This review ignores the central assertion Buchanan makes, and significantly distorts his thesis. He does not blame World War II on Churchill–although he does spend a significant amount of critiquing an imperfect man whom neoconservatives have turned, for rhetorical reasons, into an Ozymandias. And we all know how he turned out. It might have been useful actually to cite Buchanan’s argument–you could have made space for it by leaving out the praise of that embittered anti-Catholic opportunist, Hitchens–which was this: The Entente, after winning a morally ambiguous war, cast themselves as moral heroes, in part using the language of Woodrow Wilson. In fact, they behaved with great Machiavellianism, trying to cripple Germany. But they were insufficiently ruthless, just as they had been insufficiently high-minded. In other words, they were stupid Machiavellians–worthy of the Bush administration. They wounded the beast, and left it alive. Then they surrounded it with weak nations of dubious legitimacy. Knowing just how cynically they had behaved, they lacked the moral courage to resist a revived Germany. The great tragedy, of course, is that Germany was led not by a reasonable nationalist with satiable demands–as the appeasers believed–but by a murderous sociopath. (Buchanan does NOT pass over lightly Hitler’s barbarism, as the libel-happy Hitchens suggests.) Eager to avoid the errors of August 1914, the bumblers in Britain perpetrated Munich 1938. They compounded the error by drawing the wrong line in the sand, cynically pretending to defend a Poland they could not, would not, and later on did not, protect. Poland was literally thrown to the wolves for the sake of rallying British opinion, Buchanan argues, and that was done by Chamberlain, not Churchill. What Buchanan argues is that Chamberlain should have pressed Poland to accede to Hitler’s territorial demands, and become a client state–even as France and Britain armed to the teeth in their own defense. In the event, Poland was sacrificed (1/4 of its population died in that war), which served the purpose of… buying time for France and Britain to rearm (the Phony War). And Hitler gained an alliance treaty with Stalin, freeing up his armies to concentrate on overrunning most of Western Europe. It doesn’t take a paleocon, much less a moral amnesiac, to recognize the folly of such a policy. Anyone who cares about the Poles (Hitchens was mocking them even as Communist thugs murdered Solidarity priests) should be sympathetic to this argument. Of course, Hitchens has never forgiven the Poles for beating Trotsky in 1919. Why a brilliant, tradition-minded Catholic like Mr. Kimball should be siding with a vicious evangelizing atheist like Hitchens over an honorable, honest fellow Catholic like Pat is one of the mysteries of the putrefying conservative movement.