The dismantling of a Muslim theocratic state must be handled with care; Osama bin Laden, recall, listed the Spanish Reconquista among his grievances. The State Department must manage the transition gracefully.
That's a mighty big supposition.
Posted on 06/19/2025 1:12:45 AM PDT by Rummyfan
One of the longest periods of "stability" in Europe was near-century that followed the defeat of Napoleon in 1815 and concluded with the death of King Edward VII in 1910. Under the Pax Britannica, western civilization reached its height, physically, mentally, and morally, with enormous advances and achievements in science and the arts. Then, in 1914, a disruption in one of the restive provinces of the Austro-Hungarian empire soon enough became a war to death among three relatives (George V, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Czar Nicholas II, all of whom could trace their family ties by blood or marriage through Queen Victoria). The First World War, a war of enervation over nothing, trip-wired by balanced alliances and ententes, put paid to an era of "stability" -- something that risk-averse diplomats have been trying to recreate ever since.
As history shows, however, it's a fool's errand. Countries, even empires, look solid until they collapse. The illusion of permanence casts its spell until blown away by failure, ineptitude, or barbarian invasions. At Alexander the Great's death in 323 B.C. in Babylon, the 32-year-old wunderkind had birthed the Hellenistic world without suffering a single military defeat. When asked to which of his generals he bequeathed his empire, he was supposed to have replied: "to the strongest." And yet it broke apart almost immediately, creating sub-entities such as the Seleucid empire in Anatolia, Mesopotamia and Persia, and the Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt, whose last sovereign was Cleopatra VII; both ultimately fell to the Romans.
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The dismantling of a Muslim theocratic state must be handled with care; Osama bin Laden, recall, listed the Spanish Reconquista among his grievances. The State Department must manage the transition gracefully.
That's a mighty big supposition.
Pax Brittanica? What an absolute idiot! The U.S. school system taught him absolutely nothing about Europe once the Napoleonic Wars (War of 1812) put an end to our sponsorship until the U.S. comes back to Europe (World War One) as conquering heroes, and this absolute know-nothing thinks that means nothing happened.
Not once, but twice, wars spread across the whole of Europe between this “lull” that he imagines. That would be the Crimean War, and the revolutions of 1848.
The Franco-Prussian War killed almost 1,000,000 troops in 1870
The Russo-Ottoman War killed about a quarter of a million combatants.
The Russo-Persial War killed only marginally fewer.
And don’t confuse Russo-Ottoman with Russo-Turkish, because that’s another couple of hundred thousand.
And there’s the Greek War of Independence (from the Ottomans)
And another Russo-Ottoman war killed 120,000.
The Carlist wars of Spain, fought with opposition to Spain by both France and UK, cost a few hundred thousand lives.
The wars in Italy totalled a few hundred thousand. That includes Wars of Independence and Unification.
The Crimean War was Britain’s bloodiest to date outside of the Napoleonic Wars, with over a million total killed in battle.
A couple hundred thousand more died in the Austro-Prussian War.
And countless uprisings.
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