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Jordan's leaders considered Egypt an irresponsible ally in their intervention in Palestine. They found particularly reprehensible the refusal of Cairo to renew the first ceasefire, which expired in early July 1948. Britain, the United States, and the United Nations Security Council had all strongly urged the belligerents to prolong the truce; and Israel agreed to an extension. Thus, the Egyptian refusal both tested the goodwill of the Great Powers and ushered in a disastrous round of fighting. At the decisive meeting of the Arab League, Amman argued against resuming the war, pointing out that the Arab side was weaker than the Israelis and low on ammunition. Cairo, however, argued on the basis of unassailable nationalist principles that the battle must be resumed. In response to the Jordanian complaints regarding the weakness of the coalition and the lack of supplies, the proponents of war explained that, in light of their deficiencies, the Arab armies would simply have to remain on the defensive. The Jordanian prime minister, Tawfiq Abu'l-Huda, felt powerless to defy his allies.

The effect of Russia on British policy before 1914 was different from that of any other power. This singularity sprang form the peculiar nature of the two states. Each, to an extent not possessed by other powers, had the luxury of withdrawing — Britain behind the Channel; Russia behind a barrier created by sheer distance — from European affairs, and neither had an effective means of striking a direct blow to each other. Anglo-Russian relations in Europe were always pursued in the context of the relations between the Great Powers generally. Therefore, Britain always had allies when dealing with Russia about Continental issues.

This chapter discusses the centres of Anglo-Russian relations in the first two years of Nicholas II's reign. The first was Sino-Japanese War; the second was the Armenian crisis. The Sino-Japanese War was one of the first manifestations of the effect of the emergence of Germany and Japan as Great Powers had on Anglo-Russian relations. The second centre of Anglo-Russian relations — Armenia — was a traditional one and representative of the fact that the British and Russian imperial interests were worldwide and often in competition with each other.

Britain emerged from the First World War with her overall position in the East Asian structure of power diminished, but with the institutions of formal and informal empire in China unharmed. During 1929–30, two of the most profitable public utility companies in Shanghai passed from British into American ownership. Between 1911 and 1913, the Great Powers, acting in relative harmony, had seized the chance of a collapsing ancien régime to humiliate China in unprecedented ways. Until 1926, the British saw no need for a major revision of their China policy. The decentralization or even disappearance of state authority in China jeopardized the foundations of informal empire. Chinese nationalism had no coherent doctrine and no unified political movement. There were reasons to doubt the dogma that British well-being in China depended on extraterritoriality and consular jurisdiction. Britain's Imperial retreat from China went through a number of stages. The temporary rescue of a late Imperial British position in China was mainly a result of the split of the Chinese revolutionary movement in 1927 and of the victory of moderate élite nationalism over radical mass nationalism.

This chapter situates the nineteenth-century European Concert of Great Powers—which was at the political centre of the post-Napoleonic international order—and its congresses and ambassador conferences, in the framework of analysis of an emerging law-based peace system, juxtaposing innovations and paradoxes. It shows that paradoxes abound and characterize the structure, the practice, and many outcomes of the nineteenth-century Concert of Great Powers: defending the rights of smaller states entailed secrecy and privileges for the Great. Solidarity cum rivalry led to cooperation. Humanitarian crises triggered new strategic compromises. The Concert majority imposed peace on recalcitrant parties to disputes, yet the two most conservative powers—the Habsburg monarchy and in some cases Russia—refused mediation by the Concert while regarding it as self-evident that other states had to submit to their deliberations.

The origins of American intervention in World War I lay in the naval struggle that had been an important factor in precipitating the war and began in earnest at the outbreak of war. The British-imposed blockade on Germany to strangle its industrial economy and German attempts to break the blockade were important issues that led to U.S. entry into the war. In particular, American outrage over the German naval strategy provided a basis for action against the Germans. At the beginning of the twentieth century, all the Great Powers had indulged in a frenzy of warship construction. Rivalry between the traditional European naval power Great Britain and the upstart Germany had been a major reason for the British to seek the shelter of the Triple Entente alliance. However, at the start of hostilities in 1914, the fighting was largely confined to land. Nevertheless, some naval engagements occurred in all the bodies of water surrounding Europe.

This epilogue argues that many of the problems that the Habsburgs faced are present today. Geopolitics remains as a persistent and reintensifying force in which Great Powers seek to survive in competition with other large, purposeful actors. In this contest, geography remains both a key determinant of success and its ultimate prize. Advances in technology have only partially mitigated the effects of geography; even in the era of nuclear weapons, the search for security comes down to a battle for space in which finite resources must be arrayed in time to deal with virtually infinite challenges. As in the Habsburg period, the threats arrayed against today’s West are multidirectional in nature and vary widely in form, ranging from revisionist Great Powers with large conventional armies to economically backward but numerous and religiously motivated enemies employing asymmetrical weapons and tactics. The chapter then considers a few broad principles of Habsburg strategic statecraft which stand out as potentially relevant in any era.

