Identify the failures of the European powers on the eve of the First World War. In your view, what consequence should these events have on future potential conflict? Make specific reference to the effect that The Guns of August had on President Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

World War I was an imperialist war whose ultimate cause lay in the competition among the European powers for colonial possessions. The creation of Germany as a unified nation state in 1871 had destabilized the European balance of power, resulting in the need for Britain and France to ally themselves with Russia against Germany and Austria-Hungary. In the meantime Germany allied itself with the deteriorating Ottoman Empire, which had previously been a quasi-client-state of Britain. Germany hoped to solidify a connection to Asia by building the Berlin to Baghdad railway. This was opposed by Russia, whose control over the Central Asian territories that were part of its empire was threatened by the German plans.
On top of all this, little attention was paid by the Powers to the smaller nationalities which had their own plans to create unified nation states. The immediate trigger for war was an act of terrorism by a Serbian national who assassinated the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne. This in itself might not have led to war had there not already been a huge military buildup on all sides in anticipation of a major conflict. With the military primed and essentially over-prepared for war, diplomacy had no chance to defuse the situation.
In the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy and the Russians as well knew, of course, that unlike in 1914, war might now result in the end of civilization. Barbara Tuchman's The Guns of August provided Kennedy with a recounting of the rashness and folly of past leaders, who allowed the military command to blind them to the catastrophic possibilities to which war would lead. Kennedy saw that even a situation in which two hostile powers were primed against other could be defused through deal-making, to put it simply. A bilateral pullback of aimed missiles was the solution in October, 1962. It was unfortunate that forty-eight years earlier, in August, 1914, a similar solution was not found.