019.November 17, 2018. Kai-Fu Lee said his investment firm may scale back in the U.S. and try to lure US talent to China instead of investing in America.Dec 6, 2018. Canada's Ministry of Justice announces arrest of Huawei’s CFO Meng adding, "She is sought for extradition by the United States.”December 7, 2018. 5G requires more base stations than existing networks and China has ten times more than the US: 5.3 sites per ten 10 square miles vs. 0.4 in the US.December 10, 2018. Governments and secret services in the non-Western world begin equipping themselves exclusively with Huawei to protect the confidentiality of their communications.December 17, 2018. By a vote of 121-8, the UN General Assembly approves the Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and other People Working in Rural Areas, formally extending human rights protections to farmers whose seed sovereignty is threatened by government and corporate IP practices. The United States, United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Hungary, Israel, and Sweden vote ‘No.’December 21, 2018. Foxconn plans $9bn China chip project amid trade warDecember 22, 2018. China's Fourth Paradigm sells a second-generation AI product, a suite of AI software tools and a customised chip to process its algorithms, to the world's biggest banks to run complex algorithms on their data to detect fraud, identify customers and perform other analysis without needing highly trained engineers. (The world’s biggest, most profitable banks are Chinese)December 24, 2018. Chinese imports post a 14.6% rise for the first eleven months of 2018 to exceed US$2 trillion, a record, making China the most powerful trading nation by volume and dollar value.January 1, 2019. In 2018, China accounted for $52 billion in sales for Apple, and is its third-largest market. For Qualcomm, the figure is $15 billion, or about 65 percent of its total sales. Others include Intel (24 percent), Micron Technology (51 percent), and Texas Instruments (44 percent).January 7, 2019. Huawei Unveils the Industry’s Highest-Performance ARM-based CPU, the Kunpeng 920, a 7nm CPU that boosts the development of computing in big data, distributed storage, and ARM-native application scenarios by 20%.February 21, 2019. Huawei gear tests out as 30% more energy efficient than competitors and cuts connectivity cost-per-bit for by 80-90% compared to 4G. Its 5G base station is 40% of the size and weight of competing models and can be installed by two people in hours.THE PAST AS PRELUDEMidway in the sixteenth century China became the great repository of the early modern world's newly discovered wealth in silver. Long a participant in international maritime trade, China experienced the consequences of the greatly enlarged patterns in world trade. In that commerce China was essentially a seller of high-quality craft manufactures. Other countries could not compete either in quality or price. The colonies of the New World and the entire Mediterranean sphere of trade, from Portugal and Spain to the Ottoman Empire, began to complain that the influx of Chinese goods undermined their economies. F.W. Mote, Imperial China 900-1800.

I’ve written about the very specific context of international football, relative to the club game here:Is the World Cup in Russia the beginning of the end for international football? (see below, also).But before I get there it is worth looking at your question more specifically. Here are some thoughts:a) The big stars are exhausted through overuse in the regular season. By the time they get to a World Cup or Euros they are generally unable to peak again and many are also carrying injuries accrued over 50+ club games.b) Basic international football tends to suit either skilful individualists in a purple patch of form or under-exposed players benefiting from a novelty factor and emotional or physical freshness. In general players bought after summer tournament fireworks tend to be very poor value for money buys. And most flop relative to the fee paid.c) Some players are just better suited to the compressed streaks of form of cup/tournament football. They struggle to be consistent week to week over a developing league season.d) Some players play with better players for their countries but most big team players excel alongside a better cast of international stars at their clubs. And better players as teammates tend to lift performance levels.Is the World Cup in Russia the beginning of the end for international football?In the era of the Champions League the lustre of international competition is well and truly dimmed. And growing dimmer by the day.By Greg GordonOn 2017–03–28Russian president Vladimir Putin holding the FIFA World Cup Trophy at a pre-tournament ceremony in Moscow, September 2017fooGrowing up there was no contest. Whether it was the World Cup or the Euros, Home Internationals or a high profile friendly there was nothing to capture the imagination like a big game between well-matched countries, especially under floodlights.But in the era of Sky and the Champions League the lustre of international competition is well and truly dimmed.This reflects the fact that the elite club game and international football are two very different beasts, with different stresses and strains.Club football is the domain of the three year planner, the ideologue or the empire builder.International football needs quick, pragmatic thinkers and expedient planners who can keep things simple and build rapport amongst players that are unfamiliar to each other.The reality is that, as a boss, it is easier to build a team mentality and harness all