[3] On the other hand, Buchanan asserts that the greatest responsibility for the breakdown in Anglo-German relations was the "Germanophobia" and zeal for the Entente Cordiale with France of the British Foreign Secretary, Edward Grey.

[4] In assessing responsibility for the course of events, Buchanan asserts that the British could have easily ended the Anglo-German naval arms race in 1912 by promising to remain neutral in a war between Germany and France.

[5][contradictory] Buchanan calls "Prussian militarism" an anti-German myth invented by certain British statesmen and that the record of Germany supports his belief that it was the least militaristic of the European Powers.

[10] Buchanan calls Hitler's foreign policy program more moderate than the war aims authorized by German Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg in the Septemberprogramm in World War I. Buchanan contends that Hitler was interested in expanding into only Eastern Europe and did not seek territory in Western Europe and Africa.

[11] Moreover, Buchanan argues that once Hitler came to power in 1933, his foreign policy was not governed strictly by Nazi ideology but was modified ad hoc by pragmatism.

"[29] Margolis wrote that neither Britain nor the United States should have fought in World War II and that it was simply wrong and stupid that millions of people died to stop the 90% German Free City of Danzig from rejoining Germany.

[29] Jonathan S. Tobin in The Jerusalem Post gave Buchanan's book a negative review and suggested the author is antisemitic and representative of a "malevolent" form of appeasement.

[30] The American writer Adam Kirsch, in The New York Sun, attacked Buchanan for using no primary sources, and for saying there was a conspiracy by historians to hide the truth about the two world wars.

[31] He also argued that Buchanan's heavy reliance on Correlli Barnett's 1972 book The Collapse of British Power as a source reflects the fact that both Buchanan and Barnett are two embittered conservatives unhappy with the way history worked out, and they prefer to talk about how much nicer history would have been if Britain had not fought in the two world wars or the United States and Britain in Iraq.

[32] The British journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft, in a review in The New York Review of Books, complained that Buchanan had grossly exaggerated the harshness of the Treaty of Versailles by observing that most historians think that Germany started World War I and that Buchanan's criticism of the British "area bombing" of cities in the war pays no attention to how limited Britain's options seemed to Churchill in 1940.

[33] Wheatcroft wrote that Buchanan cited right-wing British historians like Alan Clark, Maurice Cowling, and John Charmley when they stated that Britain should never have fought Germany or at least should have made peace in 1940, but he ignored the wider point that Clark, Cowling, and Charmley were making: they viewed the United States rather than Germany as the British Empire's main rival.

[34] The British and American writer Christopher Hitchens, in a review in Newsweek, claimed that Buchanan ignored the aggression of Imperial Germany and said Wilhelm openly encouraged Muslims to wage jihad against the Western colonial powers during World War I, conducted the Herero and Namaqua Genocide in German South-West Africa, and supported the Young Turks government while it committed the Armenian genocide.