Short book review by Robert Barnes:
The War That Ended Peace: The Road to 1914.

Reveals the idiocy of elites that led to a war that scarred the world for a century to come, bringing down centuries-long empires in a mere half-decade across the continent, from the islands controlling a world so broad they say the sun never slept on it, across the six-century old family governing much of Europe to the Asian empire whose sudden collapse brought us the Mideastern wars of today, to the end of the continent with a three-century old Russian empire still reeling from its fall. The British Empire: gone. The Hapsburg empire: gone. The Ottoman Empire: gone. The Russian Empire: gone. What took three to six centuries to build, wiped out in less than half a decade. Oh, and it sowed the seeds for the Great Depression, another World War, the rise of Nazism, Fascism and Communism. The most disastrous war in world history. This book gives a glimpse at how it all came about. The greatest threat to civilization isn’t foreign nations or the weather or even the moral corruptibility of its leaders; it is the incredible incompetency of a decision-making class filled with Hubris.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17345257-the-war-that-ended-peace