Originally Posted by
Burney
Hence 'at least in the short term,'. Of course we'd have had to fight eventually. However, we needn't have done so when we did. Indeed, Germany didn't expect us to do so. Alternatively, we could quite easily have committed on a purely naval basis, blockaded Germany and - as was shown in the course of War itself - there was nothing they could have done about it. However, we didn't. We fought on the basis of principle. Germany had violated Belgian neutrality and on that principle, we went to war.
By the way, not every historian agrees. Niall Ferguson called our decision to intervene 'the biggest error in modern history'. He also points out that the argument that we had to intervene to secure the Channel ports is rather undermined by the fact that we had lived with a similar situation during the Napoleonic Wars whereby Europe was under his sway, the Channel Ports were all in his hands, but we didn't send land forces until we were properly prepared (which we blatantly weren't in 1914). Our navy was immensely powerful and dominant in 1914 - vastly more so, in fact than it was in 1800. We could easily have sat safely behind our navy and let Europe get on with slaughtering one another. We didn't, however, because of principle.