Steiner also thoroughly explores the two tracks that Britain and France pursued in prewar Europe: appeasing Germany and attempting to build an anti-Nazi alliance.

Closely related topics that Steiner explores are anticolonialism and colonial unrest, Italian and Japanese aggression, American and Soviet efforts to influence events and politics in Europe, Stalin's Great Purges, leadership instability in France and Britain, and the Spanish Civil War.

[1] Within the context of the failure of democracy to check rising authoritarianism and the struggle of international capitalism to escape the economic malaise caused by the Great Depression, the central figure of the narrative is Hitler, and Steiner takes the reader through the steps taken to bring about armed conflict with Nazism's eastern ideological enemy, Soviet communism, and the sidelining of western ideological enemies in the west.

The second part focuses on 1938 to 1939, the beginning of overt military aggression by Germany against its neighbors, and Britain and France's flailing attempts to create an international order to oppose Hitler and their simultaneous pursuit of disastrous policies of appeasement.

Richard J. Evans has described her two volumes in the Oxford History of Modern Europe (The Lights That Failed and The Triumph of the Dark) as the "standard works" on international diplomacy between the two world wars.