Gudrun Persson: Russian Military Thought: The Evolution of Strategy Since the Crimean War. Washington: Georgetown University Press, 2025.

 

Russia’s long borders, most without natural barriers to protect its cities, requires military planning that is not only careful but well integrated into whatever regime prevails in the state. For this reason, “the Russian view of strategy is broader and more encompassing than recognized in the West,” whose rulers tend to ‘compartmentalize’ military strategy, political strategy, and economic strategy. Indeed, “an inclination to holism is characteristic throughout the Russian intellectual tradition in literature, religious philosophy and the sciences.” Persson wisely attempts to understand Russian thinkers as they have understood themselves, never imposing analytical ‘frameworks’ alien to Russia. 

Modern Russian military thought originated in the eighteenth century with Czar Peter the Great, Petr Aleksandrovich Rumiantsev, and Alexandrovich Suvorov. Even before that, however, “when Russia consisted of little but Muscovy, the army was an integral part of the state and the ruling elites.” The flat steppes of that region lent themselves to raids and counterraids, many of them defensive responses to intruders. To expand, the regime needed to enforce strict loyalty, made possible by the close association of civilian and military officers, all drawn from the aristocracy. By the middle of the sixteenth century, Russia confronted the principal political/military powers of northern and central Europe: Sweden (‘The Hammer of Europe,’ as it was then known) and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Muscovy was successful, doubling its size in the seventeenth century. By the time Peter declared his country an empire, he had transformed Russia into a modern, centralized state featuring an efficient standing army and navy coordinated with its diplomatic corps. As an enthusiast of the Enlightenment, Peter established military councils that met sometimes as often as twenty times a year to debate strategy; Czar Peter adjudicated, and his decision became Russia’s authoritative military doctrine. Previously, education in Russia was the exclusive domain of Orthodox Christian priests; Peter founded a system of military school teaching mathematics, navigation, artillery and engineering. His formidable successor, Catherine the Great, founded a comprehensive system of primary and secondary education which could prepare Russian youth for careers in these technical fields. During her eighteenth century, “Russia was almost constantly in a state of war,” fighting Sweden, Persia, the Ottoman Empire, the Tatars of Crimea (a country it incorporated into the empire in 1783), Poland, and revolutionary France. It was under Catherine that Rumiantsev wrote Customs of Military Service, setting down organizational practices, and Thought, a memorandum successfully arguing for increased military funding, “given the territorial expansion of the empire.” He was careful to emphasize that Russia’s unique geopolitical characteristics (including its “wicked neighborhood”) meant that its military officers could learn from foreign strategists but implement only those practices fit for Russia. Conversely, Russian strategists needed to understand their many enemies not by Russian standards but “by working out what we might do if we were in his place” (emphasis added). 

Responding to Russia’s geographic vulnerability within the armature of a modern state, these strategists emphasized offensive military operations, departing from Muscovy’s defensive stance. Whether predominantly offensive or defensive, Russia’s wars have been numerous. In the centuries between 1500 and 1900, it was at war for 353 years. At the end of this period, the head of the General Staff Academy pointed to Russia’s defeat of Napoleon, saving not only itself but Prussia and Austria, as the army’s premier achievement, while observing that “war was always and throughout all times been, spontaneously and consciously, a sacred, great, an important act in the life of the state,” fought under the principles, “Faith, Czar, and Fatherland”—religion, regime, and state, fully coordinated. Rumiantsev’s contemporary, General Suzorov, emphasized “speed, assessment, attack.” Given the vast Russian peasantry and its small aristocratic officer corps, both of these classes needed to be well understood in order for their command-and-obey relationship to succeed. To do so, he appealed to the shared sentiment of patriotic pride, formulating the chant: “Subordination, Exercise, Obedience, Education, Discipline, Military Order, Cleanliness, Health, Neatness, Sobriety, Courage, Bravery, Victory! Glory! Glory! Glory!” His relentlessly offensive strategy (retreat, he thought, was equal to weakness) comported well with his spiritedness.

The following century found its major strategist in Nikolai V. Medem, the first professor of strategy at the Imperial Military Academy. In his An Overview of the Most Famous Rules and Systems of Strategy, he described the thought of such important Western strategic thinkers as Jomini, Frederick II, and Clausewitz. Against Jomini and with Clausewitz, he insisted that there can be no “immutable laws in strategy that can guide the actions of the commander in war,” but that ever-changing circumstances must be observed and respected. In chess, learning the rules doesn’t make you much of a chess player. A strategist, he wrote, must have “the knowledge of the characteristics of all strategic elements and means,” perform “the assessment of their mutual influence.” and study “the importance of each individual element in relation to the actual military actions.” Persson cites this as a characteristic example of the “holistic view of strategy” that “has remained one of the constants of Russian strategic thought” to this day.

The Crimean War (1852-1856) ended or at least interrupted the peaceful decades following the Napoleonic Wars. After Crimea, Europeans followed Prussia’s policy of universal military conscription; Russia took its time, finally introducing it in 1874. The democratization of war was complemented with important technological innovations in weapons, which could be mass-produced for mass armies as industrial economies replaced agrarian ones. Historicism and positivism dominated philosophic thought. As a result, “the study of military science became more systematic and professionalized.” The need to coordinate such technologies as steam railways, telegraphs, and the rifled muskets and cannons that enabled militaries to strike one another at greater distances, coupled with the further need to coordinate technology with the training of mass armies and with building up industrial production, made military planning more complex than ever. A better-educated, professionalized officer class was now indispensable. All of this required substantial increases in funding, which meant that economic prosperity more than ever became a precondition of military survival and victory.

The geopolitical event of the century was German unification under Prussian auspices. This ruined French hegemony on the continent, as seen in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), which closely followed Prussia’s defeat of Austria, its sole possible competitor for dominance among the German states. Prussia’s king was proclaimed emperor of Germany as William I. Excluded from Germany, Austria sought to counterbalance its neighbor by forming the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a dual monarchy. Italy finally realized Machiavelli’s envisioned structure, its several states uniting in one nation-state in 1870. 

In Russia, Czar Alexander II foresaw the need for much larger armies, which is why he emancipated the serfs in 1861, thereby more closely attaching them to what they could now think of as their country. That was also the year that Dmitri Alekseevich Miliutin assumed the duties of War Minister. As Tocqueville had observed some two decades earlier, ‘democracy’ understood as civil-social equality could flourish as readily under a monarchic regime as under a republic. Miliutin affirmed “the unity and integrity of the state” and the “equality of all its members” under the czar. For Russia to thrive, he continued, it must “cast away all outdated, outlived privileges” and “take leave, once and for all, of the rights of one social group over another”; again as per Tocqueville, no aristocracy or oligarchy must stand between the monarch and his people. With respect to educating the officers, Miliutin followed with schools that reward talent, not ‘birth.’ And he instituted mandatory literacy classes in literacy for the common soldiers, who would read books and listen to speeches extolling Russian nationality. 

Largely blocked from expansion in Europe, whose statesmen had advanced more rapidly into modernity, Russians instead sought territory in Central Asia, seizing Turkistan, Chimkent, Tashkent, and Samarkand in the 1860s, adding several khanates in the following decade. Perssons ascribes these moves to a desire for “defensible borders,” not the quest for raw materials or imperial ambition as such. One important War Ministry document identified a Western Europe full of enemies, Prussia-ruled Germany being the most dangerous. Russian strategists worried three possible hostile coalitions: Austria and Germany; Austria, Germany, Turkey, and Sweden; Austria, Turkey, France, Italy, England. Russia, they feared, had no reliable allies.

