ABSTRACT
There were three main reasons why war was avoided. One was that Abdur Rahman kept a cool head; the second, that the British government adhered firmly to the Latin maxim, ‘Si vis pacem, para bellum’, or, as Salisbury later put it, ‘willingness on good cause to go to war is the best possible security for peace’;1 the third, that when it came to the crunch, the Russians concluded that they could not afford a war – in effect they blinked first.
