 Schroeder claimed that 1914 was a "preventive war" forced on Germany to maintain Austria as a power, which was faced with a crippling British "encirclement policy" aimed at the break-up of that state.The American historian Samuel R. Williamson, Jr., lays most of the blame with the Austro-Hungarian elites rather than the Germans in his 1990 book, "Austria-Hungary and the Origins of the First World War".Another recent work is Niall Ferguson's "The Pity of War" which rejects the Fischer thesis, laying most of the blame on diplomatic bumbling from the British.