The head of the Military-Scientific Committee of the Russian army, Nikolai Obruchev, authored Considerations on the Defense of Russia, which Perssons describes as “the basis for all of the war plans up to 1909.” Obruchev understood that regime differences among states may lead to war; no longer would wars be based on “personal quarrels among the European sovereigns,” as they had been when rival monarchist dynasts faced one another, hungering for territory or eager to avenge some perceived slight. Further, “the transition from war to peace had become instantaneous,” given modern technologies. At the time, Russia ruled Poland, and Obruchev wanted that substantial territory as a geopolitical buffer in the west; in his judgment, “the position on the Vistula was the only really good one from which to mount an offensive.” (Having stayed in a hotel overlooking that river on the outskirts of Krakow, a hotel occupied by Nazi officers during the Second World War, I can attest that the view is indeed good, and not only in an esthetic sense. One enjoys what’s called a ‘commanding’ view of things.) Obruchev foresaw that a future European war “would take place on Polish territory,” and he planned preemptive attacks on Austria and Germany from there, if war seemed imminent. This strategy in turn made Russian strategists particularly concerned about rising nationalist and therefore anti-imperialist sentiments among European nations, very much including Poland. The unification of the Germanies was the most alarming example. For its part, Russia might be unified around its army.

Professor of strategy at the General Staff Academy Genrikh Leer, who eventually served as commandant of the Academy in the 1890s, also advocated a tight ‘fit’ between the regime and the armed forces, calling the military system “a reflection of the political system.” Again, Prussia and the new Germany it had organized and now dominated was the example. War, Leer wrote, is “the political bayonet” which “finally determines the most important political issues.” Complementarily, the regime is likely to influence or even determine “the kinds of war” a state will conduct. In this, Leer adopted Montesquieu’s tripartite classification of regimes. He observed that despotic (as distinguished from constitutional) monarchies will likely prosecute offensive wars, whereas democracies (he was thinking of ancient Athens) incline toward defensive wars. Monarchies—centralized states with monarchic regimes animated by the rule of law—can and will conduct both offensive and defensive wars. The overall civil-social democratization of modernity, now common to all three regimes, as Tocqueville had observed, meant that militaries could no longer rely on small professional armies; mass armies in which officers enjoyed the trust of their soldiers beneath them and the civilian authorities above them were not the order of the day, and of course the General Staff Academy was exactly the kind of educational institution designed to improve both the technical competence and the morale of the military.

With these strategic elements in hand, Russia could continue to keep its West European rivals at bay while serving as Europe’s defender against incursions from Asia. Leer pointed to Peter I as the founder of this policy, emphasizing military history as a principal component of his educational curriculum. “Leer is described as the founder of the ‘critical-historical’ school in Russian military thought,” a school which searched “for eternal rules of warfare by choosing appropriate examples from military history.” Among these “laws” were the claim that war is natural, “a part of human life”; that war is obviously destructive but also civilizing (as seen, for example, in Rome’s conquests); and that military strategy has moral, material, and political elements, which must be coordinated in order for a military campaign to succeed. 

Leer found a critic among his colleagues in Mikhail Dragomirov, who denied that military science could really exist. Such a science, he wrote, “is as unthinkable as a science of poetry, art, and music.” Students of military history should look at past battles not as phenomena that can be reduced to a science but rather “just as a painter or a composer studies masterpieces—not to copy them, but to be inspired by them.” Theory is too general for actual use, and the events chronicled by historians can be mined for ‘proofs’ of any theory: which example “to pick is the choice of the one picking.” Chance played too great a part in any battle, let alone any war, to enable a commander to rely on some scientific theory. This notwithstanding, Dragomirov did concur with Leer’s judgment that war is natural, “arguing against Tolstoy’s pacifist views on war”. For Russia, given its geopolitical circumstance, it must seem so. Therefore, Dragomirov advocated a policy whereby common soldiers would be trained only in those skills they need to fight effectively; at the same time, in a nod to civil-social democratization, he insisted that officers treat the men with respect. Consistent with these points, he recommended training in the use of the bayonet, “not because firing is not important but because the bayonet attack require more psychological strength, which is more difficult to train and take longer to acquire.” His geopolitical stance, resembled Leer’s: that Russia should guard against incursions from Asia while disagreeing with Czar Nicholas II’s push into the Far East, which led to the collision with Japan. The 1905 Japanese defeat of Russian forces, “a blow to Russia’s international prestige,” confirmed the prudence of his worries about military overextension. 

World War I saw not only the defeat of Russia’s military but the collapse of the monarchic regime, resulting in a civil war won by the Bolsheviks, who established the Red Army in January 1918 under the leadership of Leon Trotsky. That army supported the regime, “not only on the battlefield” but with “agitation, propaganda, and literacy campaigns”—Trotsky being something of a littérateur, himself. Trotsky went so far as to assert that “our state orientation has long been formed by Marxist methodology and there is no need to form it again in the bosom of them military administration.” Among the important Soviet military strategist in this first decade of the regime was Andrei Snesarev. Snesarev understood the dictatorship of the proletariat as ‘totalitarian’—to take the word coined by Communism’s enemy-twin, Benito Mussolini, who used it to describe Italian Fascism. “Wars in the future, according to Snesarev, would become increasingly large-scale and ever more complex, requiring the entire effort of the state”; this would require the state “to prepare for war in peacetime, involving not only the army and soldier but also the entire population.” A reader of Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant, Snesarev brought some philosophic heft to ‘totalitarian’ military strategy. 

A non-Marxist, Aleksandr Svechin, was permitted to publish his thoughts on strategy up until 1938, when Stalin decided to have him executed. Svechin regarded political and military defense as “the most prudent for Russia,” writing that “war is not a cure for the internal diseases of the state but the most serious exam on the health of internal politics,” an exam he evidently was not entirely sure that Soviet Russia could pass. Nor could Russia’ geographic vastness protect it, as it had when Napoleon took Moscow, only to be beaten back by ‘General Winter.’ Modern technology “had rendered distances less significant.” “We are not wearing any geographic armor,” he warned; “our chests are open to blows” and “the enemy is not asleep.” This ran afoul of Stalin’s hopes, based upon the notion that a war against the USSR would be “a struggle against the proletarian revolution” first and foremost, a war whose outcome would be “determined by the real balance of international class forces,” not so much “territorial successes.” Those class forces were assumed to favor the great homeland of socialism, and so, instead of strengthening the military, Stalin conduced several purges against Red Army officers, beginning in the late 1920s and continuing into the late Thirties. “Almost the entire military intelligentsia was obliterated” for having failed to regard Communist Party operatives as the supremely sagacious strategists of the coming world revolution.

Hitler, tyrannical heir to Bismarck’s unified Germany, made the Communists pay for their ideologically inspired folly before the Nazis themselves were driven back by forces led by some of the few survivors of the Stalinist depredations. After the Man of Steel’s welcome death, such strategists as Marshall Vasily Danielovich Sokolovsky and Admiral Sergei Georgiyevich Gorshkov attempted to reconcile Marxism-Leninism with military reality. War with the ‘capitalist’ and ‘imperialist’ Western regimes was inevitable. “Therefore,” as Persson nicely summarizes, “the ‘peace-loving’ Soviet Union was forced to take action in order to defend itself.” Such defense required preparation for the inevitable war, a defense that in turn would like require the innocent Communist regime to strike first—offense being the best defense, in accordance with longstanding Russian, not only Soviet, strategy. Nuclear weapons, though obviously devastating, didn’t change this mindset. According to Sokolovksy’s Soviet Military Strategy, published in 1962, Soviet policy aimed at a first strike aiming at the annihilation of both the enemy’s military forces and the ruin of his civil society. This world war between “two opposing social world systems” would inevitably (as per the Marxist-Leninist ‘laws of history’) end in victory for Communism, a victory guaranteed by the coming superiority of socialist economies over capitalist economies. Meanwhile, propaganda must be intensified at home and abroad, unifying Communists worldwide and disunifying the capitalist enemy. As Stalin had intoned, “It is impossible to defeat the foe without learning to hate him with all the forces of one’ soul,” and the post-Stalinist strategists continued his legacy in this regard; this was quite consistent with the regime’s aim at forming the ‘new Soviet man,’ animated by an ethos that comported with the regime of socialist collectivism. As a complement to this, “clearly, by the early 1960s Russia’s war planners were planning to destroy cities and bomb civilians using nuclear weapons in a future war” in an initial phase that would be followed by a ground invasion of Europe resulting in a swift military sweep through Europe that would “reach the English Channel within days.”

