Is some fourm of a world war always invetiable

Keep in mind that there was no memory in Europe of what a really really big war might be like. A lot of people then thought the war would be over in a few months and that it would be one big macho man adventure. Be careful what you wish for...

Honestly, I think the more relevant form of hubris was the assumption that if you didn't mobilize your army first, the enemy would get a huge advantage on you, as proven in the Franco-Prussian War, the Russo-Japanese War, and the First Balkan War. Not fighting became riskier than fighting.
 
Would it be possible to engineer the Franco-Prussian war to have the same kind of demographic impact as WWI on France's supply of military aged men? Possibly turning into a France+Austria+Denmark vs Germany+Russia war?
 
British conflicts with Russia in Asia wrapped themselves up in the decade before WWI.

Snip.

Not quite. Here I will quote (at length, sorry) from Clark, The Sleepwalkers:

During the last three years before the outbreak of war, the old geopolitical tensions between Russia and Britain were coming back to the fore. There were problems all along the Sino-Central-Asian frontier, from Tibet and Outer Mongolia to Turkestan and Afghanistan, but the most urgent issue was Persia. By the summer of 1912, armed Russian penetration of northern Persia was raising questions about whether the Anglo-Russian Convention could be continued in its current form. As early as November 1911, Grey warned Count Benckendorff, the Russian ambassador in London, that he might soon be forced to issue public ‘disavowals’ of Russian activity in Persia and that Russia was placing the future of the Convention at risk. And this was an issue that attracted interest not just in the Foreign Office, but in cabinet, parliament and the press. When Sazonov and Grey met at Balmoral in September 1912 for talks focused mainly on the Persian question, there were public demonstrations against the Russian minister. Fear for Britain’s imperial future combined with the traditional Russophobia of the liberal movement and the British press to form a potent mix. And these concerns remained acute during 1913 and early 1914. In letters of February and March 1914 to Ambassador Buchanan in St Petersburg, Grey commented angrily on Russian plans to construct a strategic railway across Persia and all the way to the Indian frontier. The Russians had begun to push aside British trading interests in Persia, even within the zone allotted to Britain under the terms of the Convention. The situation along the Chinese frontier was hardly more encouraging: in 1912–13, dispatches from British agents reported that the Russians were fomenting ‘unusual military activity’ between Mongolia and Tibet; shipments of Russian rifles had been detected passing through Urga to Lhasa and Russian Buriat ‘monks’ were training the Tibetan army, just as the Russians pushed forward into Chinese Turkestan to establish fortified positions only 150 miles from the British garrison at Srinagar. Russia, it appeared, was waiting for the next opportunity to invade India.
These perceived threats produced fine cracks in the policy fabric of the Foreign Office. In Grey’s eyes, the vexatious behaviour of the Russians enhanced the value of the Anglo-German Balkan détente. It was impossible not to be struck by how easily British and German diplomats were working together, just at the moment when Sazonov’s opportunist Balkan zig-zagging was exasperating Russia’s British partners. And Grey was supported in these reflections by his long-serving private secretary, William Tyrrell, the man who saw more of the foreign secretary than any other colleague. Tyrrell had earlier favoured ‘the anti-German policy’, but he later became ‘a convinced advocate of an understanding’.
 
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