[Anders]

Originally Posted by johndallman

There will probably be one within a decade. The organisation of armies of the time, with large pools of reservists who take time to mobilise, and the need for pre-planning of the railway movements that get them to the right place make it advantageous to be the side starting a war, if it looks likely to happen anyway.

The alliance systems that drag in more parties to any dispute that gets serious, and the lack of wisdom of several of the governments of the time ("a big hand for Kaiser Wilhelm II!") mean that wars always look plausible.

Originally Posted by ericthered

WWI would be fantastically difficult to stop. Yes, you could delay it a bit, but I really don't see it being stopped, and I don't see delaying it or even hurrying it along a few years measurably changing the outcome. The military technology won't do anything useful until the war actually happens, and any one of British tanks, American manpower, and Austrian collapse were enough to finish the war for Germany (all of them showed up in force at once).

What can I say? Everyone thought a war between the USSR and the USA was inevitable. Everyone thought a conflict between Britain and France in the 1850-1900 (when they colonized the world) was inevitable. Doubtless there are other cases of such things. Wars aren't inevitable, in fact there's data to suggest they follow a Poisson distribution, meaning they start more or less at random.