Gorshkov’s naval strategy followed from these principles. “Soviet strategy considered submarines armed with nuclear missiles to be the main fighting weapon of the navy and vastly more effective than surface vessels.” It should be remarked that submarine-based missiles, necessarily smaller than most types of land-based missiles, are useful not so much against hardened military targets as they are against ‘soft’ targets: cities and their civilians. The ‘totalitarian’ regime prefers ‘total’ war. Gorshkov regarded his navy as one element supporting an overall military and political strategy. “Gorshkov’s naval principle for Soviet strategy would be ‘specific in form, socialist in content.'” With his fleet’s most important function (as he put it) “being actions against [enemy] land,” the Soviet navy “played a significant role in the local wars conducted by the imperialists,” making it “the state’s political weapon” against them. Gorshkov’s “vision was of an oceangoing fleet with the strategic task of conducting actions against enemy territory,” a vision that “has not always been understood in the West.”

This comprehensive, Marxist-Leninist strategy may be seen in the writings of Nikolai Ogarkov, chief of the Soviet General Staff from 1977 to 1984. Two decades earlier, Soviet premier Nikita Khruschev had introduced his policy of “peaceful coexistence” with the Western democratic republics, a supposed “pause from the Marxist-Leninist dogma of the inevitability of a war between the socialist and capitalist camps.” As Persson knows, Lenin had first formulated the notion, a complement to his New Economic Policy on the domestic front. As in more or less all Communist policy, peaceful coexistence, eventually followed by “detente,” wasn’t quite what it seemed. “It did not mean peace.” Economic, political, and ideological warfare would continue, and as for the military substance of it, Ogarkov ascribed war to (of course) “the emergence of private property.” With “the spread of socialism in the world,” the “real and objective conditions to abolish war from social life” might well prevail, were it not for malignant Western imperialism. Warfare, and not only nonviolent warfare, could still be pursued, especially by supporting ‘anti-imperialist’ proxy wars in the impoverished ‘Third World.’ Nuclear war was the kind of war to be avoided, if possible. Ogarkov’s grand strategy consisted, in his words, of an assessment of “the degree of probability of future war and against which enemy; the character of that war and the way it would take the country and its armed forces; the goals and missions that could be assigned to the armed forces and what kind of armed forces are necessary to meet these goals”; and, finally, “the military programs that should be accomplished and the preparations needed by the army and the country for war” along with “the means with which the war should be conducted if it breaks out.” According to this Communist variant of “the Great Russian perspective,” “Russia had never attacked anyone” but “was forced by others to react, in spite of abundant historical evidence to the contrary.”

“It was not until the mid- to late 1980s that Russian strategists drew on the lessons of World War II and seriously challenged the offensive strategy,” recently dressed up as defensive. After all, Soviet Russia had lost about 27 million lives during the war, roughly half of them soldiers. Nuclear war quite obviously would be worse, unless (somehow) the Soviets could contrive a first strike on U.S. missiles that would wipe out America’s second-strike arsenal—highly improbable, inasmuch as Americans had submarine-launched missiles, too. Accordingly, Ogarkov adjusted Soviet doctrine. As late as 1979, he had insisted that nuclear war “was winnable for the entire socialist camp, due to the “just missions of the war, the superior character of these societies, and their political systems,” but after the Reagan Administration jettisoned detente and began to augment its nuclear deterrent, he started writing about ‘no first use,’ suddenly deeming prevention of nuclear war both possible and necessary. 

This avenue closed, Defense Minister Dmitri Federovich Ustinov pushed for more military spending, focusing on ground forces arrayed against NATO and against Afghanistan. His policy contributed to the financial crisis of the central state, which Premier Mikhail Gorbachev attempted to overcome by reducing the number of men under arms, signing a treaty limiting intermediate-range nuclear missiles, and rearranging troops in Europe in a defensive configuration. As is well known, this proved too little, too late; the empire collapsed and the regime changed—sort of. 

Marxism-Leninism eschewed, Russian territory reduced by twenty-five percent, their borders well away from the coveted ports on the Baltic and Black seas, “the civilian and military leadership” nonetheless “maintained a continued consensus on relying on military power as “the basis for Russia’s status in the international arena.” By the 2010s, under the premiership of Vladimir Putin, “the offensive force posture had returned.” The no-first-use policy had been quietly dropped in the mid-1990s. With conventional forces, Putin seized Crimea under the pretext, as he put it, of “correcting historical injustices.” There were many more to correct: Kiev, Donetsk, Kharkov, Odessa, Kherson, and others were all the “historical territories” of Russia, deserving of retrieval by force. Russian policymakers gave up their line about American imperialism but substituted “NATO eastern expansion” and the “unipolar world” dominated by the United States. Expansion threatened regime change in Russia, a thought not to be countenanced. Foreign Minister Evgenii Primakov averred that “the use of force is the most efficient problem-solver if applied decisively and massively,” with negotiations useful only “as a cover for military action.” Although written in 2000, his doctrine anticipated the invasion of Ukraine, two decades later. 

To get to that, however, military reform was necessary, as the campaign to wrest South Ossetia and Abkhazia from Georgia, though successful, exposed an unimpressive land invasion force. Russia undertook a transformation “from a conventional mobilization army to a permanently combat-ready force,” a transformation involving improvements to the command-and-control system, force structure, military education, and an arms buildup. But while Andrei Kokoshin, who has served in numerous high-level position in the Russian government and academia, emphasized the importance of “the assessment of oneself and of the most likely enemy” as the foundation of strategy, such assessments evidently had not been properly undertaken by February 2022, when Russia attacked Ukraine, citing itself as “the legal successor of the Soviet Union” and the protector of “historical truth.” “Russia is perceived as being under attack from a hostile West, and the Russian Armed Forces are tasked with defending Russia’s historical and spiritual traditions”—the latter embodied by the Russian Orthodox Church, still firmly under control of the central state, as it has been for a very long time. Under such circumstances and with such authority, Putin declared in 2021, Ukraine had no right to independence from its rightful mother country, especially as it was being used as the thin end of the Westernizing wedge, “alien to the Russian people” and coated with immoralist poisons, including “violence, egotism, permissiveness, immorality, and nonpatriotism,” and “objective threat to Russia’s national interests,” bound up as they are with the ideal of “Holy Russia,” with its capital of Moscow as “the Third Rome.” Defending this mythologized version of Russian history forms part of Russia’s official military doctrine. Thus does Russia “prepar[e] itself for a long-term conflict with the West, whose “destructive influence” on innocent Russian youths must be stopped.