This chapter examines the Russo-Japanese War, which brought about the decisive turning point in Anglo-Russian relations between 1894 and 1914. Before the war, Russia had repeatedly rejected British overtures for a general agreement between the two countries. After the war, as a result of military defeat, Russia attempted to accommodate the Great Powers. The Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 was the eventual result. The Russo-Japanese War also marked the nadir of Anglo-Russian relations. Without skillful management and good fortune, the struggle in the Far East could have resulted in a general global conflict between an Anglo-Japanese coalition and the Franco-Russian pairing.

Sovereignty according to the radicalized liberalism of Wilsonianism would exist in the international system after the Great War, or it would not. If it would not, the League was never going to become anything but what it was, an institutionalized means for state cooperation. The League continued the “laboratory” of sovereignty established at the Paris Peace Conference. It articulated a certain configuration of agents and structures in attempts to redefine a system of international security. While assiduously avoiding self-designation as any kind of “world state,” the League tried to complete a good deal of unfinished business bequeathed to it by the conference, notably in the “unmixing” of lands and peoples. It would try to draw boundaries, administer plebiscites, enforce minorities treaties, supervise mandates, and avoid blame for the population exchanges. But in the end, the League was always what states made of it.

One must go back to the effects of World War I and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy to understand Hungary's role in World War II. During the turbulent years 1918–1919 the Kingdom of Hungary disintegrated, Hungary's neighbors occupied much of the country, and the new democratic republic failed to win Allied recognition, replaced by a short-lived Bolshevik regime. As a final blow the Peace Treaty confirmed the losses, including territories such as Transylvania and Northern Hungary, which had been integral parts of the Kingdom and carried great symbolic value. One and one-half million of the population lost lived in solidly Hungarian-inhabited belts on the new borders. Hungarians never recovered from their sense of injustice at the dismemberment of the Kingdom, and their belief that the Treaty of Trianon had been a dreadful mistake, which the Great Powers would eventually rectify.

This chapter examines the neutrality of smaller states in Europe, including Belgium and the Netherlands, as a strategy to stand aside from the impending war in 1939, along with the possibilities of choice for the Jews who wanted to escape persecution at the hands of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. It suggests that the move towards neutrality was a response not only to fears of aggression but also to the failures of the Great Powers to make the Geneva system work or to offer alternative options for keeping the peace. It also considers attempts by smaller states to strengthen security through common action and the Balkan Entente countries' capability for regional action.

After the event, the ‘wars of unification’ seemed to many commentators to have been a connected, even progressive, series of national conflicts, issuing in the founding of a German Kaiserreich. At the time, however, the conflicts appeared very different from each other. The war against Denmark in 1864 had been anticipated by liberals as a ‘great war’, but its very status as a war had been contested by the Prussian and Austrian governments, who preferred to think of it as an ‘intervention’ on the part of the Great Powers or an ‘execution’ on behalf of the other German states. The conflict between Prussia, Austria, and the other German states in 1866 often seemed from a reading of the press to be a war of brothers. Only the war against France in 1870 had broad public support.

This chapter investigates the potential for the new disorder in the context of a specific geographical locus: Crimea. It is in this historical pivot-point that relations between great powers will be most significantly tested, and here that one finds political, economic and security quandaries that are best conceptualised in terms of a ‘trilemma’. This occurs in terms of competing themes of democracy, self-determination and economic globalisation. The argument here is that managing each of these three themes will be a difficult task in general, and virtually impossible where the major power centres of the post-unipolar world ultimately meet. Accordingly the chapter examines the preconditions for Russian involvement in Crimea, the instruments it employed, its normative justifications for doing so, and the domestic and foreign policy gains it sought to engender.

Price-Smith argues that US foreign energy policy frequently exhibits a fundamentally illiberal character, and this is particularly true of US military actions taken in the domain of energy. He advances several specific arguments; that material forces exert an enormous (but often ignored) influence on the United States’ security decision making and on its grand strategy; Perceptions and misperceptions regarding the availability of energy (e.g., oil) affect decision making, and may result in deviations from rationality that contribute to the onset of conflicts, such as the United States’ problematic decision to invade Iraq in 2003. Moreover, Price-Smith argues that oil acts as a mechanism that exacerbates the security dilemma in the Persian Gulf. Oil resources serve as a target of aggression, and revenue flows from oil foster militarization and intensify a regional arms race that has sporadically resulted in powerful manifestations of inter-state violence. However, Price-Smith argues against the common wisdom that scarcity of oil will impel conflicts between the Great Powers. Instead, he argues that the Great Powers are pursuing a strategy of asymmetrical conflict against weaker states in the early 21^st century, and that this is associated with a desire to attain mastery over energy resources.

This chapter offers some comments regarding the curious combination of power and impotence in the rule of the Great Powers, including that of the United States. Topics discussed include imperial overstretch and the fall of the Soviet Union; how to reduce Soviet defence spending; and United States and overstretch.

International security suffers not just from rules on force that are too strict but also from international institutions that don’t work. Proposals to expand the UN Security Council would only exacerbate the collective-action problems in preventing global harms. I propose that a concert of democracies supercedes the UN.