Note to Self: John Gaddis's Strategy is a weird book. I do not recommend it. But there are some gems. This is one of them—British late nineteenth-century Prime Minister the Earl of Salisbury's attitude towards America:
Salisbury as explicated by Andrew Roberts, transmitted via Gaddis:
One night during the [United States] Civil War, Georgina Cecil awoke to find her husband standing, asleep but agitated, before an open second-floor window. He seemed to be expecting invaders, “presumably Federal soldiers or revolutionary mob”.... Lord Robert Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil.... Never... his wife recalled, did he suffer “such extremes of depression and nervous misery as at that time.”... He despised democracy—so deeply that he sympathized with secession, favored the Confederacy, and regarded Lincoln’s assassination as a legitimate last act of resistance.... “If we had interfered,” he’d written of the Civil War in the last year of his life, it might have been possible “to reduce the power of the United States to manageable proportions. But two such chances are not given to a nation in the course of its career.”...
Baited... on two fronts, Salisbury yielded on one. “There is no such thing as a fixed policy,” he observed, “because policy like all organic entities is always in the making.” And so he and his successors began methodically and unilaterally eliminating all sources of friction with the United States... Venezuela... the Spanish-American War (Britain stayed neutral)... the Philippines (Salisbury supported American, not German, annexation)... a future Panama Canal (Britain relinquished long-held rights in the region), and... Alaska’s boundary (Canada sacrificed for the greater good). It may not have been appeasement, but it was lubrication: like Mikhail Gorbachev almost a century later, Salisbury set out to deprive an enemy of its enemy....
The impulse of democracy, which began in another country in other lands, has made itself felt in our time, and vast changes in the centre of power and incidence of responsibility have been made almost imperceptibly without any disturbance or hindrance in the progress of the prosperous development of the nation...
The sleepwalker still regretted the Confederacy’s defeat, and the consequent loss of a balance of power in North America. The strategist, however, never forgot that “we are fish,” and “alone can do nothing to remedy an inland tyranny.” So Great Britain learned to live with a democracy dominating a continent. For that, with whatever ambivalence, Salisbury had Lincoln to thank...
#shouldread
