The Decline of Bismarck's European Order: Franco-Russian Relations 1875-1890In an attempt to discover some of the underlying origins of World War I, the eminent diplomat and writer George Kennan focuses on a small sector of offstage events to show how they affected the drama at large long before the war even began. In the introduction to his book George Kennan tells us, "I came to see World War I . . . as the great seminal catastrophe of this century the event which . . . lay at the heart of the failure and decline of this