What went wrong for the Russians in Ukraine? They sent in far too few troops—only 200,000 against a country of more than forty million. This assumed that the Ukrainians believed Russian claims that they were really Russian, that they would welcome the invading troops as liberators. But there was no “mass surrender” and on their own side, the Russian soldiers weren’t adequately informed about the purpose of the war or given any strong motive to fight it. Whatever the outcome, it evidently will have come at a brutally high cost for Russia.

Persson concludes his study by identifying several constant themes in Russian military strategy. Because the state has been so thoroughly militarized for so many centuries, whatever regime rules it features military force as an integral part of the whole. As a consequence, military strategy shapes the regime fundamentally, even as the regime guides the strategy according to its own principles; Western analysts often overlook “the primacy of policy over strategy” in Russia. Those regimes have never taken natural rights as their foundation, looking instead to history, although ‘history’ might range from Russian Orthodox providentialism to Marxist-Leninist dialectic. Whatever the history, it typically casts the West—Roman Catholicism, democratic republicanism, capitalism—as the enemy of Russia. Given the geographic insecurity of its borders, the enemy must be attacked, not merely defended against; territorial expansion makes it less likely that Russia’s center will be overrun. This leads to fits of overexpansion, followed by humiliating retrenchment. The difficulties in maintaining Russian strategic policies derives from its centralization. The policies are designed to strengthen the centralized state, which attempts to rule some 150 ethnic minorities over a vast territory, but over-centralization weakens the state. For example, the various sorts of Russian monarchs, whether czars, commissars, or presidents, have inclined to rule by fear, and to kill or fire the most prominent military thinkers. This leads to “institutional loss of memory” and, more profoundly, a moral atmosphere of distrust in regimes of despotism. 

A. Wess Mitchell: Great Power Diplomacy: The Skill of Statecraft from Attila the Hun to Henry Kissinger. Chapters Six and Seven. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022.

 

It was the consolidation of the German states into one nation-state that rearranged European and, finally, world geopolitics in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. Modern Germany had a larger population than any European state except Russia, a larger GDP than any European state except Britain, and occupied more territory than the Germany of today. The architect of that consolidation was Reich Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Although Bismarck has been associated with the policy of ‘iron and blood,’ a phrase from his 1862 speech preparing Germans for wars against Denmark, Austria, and France, Mitchell shows that he was far from a simple militarist, but in fact a state builder and diplomat. As a state builder, he embraced no dogma except nationalism, no regime but monarchy; as a diplomat, he embraced no dogma but nationalist Realpolitik. When asked if he was pro-Russian or pro-Western, “I have always answered: I am a Prussian.”

As such, he understood that his Prussianized Germany could be no Austria, with a defensive strategy. Located squarely on the Great European Plain, Germany had no natural boundaries, no mountains to protect it from attackers. This lent Germans to militarism, as embodied by Field Marshall Helmuth von Moltke. Following the teachings of the Prussian military scholar Carl von Clausewitz, Moltke always sought the “decisive battle,” the one that would destroy the enemy army. He went so far as to reject Clausewitz’s preference for civilian control of the military during wartime, when “the job of politicians was to get out of the way.” His overall strategy was to defeat France first (which he did, in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71) and Russia, which he did not get the chance to do.

Bismarck opposed him on the Eastern Question. Beginning in 1887, when Russian troops reportedly began to move toward the Austria-Hungarian border, Moltke and the other generals wanted to continue the iron and blood strategy that had prevailed in the previous three wars. Bismarck saw that Russia was no small or medium-sized country. Twice the size of Germany, assured of an alliance with the French, with their ambitions for revanche against the humiliation of 1871, Russia could exploit the vulnerabilities of newly constituted Germany, “his new creation.” In the years since the victory over France, Bismarck forged and cultivated “an intricate system of alliances designed to avoid that scenario and give Germany the space she needed to develop as a great power,” a system centered on a triangular alliance with Austria-Hungary in the south, Russia in the east. All powers other than France should be put in a position to need Germany. Those needy powers should be “held apart from coalitions against us by their relations to each other,” relations governed by mutual distrust. To prevent Russian conquest of territory in Austria-Hungary, that shaky coalition needed to be preserved; France should be encouraged in their colonization of Africa, which kept them embroiled in distant lands; the Russian alliance needed constant maintenance, lest the czar align with France against Germany. “The heart of Bismarck’s disagreement with the generals” under these circumstances was his sense that “rather than making Germany more secure…military buildups and preventive war would bring about the very catastrophe they were meant to prevent,” terrifying the Austrians and the Russians instead of building their confidence in German bona fides. But no: “The secret to politics,” Bismarck insisted, is and will remain “a good treaty with Russia.” Such a treaty reinforced dynastic ties (Wilhelm I was Czar Alexander II’s uncle), financial ties (Russian railways were financed by German banks), and military ties (Germany was Russia’ main arms supplier). 

There was a flaw in this strategy. In expelling Austria from the German Confederation in 1866, ridding Prussia of its only possible rival for dominance therein, Austria had turned its geopolitical sights on the Balkans, putting it “into increased competition with Russia.” To prevent this competition from erupting into war, Bismarck first arranged a secret mutual defense pact with Russia, then a treaty with both Russia and Austria-Hungary whereby each pledged to the others to enter into tripartite consultations if any dispute arose. The League of the Three Emperors eventually became “a three-way pact for preserving peace in the Balkans.” Mitchell observes that this was similar to Metternich’s Holy Alliance of the first decades of the century, except that this time Berlin dominated Vienna. As the putative peacemaker in the Balkans, Germany could negotiate not only with its alliance partners but with the Ottomans and the British, who also had interests there.

The arrangement began to unravel in Moscow. The czar was unhappy with Bulgaria, which had aligned with the western powers. Not only did Alexander refuse to renew the League in 1887, but he also began to explore the alliance with France that Bismarck had hoped to head off. In his last three years as Chancellor, he increased military spending and moved toward closer relations with Britain and Italy in an effort to contain France. More, he undertook “the final grand diplomatic maneuver” of his tenure in office, the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia. This treaty mutually pledged “benevolent neutrality” between the two countries and joint efforts to “localize the conflict,” should either party “find itself at war with a third Great Power” unless the war occurred as a result of a German attack on France or a Russian attack on Austria-Hungary. Bismarck also conceded to Russia “preponderant and decisive influence in Bulgaria”—a small price to pay for Germany, if not for the Bulgarians. As Bismarck assured British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, Germany could not afford to see Austria-Hungary conquered or chopped up by the Russians, as that would leave Germany exposed to a Franco-Russian assault. Salisbury was convinced and made an exception to Britain’s general preference for ‘splendid isolation’ from Continental affairs when it came to military security commitments. The crisis of 1887 had been averted. “That Europe didn’t go to war in 1887 or 1888 was primarily due to Bismarck’s diplomacy.” 

“What distinguished Bismarck from the generals is that he was enough of a realist to see that the German Empire would not be able to attain a lasting security by primarily military means.” While he had unhesitatingly backed military action in previous decades, “when it suited the state’s needs,” those needs had changed. A unified Germany had different fish to fry, and a different recipe with which to prepare them for its now more delicate appetite. Mitchell remarks that “military power was a crucial enabler to Bismarck’s diplomatic success,” but military power need not be expended in order to be effective. As an island country, Britain enjoyed the geographical foundation for a pick-and-choose foreign policy. What Britain had geographically, Bismarck aimed at through diplomacy: “What Germany got most through her treaties was the ability to exercise influence over other powers’ actions while maintaining flexibility in her own”—the “closest that a great power” on the European continent could get to a noncommittal foreign policy.” The flaw was the very intelligence of Bismarck, the intricacy of his secret arrangement. He was a suspect man. His Realpolitik turned unrealistic when suspicions of German intentions, and of Germany military power, intensified.

