This Sound Familiar?

“Like many of his contemporaries at the turn of the century, he thought large-scale war between great powers was obsolete...surely civilization had progressed beyond that point in a new century, when nations were more and more dependent upon one another for commerce and common sense had made such nightmares ludicrous.”

Now, you may be thinking of a certain President-elect saying/thinking that but, in truth, it was...Winston Churchill, in 1900!

And, of course, he developed a different concept a few years later:

In political exile following World War I, he warned of the rise of dictatorships in Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain and the Soviet Union, so much so that his critics, who did not want to think anymore about great confrontations, called him a warmonger. When he denounced the agreement reached at Munich in 1938, he warned that there could “never be friendship between the British democracy and the Nazi power.” ...

...Like Lincoln, he saw the importance of bolstering public morale, and he understood how deadly it was to talk of peace deals when the nation was losing. “We shall go on and we shall fight it out,” he declared. “And if at last the long story is to end, it were better it should end, not through surrender, but only when we are rolling senseless on the ground.” No one doubted him when he promised to die with pistol in hand fighting the Nazis in the streets of London.

These were the qualities that made Britons choose him over other men, and to follow him in a desperate struggle against the greatest odds.