your resources towards a primary focus in club football than it is at international level — because you have the time, resources and opportunities to do so.Familiarity alone, among players that play and train together every day, will see to that and make the play more polished, slicker and quicker.Also, there are slightly different tactical conventions in international football than in the club game. Firstly, in terms of where teams set their defensive line on the field and also secondly, where and how they press the ball when they are trying to win it back.In international football a load of teams, and I am guessing the majority here, err on the side of caution and defend with a deeper block — a lower lying line.This is simply because no international side can ever be as well drilled as a comparable club side and they have to keep it simple by necessity to prosper.Phillipe Coutinho tussles with Alexis Sanchez, Brazil vs Chile, International Friendly, 29th March, 2015, Emirates Stadium, London © Anish Morarji.The second thing is that the general trend in international football is that most teams are happy to let their opponents have uncontested possession in their own half and they then only press up as a unit when the opponent enters their half.This is because the front six at international level are generally better than the back fours in terms of their ability to effect results. As a consequence of this international defences are far more safety first in mentality than comparable club sides.And this is a crucial point, because the team without the ball controls the tempo of the game — and not the other way round as you’d probably think as a fan. This is because they can hurry opponents in possession, sit off them, keep a tight compact block, show them wide, dive into tackles, break up the play with fouls, and so on.And the team with the ball will always have to work out how they want to play as a response to that.Jose Mourinho apparently has a seven point plan for big games. It is a plan that could have been written specifically for international football. Specifically so as every international away game is literally played in a foreign country:1. The game is won by the team who commits fewer errors.2. Football favours whoever provokes more errors in the opposition.3. Away from home, instead of trying to be superior to the opposition, it’s better to encourage their mistakes.4. Whoever has the ball is more likely to make a mistake.5. Whoever renounces possession reduces the possibility of making a mistake.6. Whoever has the ball has fear.7. Whoever does not have it is thereby stronger.As a more tentative, less drilled game, international football tends to have a slower tempo — even if the dynamic action on the field (that leads to goals and chances) is nearly as fast as club football. The build-up is more tentative, less complex, more hesitant because the context is simply unfamiliar in relative terms to club football. And in tournament football, of course, at the end of a long hard European season, all the biggest stars are exhausted through simple over-use.For international managers, the players come together intermittently and unlike club bosses, they can’t dip into the transfer or loan market to solve any imbalances in their side nor indeed can they impose a style of play or complex tactics on an international squad if they don’t have players who can enact it. The football at international level is always a compromised solution by definition.The exceptions are nations that have a dominant national character and style of play that all native players understand and have been schooled in. The Dutch 4–3–3 or the current German side are good examples. But the teams that stand out in their style are exceptions to the general rule.And then there’s an issue of perception.Club football finds its natural pecking order in a dressing room but at international level everyone is sailing under a flag of convenience and operating to their own agendas.Some are patriots, some are playing for profile or a transfer move, others are happy to turn up but won’t put their club interests at risk for the national cause. There might also be players who are great players but can’t find a way to play together with another key man in an international squad.The preparation is unlikely to be as good or as familiar for big club players representing their country. Small things and better managers make all the difference — and the best managers and coaches are at Champions League clubs as opposed to countries for career and financial reasons.None of this encourages fast, fluent and coherent football.As an international team is thrown together and then dispersed it is hard to create a cohesive squad of subsumed egos and one common cause for a World Cup campaign, or similar.Different players come and go, there’s a gap between big games and even if the compressed phase of a finals tournament operates like a club season in miniature form, it just isn’t the same game.At club level the good teams are so good that they are virtually playing by instinct formed of endless repetition-enforcing drills and tactical concepts. This is not the case for international class players — even though their ability or football intelligence is not in dispute — there’s is a game of simply trying to make it work on the day.In comparison to the well-oiled machines of the top Champions League sides, even the likes of Germany, Spain, Brazil and France who will take the field in Russia this summer are making it up as they go along. And the difference in quality and spectacle is there for all to see.