We cannot know if Bismarck could have kept the game going, or for how long. After his patron Wilhelm I died, “the strutting and insecure Wilhelm II” fired him. Wilhelm, along with the next generation of German generals—even more aggressive than the ones Bismarck had outmaneuvered [1]—frightened the rest of Europe sufficiently to put Europe on the path to the First World War, a war in which “Germany found herself embroiled, for the first time since Frederick the Great, in a war on two fronts.” By 1914, “Bismarck’s system failed not so much because his successors didn’t understand it but because they rejected it, opting instead for a simpler and seemingly more dignified military-intensive security.”

With this, Mitchell turns to British diplomacy in the years before each of the two world wars the Germans widened in the first instance and triggered in the second. With Germany’s consolidation and defeat of Austria and France, followed by its industrial and technological advances in the final three decades of the nineteenth century, British statesmen understood that they needed allies. But who? At the turn of the century, the Americans were still not friends and France might prefer alliance with Russia to alliance with Albion perfide. “Even if they never congealed into a hostile bloc, the presence of so many powerful states at so many points on the compass created the prospect of a multifront dilemma well beyond the country’s ability to manage.” It wasn’t as if Great Britain wasn’t great. The Empire ruled one-fourth of the world population—more than “those of the next four great powers combined.” It shared nearly a quarter of world trade and out-produced mainland Europe in steel. Its fleet ruled the seas, worldwide, in accordance with its “Two Power Standard”: “maintaining a navy at least as big as those of the next two most powerful states combined.” Its imperial holdings enabled it to support both its navy and its international shipping with a worldwide network of ports and coaling stations. All of this notwithstanding, the Boer War, which required 500,000 British and colonial troops to prosecute, showed that the far-flung British Empire had also stretched itself dangerously thin. To build a still bigger navy was untenable. Britain needed to reduce the number of potential enemies, then “focus its strength on the places that mattered most, which were the British home islands and the Mediterranean. That would require diplomacy.

Charles Henry Keith Petty-Fitzmorris, fifth Marquess of Lansdowne, succeed Lord Salisbury as foreign secretary. Salisbury had already gathered a capable Foreign Office staff of some fifty persons, each placed in one of six departments that oversaw the several major regions of the world. Those persons were smart and well-informed. “The Foreign Office represented Britain’s accumulated institutional memory a great power: the ‘digestive organ’ by which events could be conceptualized against the basis of Britain’s past experiences, and translated into practical policy.” Lansdowne himself came to office with substantial experience overseas, first as governor-general of Canada, then as viceroy of India. He understood “just how vulnerable the empire had become at its outermost frontiers.” He did not want to relinquish Britain’s independence of action in foreign matters, sometimes called its ‘splendid isolation’ from Europe’s continental broils. To avoid joining an alliance there, he preferred to “ameliorat[e] difficulties with as many rivals as possible.” “In these times,” he observed, “no nation which intends to take its part in the affair of the civilized world can venture to stand entirely alone.”

British diplomats first negotiated a naval treaty with the United States, so that the British navy could transfer its ships to more dangerous waters than those in the Western Hemisphere. They then approached Japan, forming a mutual defense treaty, enabling the British to concentrate their Asia-based fleet nearer to their biggest colony, India, and to assist its army, “bogged down in a long and grinding war in South Africa” against the Dutch settlers, the Boers. Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain had maintained that Britain should work towards alliances or at least settlements with the United States, Germany, and Japan to contain any Franco-Russian combination. Lansdowne concurred. The resulting overtures resulted in the Hay-Paunceforte Treaty with the U.S. in 1901, recognizing exclusive American control of the Isthmus of Panama, and a naval treaty with Japan, but Germany balked, regarding Britain as an unsure ally in any future continental fight. Lansdowne then turned to France, and in April 1904 the two countries agreed to recognize their English rights in Egypt, French rights in Morocco. They also resolved colonial border disputes in Africa and Southeast Asia. In this, Landsdowne won the applause of the younger Foreign Office administrators, who viewed Germany as a more serious threat to Britain than France. As for Russia, its defeat by Japan in 1905 lowered its geostrategic standing in Asia, while increasing the threat of a Russo-German alliance, which Kaiser Wilhelm II was in fact seeking. Britain continued attempts to reconcile British and Russian interests in Central Asia, and these did work out, at the cost of relinquishing any claim to Tibet, geostrategically important in relation to India.

Overall, “Lansdowne’s diplomacy facilitated the concentration of naval power” without incurring “ruinous financial outlays.” Britain closed three of its nine overseas naval stations—the ones in America’s sphere of influence—and reduced the size of its Asian fleet, intensifying its assets in Europe in the years before the First World War. In addition to the Tibet concession, Britain also gave up on halting the Panama Canal project, “which its naval planners rightly foresaw would forever alter the balance of power in the Atlantic” by enabling the United States to move ships from coast to coast, even as the Mississippi River had long enabled it to move commercial shipping between north to south to and from the Gulf of Mexico. And in conceding naval dominance in East Asia to Japan, Britain relinquished “the status of top naval power to an Asiatic state without a long-term plan for regaining her position there”—with deadly results in the decades following the Great War. France came to dominate most of northern and equatorial Africa, while Russia benefited from trade routes it now indisputably controlled in Central Asia, leverage that resulted in political and economic advantages for the Soviet Union, whose existence no one beyond the small knot of Bolsheviks foresaw at the time. In the impending war, however, Britain enjoyed alliances with France, the United States, Russia, and Japan—just enough to defeat powerful Germany and the now-hapless Austro-Hungarians and Ottoman Turks. Under the terms of the 1919 peace treaties, “the German and Ottoman empires were disassembled, and big chunks, including choice portions of Africa and the Middle East, were transferred to Britain,” adding to the acquisition of German naval and merchant vessels, a year earlier. This gave Britain “the widest margin of naval superiority in her history.”

As has long been understood, the Woodrow Wilson-David Lloyd George notion of a new diplomacy, one of open covenants, openly arrived at, with disputes settled in a neo-Kantian League of Nations—all assuming not a balance but what Wilson called a “community of power”—simply didn’t work. “Where the old diplomacy had operated on the rule that ‘conferences only succeed when their results are arranged beforehand,’ the new diplomacy left everything to be settled at the conference, in a compressed timespan,” putting statesman under self-imposed pressure to “have something glitzy to show for their labors,” namely “elaborate communiques that masked disagreements and left the underlying problem,” whatever it might be, “to be resolved at a later date.” Mitchell comments, “Diplomacy, it turned out, was a good deal harder than the politicians had imagined.” 

Diplomacy of the new sort worked with the like-minded American regime and the not-so-like-minded but allied Japanese regime. The three countries met at the Washington Naval Conference in 1921-22, agreeing to freeze warship tonnage, halting the construction of navy ships for ten years and to scrap many of the existing ones. This gave Britain confidence that the U.S. would refrain from using its manufacturing power to build “a fleet far outstripping her own,” thereby enabling it to continue to police the British Empire. 

Unfortunately, Japan was less cooperative in reality than it was ‘on paper,’ moving to achieve dominance in East Asia on the basis of the supposed racial superiority of Japanese to Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos, and others. Communism in Russia, fascism in Italy, and finally Nazism in Germany were regime enemies of Britain, much closer to home. The British economy, saddled by war debt, left its land army weakened and its people “spiritually sapped,” largely pacifistic. And quite realistically, the British Admiralty told the cabinet that the navy could not fight a two-front war with Japan and “the strongest European naval Power,” which by 1934 was Nazi Germany. By 1937, the Chiefs of Staff implored the cabinet to “reduce the number of potential enemies,” just as the diplomats had done in the years prior to the Great War. With Japanese rulers intending to seize British and American territories in Asia, with the Soviet Union under Stalin an implacable enemy, with the worry that an alliance with France would only serve to provoke Germany, the decidedly more powerful of the two nearest continental great powers, British prospects had dimmed.

