Once you are in a war the only real option is to fight it. The time to stop a war is before it starts. Had we forged an alliance of Britain, France, Czechoslovakia & the USSR at Munich WW2 would either not have happened or lasted a few weks till the German general staff shot Hitler.

In the same way WW1 happened because of the breakdown of the Concert of europe, whereby the big European powers divvied it up between them. This may not have been entirely fair but it pretty much kept the peace for a century. Once it started i do not agree that we could have stayed out, being unconcerned about a German victory.

It has also been said that removing the Shackleton from the Falklands was the tippingh point for starting that war.

I think that the worst effect of the Yugoslav wars is that, to destroy Yugoslavia, we also destroyed international law (the “recognition” of Croatia & Bosnia certainly breached not only law but our word under the Helsinki treaty to “take no action against the territorial integrity or unity” of signatories, the Kosovo war was blatantly aggression & even breached the NATO treaty). That Iraq was also illegal merely makes it worse. This illegality has clearly encouraged the proliferation of nuclear weapons & made it infinitely more difficult for nations to trust to anything other than force. The paralle with the period before WW1 is clear.