Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War: How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World is a book by Patrick J. Buchanan, published in May 2008. Buchanan argues that both world wars were unnecessary and that the British Empire's decision to join the wars had a disastrous effect globally. One of Buchanan's expressed purposes is to undermine what he described as a "Churchill cult" in America's elite. Buchanan focuses particularly on how Winston Churchill helped influence Britain into the world wars with Germany in 1914 and in 1939.