It was in line with all of this that Joseph Chamberlain’s son, Neville, famously pursued another policy of appeasement in 1938, this one based on a much thinner margin of error, a margin narrowed by economic depression and substantially weaker military strength. The political atmosphere had changed, too, with the Germans buoyant under the initial results of Nazism, the British, “most of whom had lost menfolk in the Great War,” eager for ‘peace in our time.’ For its part, the British ruling class, very much including its foreign policy establishment, wanted to give the Germans a break, mindful of “the harsh terms that they regretted imposing on Germany after the previous war.” This is not to say that the Brits imagined Hitler to be genuinely appeasable. They did suppose that they could buy a bit of time. 

Chamberlain himself saw that Germany, even in its condition of economic recovery from the Great Depression, had recovered on the basis of massive state investments in manufacturing, investments that by definition could not be sustained. Germany would need a short war. If Germany ventured to do so, “Chamberlain reckoned” that “he could trigger an Anglo-French-U.S. coalition whose industrial powers far outstripped those of the Reich.” Surely Hitler understood that. Therefore, the right strategy was to placate Hitler “at a reasonable price to Britain,” then turn to negotiations with Japan, “sequenc[ing] the strategic dangers facing the country while avoiding a military buildup on a scale that would overwhelm Britain’s fragile economy.” 

Chamberlain met with Hitler twice before the notorious meeting at Munich. In the aftermath of the useless agreement reached there, Hitler continued to seize territory, culminating in his attack on Poland, “where Chamberlain finally drew the line.” The British failure to stop Hitler with words led Stalin, in a way paradoxically, to negotiate his own pact with the Führer, with the same eventual result. While it is true that Chamberlain had made the correct prediction—Hitler could not sustain a long war—that war “came at the cost of eighty million lives and the ultimate demise of the British Empire.” Intending to “quiet Europe in order to concentrate attention on Asia,” he “achieved the opposite, emboldening Germany and thereby reducing the bandwidth that Britain could devote to Japan.” In terms of his negotiation strategy, his failure was to allow Hitler “to set the pace and parameters of negotiations,” and even to accept “Hitler’s aims as the basis for negotiation and abandoning his own positions at the slightest indication of displeasure.” He attempted “to change the mindset of a mercurial ruler,” as if “the problems in international relations are the result of misunderstandings that can be cleared up like disagreements between individuals.” Mitchell acutely observes that such a misguided diplomatic strategy and the equally misguided diplomatic techniques that followed from it typify a mindset easily fostered by “liberal democracy,” namely, that “conflicts arise not because the other side’s interests collide with one’s own but because he is misunderstood, and the corollary, that conflict can be avoided through the patient application of reason and goodwill.” But of course, Hitlerian tyranny, and many others, utterly despised reason and goodwill as defined by liberal democrats/commercial republicans, regarding them as signs of contemptible weakness of will and of character. In the case of Chamberlain, and indeed of the British people generally, the regime ethos had been exacerbated by “three decades of decline not only materially but spiritually.” 

In its overall geostrategic performance over two centuries, “Britain forms the connective tissue between the classical European states-system and the global power blocs of the 20th century” as “the last mistress of the balance of power and the first operator of worldwide collective security.” As it has happened, the United States has inherited “Britain’s role and the burdens it entailed.” And perhaps Russia, followed now by China, have set themselves in the place of Germany?

 

Note

1. See Charles de Gaulle: The Enemy’s House Divided. Robert Eden translation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

A. Wess Mitchell: Great Power Diplomacy: The Skill of Statecraft from Attila the Hun to Henry Kissinger. Chapters Four and Five. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022.

 

In 1515, Francis I, the recently crowned king of France, then under the Valois dynasty, was captured by the Austrians at the Battle of Pavia and imprisoned by the Hapsburg emperor, Charles I. The Queen Regent, Louise of Savoy, formally requested the intervention of the Ottoman sultan, Suleiman I, an entreaty that “scandalized Christendom.” Muslims were the enemy. But Mitchell sees in this policy “a blueprint for a continent-wide grand strategy rooted in the use of alliances and state interest that would culminate, a century later, in France’s rise to European preeminence and the creation of the modern states system under one of diplomacy’s greatest practitioners, Armand-Jean du Plessis, Cardinal de Richelieu.”

Like Byzantium and Venice before it, France was surrounded by enemies. That pioneer of modern statebuilding, Henry VIII, plotted recovery of the territories England had ruled in northwestern France before the Hundred Years’ War. Elsewhere, the sprawling Hapsburg empire ruled substantial territories in Central Europe, Italy, and the Iberian peninsula. Charles V, king of Spain and emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, continued to exhibit “an iron determination to expand his inheritance by all means necessary,” and France was on the list. 

France had one advantage: compactness. French territory was not disjointed, as were the lands of Charles and Henry (who had more than one island in his kingdom). “French geography encouraged centralization,” that is, statism, thanks to its coherent river systems, north and south. No mountain ranges impeded movement of troops within it. But statism was still mostly potential, with monarchic rule “constrained by the particular privileges of towns and provinces, by the persistence of large ducal fiefs and foreign enclaves, and by the absence of a shared language and code of law”; most of the French didn’t speak French, and the Napoleonic Code was some three centuries distant. Still, the French understood the dangers all around them, and warfare is a great centralizer of governments. “The need to build and maintain larger armies spurred kings to assert greater central control over the resources of their realms, which meant reigning in the feudal lords with whom they had long shared power.” Centralization already had a foundation by Francis’s time, as the Estates-General did not wield the power of the purse; the king could collect taxes directly. The Parlement of Paris, which combined the judicial power with those of an upper legislative chamber, “derived its power from the king.” Francis could not rule as an ‘absolute’ monarch, as the Bourbon Louis XIV would do, but political writers had begun to ‘theorize’ monarchs as persons “bound neither by duty to the populace nor by obligations to the nobility, but only to the dictates of divine and natural law.” Those laws obligated them to defend the realm, not to promote “Christian virtue.” In this, “they were following in the footsteps of the Italians.” 

Charles V proposed exchanging Francis for French territories, transfer of territories in the north to England, and allowing the Duc de Bourbon, “Francis’s French rival,” to establish “a kind of state-in-miniature inside France.” That is, he proposed to subordinate France to himself. Louise refused to pay such an intolerable price for her son’s return, but in 1526 Francis agreed to the swap, which he seemed to guarantee by giving the Hapsburgs his sons as hostages. Once safely back on French soil, however, he reneged. That might well have provoked a disastrous war. But his mother had used the intervening decade-and-a-half to some advantage. France wasn’t the only European country worried by the Holy Roman Empire. 

“The hinge of Louise’s strategy was England.” She aimed at disengaging it from its alliance with the Hapsburgs, to eliminate the threat of a two-front war. Her argument to Henry was simple: instead of my territory, take my cash. This led to the Treaty of the More—a pun worthy of Shakespeare, their contemporary—which came with a promise from Henry to push for Francis’s release. Nor did Louise neglect the continent; “she sent agents to the German princes siding with Martin Luther in his escalating dispute with the emperor” and she appealed to Venice and Rome to form a coalition to remove the Habsburgs from Italy. And she reached out to the Ottomans. 

