SOURCE: “Lessons of the Great War,” in Commentary, Vol. 108, No. 3, October, 1999, pp. 48-52.

In the following essay, Kagan responds to Ferguson's arguments in The Pity of War concerning the length and resolution of World War I and Ferguson's counterfactual assertions.

In August 1914, the Central Powers—Germany, Austria-Hungary, and their lesser allies—went to war against Russia, France, Great Britain, and their lesser allies. The Great War, as contemporaries called it, World War I to those who lived through its horrible successor a few decades later, raged for more than four years, doing awful damage. Battle casualties alone mounted to 4 million dead and 8.3 million wounded among the Central Powers and 5.4 million dead and 7 million wounded among their opponents, while further millions of civilians died, either from the war itself or from causes arising out of it.

Among the casualties, too, were the German, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Turkish empires. America...