In order of importance: their treaty obligation to Belgium, their desire to support France on both geopolitical and moral grounds, their fear of Germany, and their unwillingness to antagonise Russia.Until the end of the 19th century, Britain was generally on unfriendly terms with both France and Russia, although willing to cooperate with them on specific occasions. The Fashoda Incident of 1898 almost led to war between Britain and France; the Royal Navy mobilised and the press of both nations demanded military action - luckily the diplomats worked out a last-minute solution. British actions in Afghanistan were largely motivated by concern that Russia might conquer or vassalise that country and use it as an invasion route into British India. Germany, on the other hand, was seen by Britain as a friendly power; their interests did not conflict with those of the UK.All that changed at the start of the 20th century.German naval expansion in the first decade of the 20th century was seen by Britain as a deliberate threat to their security.First, Germany began a massive programme of naval expansion. They had 9 battleships in 1880, 12 in 1890 - but 29 in 1905, with plans for many more. Furthermore, while the public reason for their new battlefleet was to protect commerce and the new German colonies in Africa and the Pacific, they were building few gunboats and long-range cruisers. Instead their programme concentrated on short-range heavy battleships, which would only be needed to fight one possible enemy: Britain's Royal Navy. It's not surprising that the UK govenment saw this new policy as a threat. The result was a hugely expensive naval arms race.Secondly, under Kaiser Wilhelm II the German government followed a foreign policy which was seen in Britain as aggressive, bellicose and erratic. The Germans were quick to threaten war, send naval expeditions or begin preparations to mobilise their army whenever diplomatic negotiations seemed to be turning against them. In the decade leading up to WW1, Europe had hovered on the brink of total war at least three or four times - the two Morocco crises, the Bosnia crisis and the Balkan Wars - and in each case the consensus in Britain was that Germany had provoked or worsened the crisis through aggressive and bullying behaviour.(Note that I'm not arguing that Germany's actions were necessarily unjustified from their own perspective in those situations: I'm describing how they were perceived in Britain.)The Agadir Crisis in 1911 was one of several occasions when Germany used the direct threat of military force to overawe its rivals in Europe.In addition, the ideas of Social Darwinism, 'might makes right', and war as a noble profession were common in many Western countries in this era, but they were particularly attractive to many in the German intelligentsia because of Imperial Germany's conservative traditions of Prussian militarism and its authoritarian government structure. Such views formed part of the popular Western stereotype of Germans even before the First World War seemed to confirm them.The result was that by 1914, many influential people in Britain saw Germany as, to use the modern expression, a rogue state. They were militaristic, untrustworthy, aggressive, and a danger to all their neighbours.This fear of Germany led Britain to set aside its centuries of antagonism with France and form the Entente Cordiale in 1904. Even more astonishingly, Britain even concluded a similar series of agreements with its long-term enemy and ideological rival Russia in 1907. The members of the Triple Entente had almost nothing in common except for a mutual fear of Germany.The formation of the Entente was seen by many as unexpected and even unnatural due to the long history of enmity between the participants.It's important to note that the Triple Entente was not an alliance. It involved no formal or binding agreements, and imposed no legal obligations on its members. (France and Russia did have a formal alliance, signed in 1892, but that was separate and did not involve Britain.) Instead, the Entente was, as its name implies, a 'friendly understanding'. It was a statement that the three countries would seek to work together and solve their differences through negotiation rather than warfare, because they needed to maintain a common front.When the Sarajevo assassination took place, Britain did not at first see the affair as any of their business. It was recognised that Austria-Hungary was angry with Serbia, and Russia saw itself as Serbia's protector; but it was generally assumed that the two countries would back down or seek a compromise rather than actually going to war. The British Foreign Office initially assumed that Germany, like France and the UK itself, would join them in counselling moderation and trying to calm the situation down. Sir Edward Grey expended much political capital in trying to set up an international conference where a compromise might be hammered out - only to learn that the German government was deliberately sabotaging the negotiations and secretly urging Austria to take an ever-harsher line.After-effects of rioting in Sarajevo following the assassination of the Archduke. It was believed that Austria-Hungary planned to punish Serbia in order to stifle its own internal dissent: Britain's attitude at first was "Not our problem, as long as things don't get out of hand".This extract from a letter written by Sir Arthur Nicolson (the Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs) to the British ambassador in Russia on 28 July gives a good illustration of British views one week before war was declared:I can quite understand Russia not being able to permit