By the time of her son’s return, France had positioned itself to force Charles V to think twice about a punitive war. A scholar and patron of arts and letters, Francis readily justified his refusal to comply with the treaty “on the grounds that under natural law, a ruler could not give away any part of his demesne without obtaining the permission of his people.” He reinforced his mother’s diplomatic overtures by forging a formal alliance with England in the spring of 1527 and continued to court German Protestants, along with the ever-restive Poles. But it was “the breadth and audacity of the Franco-Ottoman alliance” that “shocked Europe,” this “blasphemous union of the lily and the crescent,” as its critics sniped. The renowned Italian writer Pietro Aretino exclaimed, “You have thrust the sword of the Ottoman into the heart of Christendom!” In the war itself, France fared poorly, saved “only by the military incompetence” of its enemies. But, Mitchell observes, the example of French diplomatic success stands as an example of a country confronted with military threats on several fronts “foist[ing] the problem back” onto his main rival, notwithstanding the religious differences between his country and a principal ally. In Francis’s reign “we see the stirrings of a French school of diplomacy geared to the conscious cultivation of a European states system.”

After Francis had passed from the scene, three Valois kings succeeded him, after which the male line of the dynasty died out. The first Bourbon, Henry IV, married a Valois, uniting the two rival families; he also attempted to unite French Catholics and the Huguenots. His reward was assassination. Henry’s son, Louis XIII, ascended the throne in 1610 as a child. His mother, a Medici, ruling in his stead, rather badly, and was exiled by him in 1617; her closest advisers were killed. The Thirty Years’ War, initially a civil war of religion within the Holy Roman Empire, broke out a year later. In 1624, Louis made the most important decision of his thirty-three-year reign, appointing Richelieu as his principal minister. The Empire was not only divided religiously but it had also been divided into Spanish and Austrian lines, with the Austrian Habsburgs looking east toward Central Europe and the Spanish Hapsburgs concentrating their attention on the New World. Spain was “the greater threat” to France, having invaded France a few years earlier in an attempt to overthrow Louis’s father. Although predominantly Catholic France might have supported the Hapsburgs in their civil war against Protestants, they could not do so, given the geopolitical threat the empire posed. 

Instead, Richelieu undertook la guerre couverte. Remaining formally at peace with Spain “for the time being,” Richelieu forged a system of alliances against the empire. He prudently “avoided Francis I’s mistake of being sucked into Italian affairs,” focusing instead on Germany and its Protestant states, intending to prevent Habsburg consolidation of power there. “If the Habsburgs could be stopped in Germany, they would remain, from France’s perspective, a largely peripheral empire confined to Spain and Austria.” ‘Germany’ was not united; unification of the some thirty-seven German states would only occur two centuries later. Richelieu encouraged German Protestants to remain “in the fight against the Hapsburgs” while working to pry German Catholic states away from “the Imperial cause.” In the event, he did sign a secret treaty with Bavaria, agreeing to a defensive alliance. At the same time, he made overtures to the Low Countries, Denmark, and Sweden, with whose monarch, Gustavus Adolphus, France entered into alliance in 1631. As the Byzantines and the Venetians knew, money lubricated good relations and were a lot less expensive than the cost of maintaining larger armies.

As with Byzantium and Austria, such a complex diplomatic strategy required the establishment of a foreign policy bureaucracy to assist in its management. “The very creation of such an entity gave institutional expression to diplomacy as a standing preoccupation of the state, distinct from war, with its own budget, staff, and voice in high policy.” Accordingly, Richelieu systematized French foreign policy, with its ambassadors abroad now “tightly tethered to a professional secretariat back home.” 

Richelieu’s aim was “a Europe of sovereign states Catholic and Protestant, whose rights would be enshrined in law and held together by an equilibrium underwritten by its largest powers,” among whom France would hold the balance. The smaller states would be protected. The balance of power would “ensure le repos de la chrétienté.” Mitchell knows that “what ultimately gave French diplomacy its compelling energy was the country’s capacity for large-scale military action.” When its envoys spoke, foreigners listened. But the threat of military intervention came with rational justification: Do you really want to descend into religious warfare, again? Do small states not deserve to have their rights, especially their “liberties” or self-government, respected as much as big states do? Does not the law of nations say that all states have such rights? “By appealing to custom and law as the basis for this policy, rather than the power principle, French kings elevated self-interest to a national mission.” Such arguments required that French statesmen practice what they preached. “The minute [France] switched to a policy of active conquest it would be seen not as a protector but as an opportunistic predator.” When Louis XIV took the throne a year after Richelieu’s death in 1642, he initially followed the advice of the Richelieu’s successor, Mazarin; the 1648 Peace of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years’ War and kept Europe at peace for a generation. But in the 1660s, Louis abandoned the Richelieu-Mazarin strategy, adopting a policy of “security through conquest,” which ended the peace of Europe. And the great power France had neutralized led the charge against France.

In 1755, after ninety years of intermittent war, Austria saw that Prussia, ruled by the brilliant and ruthless Frederick the Great, had arisen as a new danger to Europe generally and to Austria in particular, having seized and held Austria’s most valuable territory, Silesia, in two wars, with a third (also won by Prussia) to follow the next year. The Austrian empress, Maria Theresa, did not rule a thoroughly modernized state, as Austria consisted of “a wild assortment of territories, inhabited by more than a dozen ethnicities,” which “complicated its leaders’ ability to create a powerful central government capable of mobilizing resources for war.” And it was surrounded by enemies.

Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz-Rittburg was Maria Theresa’s most sagacious cabinet minister. In 1749, he wrote a memorandum proposing “nothing less than a comprehensive overhaul of Hapsburg foreign policy” in light of the Prussian menace. Austria needed allies. That required detente with France, hitherto Austria’s “archenemy”—a radical proposal, indeed, since “rivalry with the Bourbons was part of the fixed furniture of Habsburg statecraft,” and one that might easily Austria’s alliances with England and Holland. But those sea powers had proved inadequate for Austrian security. Austria needed the assistance of “nearby land powers—big players, with real military heft, like France and Russia.” 

Austria also needed a much more coherent foreign policy apparatus. Its Privy Conference had charge of national security, overseeing the Austrian Court Chancellery, headed by the Chancellor, effectively the foreign minister. In the second quarter of the eighteenth century, another institution was established, the Chancellery of State, headed by the State Secretary. This led to confusion, which Kaunitz set out to eliminate by “install[ing] modern administration on the French model”: a foreign minister (himself), a deputy minister, three department heads, all of whom practiced regular reporting from the ambassadors and routinized office functions. Foreign diplomats were no longer allowed to approach the empress’s advisors directly. The Chancellery, not the Privy Conference, became “the real locus of policy.” This enabled the empress and her foreign minister to implement a coherent new policy, which otherwise would have been stymied: to break with the maritime countries and ally with France and other Catholic countries against the Protestants of Prussia.

When the French and their Indian allies defeated and mortally wounded British General Edward Braddock in the July 1755 Battle of the Monongahela, Kaunitz seized the moment to persuade the Privy Conference to adopt his policy, implemented by offering Louis XV the part of the Austrian Netherlands now called ‘Belgium’ in exchange for French territories in Italy. The French were reluctant, at first, but when Frederick successfully treated with England the following year, they began to see merit in the offer, and in the reconstitution of their alliance structure. Louis pledged military aid to Austria, if the Habsburgs were attacked by a “third party”—obviously, Prussia. Mitchell judges that “it would be hard to find a more lopsidedly advantageous arrangement in diplomatic history.” Kaunitz had no use for the Austrian Netherlands, preferred the southern sphere of influence, Italy (well away from Prussia), and could hope for French military assistance to regain Silesia, if Prussia attacked. Further, France was unthreatened by Prussia and was sending troops needed in North America to a bordering country on continental Europe, instead. Kaunitz then reached out to the Holy Roman Empire, Russia, and the Ottomans in what was called his renversement des alliances. 

