Review: What led to World War IBut it really didn't matter whether Serbia accepted or rejected the ultimatum, Fromkin says. Austria had decided to go to war against the Balkan kingdom, regardless of its response. The ultimatum served to Serbia, deliberately worded to elicit a rejection by any nation prizing its own independence, had been drafted two weeks before the murder of the Archduke. The assassination was only a convenient excuse.
"The Hapsburg leaders wanted to destroy Serbia before the assassination. They would have launched their campaign not in 1914, but in 1912 or 1913, had they not been blocked," Fromkin writes. "The opinion of Europe had stood in their way, as did the fear of Russia and as did the lack of German support."
However intense Austria's urgency to crush Serbia, the fragile Empire would not have embarked without German support on a military adventure that almost surely would draw Russia, France, and Britain onto the battlefield. And Germany, regardless of the Kaiser's erratic pacifism, wanted that war as badly, precisely to provoke the Russians into entering the battlefield. Why?
Even as Austria was afraid of Serbia, Germany -- especially its chief of the Great General Staff, Helmuth von Moltke (known as Moltke the Younger) -- was anxious about Russia.
"The ultimatum served to Serbia, deliberately worded to elicit a rejection by any nation prizing its own independence"
Now why does that sentence sound so familiar? Guess NATO and Clinton learned something from history after all.
Germany provokes war with Britian, France, Russia because the Field Marshal is anxious about Russia. Well, now that that is settled, ....