Austria to crush Servia. I think the talk about localising the war merely means that all the Powers are to hold the ring while Austria quietly strangles Servia. This to my mind is quite preposterous, not to say iniquitous. I do not understand after the very satisfactory way in which Servia has met the Austrian requests how Austria can with any justification proceed to hostile measures against her. If she deliberately provokes war with Servia with the intention of giving her what she calls a lesson, she is, I think, acting most wrongly, for she must know very well that such action on her part would in all probability lead to a general European conflagration, with all its untold disastrous consequences.Germany has not played a very straight game at least so far as we are concerned in all this business. On two occasions we asked her to use moderating language at Vienna and we promised to support her if she did so. She contented herself with simply passing on our proposal as our proposal, which of course was not what we desired or requested, and again she brushed on one side the idea of a small conference here as being an impractical suggestion. Then Lichnowsky [the German ambassador in London] says that he is so pleased that Anglo-German co-operation seems likely to be successful. His interpretation of the word "co-operation" must be totally different from that which is usually accepted.It is no use indulging in surmises as to how much Germany knew of Austria's move before it was actually made. I know for the past two or three weeks the German Ambassador here has been exceedingly anxious and perturbed, and on more than one occasion has said to some of his colleagues that if they knew all that he did they would be equally disquieted. Moreover I cannot believe that Austria would have gone so far as she has done without having informed Germany, her ally, of her proposed procedure, and secured her promise of co-operation. [It would later be revealed that Germany was indeed informed of Austria-Hungary's plans back on 5 July and strongly encouraged them; but the British government was not aware of this at the time.]Sir Arthur Nicolson's letter goes on to say that he was concerned that Russia would see Britain's actions in this crisis as a test. If the UK did not offer its support, then Russia would be unwilling to cooperate in the future - with potentially fatal consequences for British interests in Persia and India. This does indicate another reason for British involvement in the crisis: they were afraid of the diplomatic consequences in St Petersburg if they were not seen to be standing alongside Russia.However, this perceived need for cooperation must be balanced with the fact that it was not guaranteed. Britain had no alliance or treaty with Russia; the Triple Entente was based on a cold calculation of mutual self-interest, not friendship between the countries involved. The British were nervous of Russian military strength in Asia, and were worried that if they stood aside from a Germany/Austria-v-Russia/France war, then the winner - whichever side that happened to be - would regard Britain with hostility afterwards.Some in Britain feared that if they failed to support Russia in July 1914, the consequence a few years later might be a Russian army marching down the Khyber Pass into India.A few days after the letter I quoted above, the situation had escalated and total war seemed imminent. It was at this stage that British obligations to France entered the situation.The geopolitical implications can be summed up quickly: balance of power. Germany was very strong and regarded as hostile to Britain - but the alliance of France and Russia kept German ambitions in check. If France was defeated in a war, then there would be nothing to stop Germany from imposing its will on Britain through force or threats - and if it came to open war, a Germany that controlled French resources and industry as well as its own would be unbeatable. It was generally acknowledged that Germany was more powerful than France, and the outcome of a war between them was likely to end in German victory if nobody intervened.Germany had defeated France and captured Paris in 1870. France had built fortifications and strengthened its army since then, but Germany was still much more powerful.Furthermore, British military policy for centuries had been concerned with control of the Channel ports. The British Army was comparatively tiny because the UK relied on its (very expensive!) Navy for protection instead. However a hostile power which controlled the coastline from Cherbourg to Antwerp could construct an invasion fleet and slip across the Narrow Seas under cover of night, evading the Royal Navy and invading and conquering Britain before it could react. It was for this reason that France was traditionally seen as the main enemy, and why Britain had supported the creation of a neutral, harmless Belgium on the coastline directly opposite Kent. The idea of a hostile, militaristic Germany basing its torpedo boats and submarines in Ostend or Dunkirk gave British military planners nightmares.For this reason, when it became clear that Germany was planning to attack France if the French refused to back down over their support of Russia, Britain saw its interests directly threatened. Angering Russia might make for difficulties in Asia; but a German conquest of France was an existential threat to the United Kingdom's own homeland. Not everybody in the British government, let alone the wider political Establishment, was convinced that this was in itself a reason to intervene in the war against Germany; but it was a strong factor in tilting the balance towards