I will go back to 1913 and offer the failure of Great Britain to clearly let France and Germany know whether it would honour the Entente Cordial and so precipitated the First World War, the First War could have been prevented by being clear either way, the Germans assumed the British would try to stay out and so felt they could safely invade Belgium, had the British been clear the Germans wouldn't have started WW1 (equally if the British had told the French a decade earlier we would cover them they wouldn't have done their level best to provoke the war prior).
As it was when the Germans asked what the British position in the event of war the UK language was uncommited diplomatically despite its treaty obligations, much like the US with Saddam Hussain and Kuwait a century later
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