Hello and welcome back. This is WAR 1870–1949: How Empires Rise and Fall. We’ve moved into the Balkans, into the seam where old empires crack and new nations sharpen themselves like blades. And now we come to something that feels, at first, almost reassuring: the crises before 1914, the near misses, the moments when Europe comes close to the abyss and then steps back.

But here is the cruel truth. Near misses don’t always teach caution. Sometimes they teach confidence. Sometimes they teach that escalation works. Sometimes they teach that you can mobilize and threaten and posture and still avoid the worst. And that lesson—learned repeatedly—can be fatal.

So today we’re talking about the rehearsals.

1905 to 1913.

A decade where Europe practices catastrophe without yet committing to it. A decade where every crisis tightens the ...