intervention.Moral and emotional concern for France also played a factor. It was generally accepted in Britain that they were behaving honourably; not seeking to provoke a conflict but also unwilling to back down in the face of bullying - such as Germany's 'suggestion' that France should hand over the fortress of Verdun to Germany in return for a German promise not to attack them!As mentioned, Britain had no formal treaty of alliance with France. However, since the formation of the Entente Cordiale the military staffs of the two countries had engaged in a series of discussions covering mutual defence planning. These plans were purely hypothetical in nature, and dealt with technical matters of military deployments in the event of war. British politicians had authorised the talks; but took no active part in them, leaving that to the soldiers. It came as rather a shock to the British Cabinet when they learned, a couple of days before war broke out, that the Staff conversations had been a lot more detailed and far-reaching than most of them had suspected.Worse, part of the agreement was that the French navy would concentrate its heavy ships in the Mediterranean, while the British navy covered the Atlantic and English Channel. It seemed like a sensible division of forces - but it meant that if Britain did not go to war alongside France, the French northern coasts would be left exposed to German attack until they could shift their fleet north again. Both the French ambassador in London and those of the British government who favoured intervention painted a lurid picture of German ships shelling French towns and killing helpless French women and children if Britain stood aside from war.Naval bombardment of coastal towns was the pre-WW1 equivalent of bombing civilian population centres today. This picture shows the actual German attack on Scarborough in 1914.Those of the Cabinet who opposed intervention saw this as pure emotional blackmail - but it was effective nonetheless. On 2 August the British government agreed to make a declaration that "if the German fleet comes into the Channel or through the North Sea to undertake hostile operations against French coasts or shipping the British fleet will give all the protection in its power." In other words, that was a commitment to military action in advance of the formal declaration of war. It seems likely, though, that Germany would have been willing to make an assurance that they would not perform such an operation, in order to keep Britain neutral.Finally, there was the German invasion of Belgium. Back in 1839 Britain, along with the other Powers of Europe, had signed a treaty guaranteeing Belgian neutrality. Germany's unprovoked invasion of Belgium on 3 August 1914 was a direct violation of the treaty, and thus committed Britain to war.German troops on the attack in 1914.The German Chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg, was incredulous that Britain would allow its actions to be dictated by a 75-year old treaty: "Just for a word - 'neutrality', a word which in wartime had so often been disregarded; just for a scrap of paper Great Britain was going to make war on a kindred nation who desired nothing better than to be friends with her." His injudicious comment was a gift for British propagandists: Britain was a country that could be trusted to keep its word and respect its agreements, while in Germany Realpolitik and Might Makes Right were the only watchwords, and solemn treaties were not worth the paper they were printed on.Was there in fact any validity in Bethmann-Hollweg's words? If Britain had truly desired peace, would they have ignored or found an excuse to break the 1839 Treaty of London? It's certainly possible. However, it must be said that British governments of the 19th and 20th century often expressed the view that having a reputation for trustworthiness and honesty was in itself a priceless diplomatic asset that must be carefully fostered. The result of this enlightened self-interest was that the UK simply didn't sign treaties or alliances if it thought there was any chance it might not be able to keep to them. That's why they were so careful not to give any formal commitment to France or Russia; they refused to make promises they might not be able to keep.What can be said, however, was that the German attack on Belgium was a godsend for Prime Minister Asquith. His Cabinet was hopelessly divided over intervention in the war, with several ministers resigning and more threatening to do so if he went ahead and declared war, which would bring down the government. Public opinion in the country was sharply divided; the City of London was panicky and Ireland was in turmoil. Germany's invasion of Belgium changed the situation overnight.It was a clear example of German aggression; it made the war into a question of Right and Wrong instead of mere imperial power politics; and it gave the government a formal, legal reason for Britain to intervene. The attack on Belgium allowed the government to close ranks and reunite behind the Prime Minister, and put public opinion strongly behind the war effort. Britain's ultimatum to Germany demanded that the German Army withdraw from Belgian territory and offer a guarantee that it would not violate Belgian neutrality again; it was Germany's refusal to agree to this that was the proximate cause of Britain entering the war.This cartoon (from the magazine 'Punch' published on 26 August 1914 shortly after the German destruction of Louvain) illustrates how public opinion in Britain regarded the war, and what the ordinary people believed they were fighting against. The original title was 'The Triumph of 'Culture'".