In the enjoyable but somewhat problematic The End Is Nigh, Robert Crowcroft aims to show not merely that British foreign policy in the 1930s was disastrous, but that there was an alternative that could have preserved the power of the British Empire. If the United Kingdom had stepped back from entanglement in Europe, he argues, Germany and the Soviet Union could have been pitted against each at an earlier stage to her own advantage. The result is a highly readable but somewhat perplexing account of the interaction between domestic politics and foreign policy in Britain in the years to 1940. The perplexity arises, perhaps, from one of the factors that adds to the readability. Detailed historiographical discussion is sacrificed in the interests of maintaining a fast-paced narrative. Therefore, while Crowcroft seems to court controversy, it remains unclear exactly with whom or with what he is actually arguing. It is striking, too, that Maurice Cowling, a pioneer of the high-politics approach that Crowcroft favors, receives only two passing mentions. A clear picture of the existing scholarship does not emerge from these pages.

One can appreciate Crowcroft's authorial dilemma, in that he seems to be aiming in part at a popular audience who might feel some impatience with lengthy discussions of the past squabbles of historians. The dustjacket presents the book as a challenge to “the dominant Churchillian narrative,” and it is true that a version of that legend still has considerable purchase outside the academy. Crowcroft says that he is offering a “cynical” account in which politicians “think constantly of their own self-interest” (x). Yet this is exactly what Churchill alleged of his own enemies, sometimes on the basis of distortions of their positions. There is a notorious index entry in the first volume of Churchill's war memoirs (albeit he did not actually write the words himself): “Baldwin, Rt. Hon Stanley . . . confesses putting party before country” (Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 1, The Gathering Storm [1949], 697). Of course, Churchill presented himself as having risen above squalid ambition, but generations of historians have worked to show how he, too, trimmed his sails to the prevailing winds. So the notion that politicians exploited foreign policy questions for political gain, while indisputably true, does not feel like much of a discovery.

Crowcroft's contention that Britain's decline could have been avoided is highly debatable, even were it granted that the preservation of British power was axiomatically a desirable thing. Given that all European empires collapsed virtually simultaneously within thirty years of World War II, it seems doubtful that even the soundest statecraft in the age of appeasement could have turned Britain into an exception. Crowcroft can, however, be forgiven his excursions into counterfactual history. The topic begs for it. Even stalwart defenders of Neville Chamberlain are forced to argue that if he had not acted as he did the outcome would have been worse. Indeed, even if Crowcroft's wider claims are not granted, it is possible to sympathize with the view that Munich secured the worst of all possible worlds. It was not merely that Hitler was allowed to have his way; it was that Britain and France lent their imprimatur to the sacrifice of Czechoslovakia, helping convince the Soviets that they were being encircled and thus paving the way for the Nazi-Soviet pact.

Why did Chamberlain insist on putting his name to a formal agreement when, by his own confession, he “didn't care two hoots whether the Sudetens were in the Reich or out of it” (116)? Crowcroft notes, “he was merely concerned with how changes were made” (116, emphasis original), but he fails to draw out the implications of this. Chamberlain's commitment was to the rules-based order that Hitler was so desperate to overthrow; he could put up with the substance of any arrangement as long as it appeared that Britain had been consulted. What the prime minister could not contemplate was (to quote Lloyd George's Mansion House Speech during the Agadir crisis) seeing his country treated “as if she were of no account in the Cabinet of Nations” (Times, 22 July 1911). The Führer, for his part, could not tolerate being forced to treat other nations with even notional respect, which is why he was so angry with the outcome of Munich in spite of having been given (in substantive terms) everything he wanted.

The most puzzling aspect of the book, though, is why Crowcroft thinks that anything might have been different. That is to say, if politicians were really the self-seeking creatures that his model suggests, why should they been expected to exercise the wise statesmanship of the kind that he retrospectively urges upon them? There are some hints that their condition was not necessarily one that affects all public officials at whatever place and time, but rather was an artifact of a particular historical moment. In the end, the scholarly reader's chief frustration comes not through disagreement with Crowcroft's more contentious points but in reaction to his underdevelopment of an argument that could potentially have led to a profitable discussion.