Now, Prussia was the isolated country. Its rival, Austria, had doubled the military strength it could field. Its new ally, England, was a naval power, unable to offer much military help on the continent. Unfortunately for the Austrians, their military officers were less skilled than their diplomatic corps. In the Seven Years’ War, the Habsburg coalition defeated Prussia repeatedly, driving its army back into its own territory, “but each time, cautious Austrian commanders frittered away their victories and allowed Frederick to bounce back.” When Czarina Elisabeth died and “her erratic son, Peter III,” succeeded her, he abandoned Austria and allied with Prussia, “allowing Frederick to focus his full attention on Austria” and to “force Maria Theresa to the negotiating table,” where she was unable to recover Silesia. Kaunitz’s balance-of-power system might have worked, had the other elements of the Austrian regime met the challenge. They didn’t. With the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which had buffered Austria from Russia, now in disarray, Austria could either do nothing other than watch Russia and Prussia carve it up or join in the carving. They chose the latter, agreeing to the first partition of Poland in 1772. Kaunitz thus added more than 30,000 square miles of territory and 2.65 million people to the empire—a mixed blessing, since now the acquisitions would need to be governed by the none-too-coherent Austrian state apparatus. He had avoided war, temporarily, at the cost of increased dependence upon Russia, which he had brought back into alliance with Austria; he needed it as a counterweight to Prussia, which had also gained territory and population. “As Europe’s sprawling middle power, Austria could never win in these games.”

And the games continued. The French Revolution and Napoleon made France a new menace to Austria, this time not only a threat to its territories but to its imperial structure and its regime. Austria lost some of its territory in 1797, but this was only a prelude to Napoleon’s dismantling of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 and to the 1807 agreement between the French emperor and Czar Alexander I, which “divided Europe between them.” A last, desperate war Austria launched two years later “ended with her comprehensive defeat” and the loss of 32,000 square miles of territory along with independence. As an act of propitiation, “the Austrian emperor, Francis I, gave his eldest daughter, Marie Louise,” the great-niece of Marie Antoinette, in marriage “to the Corsican ogre.” And while Napoleon finally met his Waterloo, Austria suffered more combat fatalities than any other country, lost one-third of its population and territory, and incurred a huge war debt. 

Once again, diplomacy, so often the art of the weaker, proved Austria’s strongest feature. Klemens Wenzel Count von Metternich, the Austrian foreign minister, organized and hosted the Congress of Vienna, where the victorious powers met to negotiate the postwar settlement. Metternich aimed at what he described as “a long general peace” after “the pains of a two-and-twenty years’ war.” To do that, he recognized, would require the establishment of “a new state of affairs” in Europe “that conforms to all interests,” putting “the geographic and political relations of the powers on a just and therefore durable basis.” He went on to write that he wanted European statesmen to reject “the system of conquest” and to establish a “system of restitution and equivalents in the forming of kingdoms and states” in accordance with the law of nations. “The modern world,” he wrote inclines nations “to draw near to each other, and in some fashion to enter into a social league.” The ancients had only “prudence” to restrain international relations, but modern states might establish those relations “upon the basis of reciprocity, under the guarantee of respect for acquired rights, and the conscientious observance of plighted faith”—all of which requires steady diplomacy. Metternich did not imagine that the balance of power could be erased. It rather should be supplemented by “adherence to treaty rights”—those “acquired rights” he had cited—and an institutional structure that would enable the great powers to consult with one another and coordinate their actions. This went “well beyond Kaunitz’ conception of diplomacy,” as Metternich proposed “a political order in which peace would be preserved not on a reactive basis, through the cobbling-together of coalitions once a war had already broken out, but proactively, on the basis of binding obligations supervised by the great powers,” “an essentially federative arrangement rooted in collective security.” The Holy Roman Empire could provide Europeans with an example of such a structure, a precedent which collapsed not because it was too big but because it wasn’t big enough, did not encompass the whole of Europe. This, and Austria’s own vulnerability, “lent moral credibility to Austrian diplomacy”; the moral thing to do, the peacemaking thing to do, was the only thing contemporary Austria could do. Unlike the other great powers, its particular ‘is’ coincided with the universal ‘ought.’

Structurally, Metternich planned what his aide Friedrich von Gentz called a “central dike” consisting of a strengthened Habsburg monarchy, drawing revenues from territories it had lost to Germany, surrounded by smaller states tied to Austria politically, militarily, and economically. Austria would head a German Confederation, its states following the policy of ‘an attack on one is an attack on all.’ He also hoped that eventually the states within the Confederation would agree to common commercial policies and a transportation network. He also advocated a Quadruple Alliance consisting of Austria, Russia, Prussia, and Britain to contain France and the Holy Alliance consisting of Austria, Prussia, and Russia to uphold monarchic regimes against republics and republicanism, associated in Europe with secularism. A son of the Enlightenment himself, Metternich privately despised the Holy Alliance’s religious inflexion while regarding it as necessary to keep Orthodox Russia involved—which he wanted to do, because he envisioned of regular consultations among Alliance members as a means of restraining the Czar’s ambitions in Eastern and Central Europe. 

Generally, such consultation was the animating practice of all these constructs. He did not want any of them to have a professional executive body. That, “he believed, would have fueled the growth of a permanent bureaucracy with its own separate agenda.” Regular conferences or “congresses” charged with addressing specific interstate problems or questions were much preferable. 

In 1818, France joined the Quadruple Alliance. The new Quintuple Alliance proved fragile, as Britain “was drawn more and more to its traditional foreign policy of avoiding peacetime alliances on the European continent,” especially after George Canning replaced Metternich’s friend, foreign secretary Viscount Castlereagh in 1822, and as France also distanced itself after the appointment of Chateaubriand, who “saw France’s participation in the Vienna system as a national humiliation.” On Austria’s eastern and southern fronts, Russia coveted Ottoman territories in the Balkans “under the guise of protecting Orthodox Christians” and Ottoman power declined, especially under the pressure of the Greek independence movement. 

Metternich kept the alliance with Russia alive, nonetheless, and it was fortunate for Austria that he did. In the revolutionary period of 1848-49, the Habsburg family was threatened, Metternich fled the country, but Russia came to Austria’s aid and Prussia assisted in quelling the rebel forces within the German Confederation. “Metternich’s diplomacy helped ensure not only that Austria’s geopolitical rivalries were pacified but that the rivals themselves were active participants in her salvation.” 

War among the great powers did break out in the mid-1850s, when the ever-weakening Ottomans refused the Czar’s demand to make Russia the protectors of Orthodox Christian in the sultan’s empire. In retaliation, the Czar’s army occupied the Danubian Principalities—Moldavia and Wallachia—controlled by the Ottomans. In order to preserve what was now called the Concert of Europe, Britain and France sided with the Ottomans and defeated the Russian forces in 1856. Thanks to the Austrian system, however, the war did not become generalized, as it would in 1914. That was after “the impetuous young emperor Franz Joseph had discarded Metternich’s conservative methods in favor of a new grand strategy centered on offensive military power,” which left Austria “ranged against multiple rivals without a single ally.” The results “were catastrophic” both for Austria and for Europe.

Austria’s decline facilitated its expulsion from the German Confederation, a move precipitated by Prussia under the direction of its master geopolitician, Otto von Bismarck.