@Private:
The book would add a number of points, of which here are a couple:
A few comments on this. First, I doubt that France and Russia saw themselves as defending “a balance of power” in Europe; if any of the Allied powers thought that way, it was Britain, whose foreign policy in the decades leading up to WWI basically aimed at keeping Britain’s options open. This non-committal policy infuriated the French, whose objective was to get Britain solidly on-side for any eventual war with Germany. (Ironically, that’s pretty much what Britain’s own objective was vis-a-vis the U.S. from 1939 to 1941).
Second, the search for a single “key cause” for WWI is a quest that has occupied historians and other commentators for a whole century, with the pendulum swinging back and forth (according to the fashion of the day) between “it was Germany’s fault” (see Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles, a.k.a. the War Guilt Clause) and “it was everyone’s fault” (see Margaret MacMillan’s book “The War That Ended Peace: How Europe Abandoned Peace for the First World War”, though she does attribute significant blame to Kaiser Wilhelm, arguing that his unstable personality would not have been an issue if he’d been the ruler of Lichtenstein rather than of the preeminent military land power of his era).
Third, it should be noted that Germany wasn’t the only major power of the day where right-wing views were espoused by the army and other leading social actors. The pre-WWI Dreyfus Affair scandal in France illustrated a similar dynamic, and in the run-up to WWII the right in France hated the left to such an extent that it was sympathetic to the concept of an authoritarian regime, which is exactly what France got from the Vichy Regime under Marshall Petain (who, when France was crumbling in June 1940, blamed its defeat on (as I recall) “twenty years of Marxism”).
