The ten rules governing how our new world really works (Rule 7: Knowing your country's place in the world; Lord Salisbury Saves the British Empire)
Introduction: The Imperative of Seeing the World as it is
Throughout history, any political risk analyst worth their salt—from the pythia to me—has been able to see one thing above all: The basic power structure of the world and their country’s place within it. Whether it is Roman historians looking at the unipolar Mediterranean of the Augustan Age or Castlereagh and Metternich gaming out complex European multipolarity after the fall of Napoleon, this is the starting point for all effective political risk analysis.
In the late nineteenth century, following on from the American Civil War and with Great Britain still the undisputed greatest power in the world, one major British statesman, the brilliant, pious, gloomy Lord Salisbury, rightly sensed that while Britain’s power was waning, it still had the ability to set the scene for the coming era. He based his new strategy on the correct and novel structural fact that while London remained first amongst equals, other great powers such as Germany, the United States, and Japan were relatively on the rise. Seeing the world dispassionately as it is in terms of power is the entry point for any successful political risk analysis, and there are few statesmen in history who displayed this talent as acutely as did Salisbury during the fraught days at the end of the Victorian era.
Salisbury’s Intellectual Courage in Confronting His Changing World
He is not an easy man to love, Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, Third Marquess of Salisbury. A direct descendent of Lord Burghley, the able chief minister to Elizabeth I, Salisbury never let you forget for a moment that his family was used to running things. Aristocratic, brilliant, haughty, imperious, never giving an inch, he dominated late Victorian British politics after the colossal struggles of the earlier Gladstone-Disraeli era, serving as Conservative Prime Minister three times between June 1885-July 1902.
A powerful speaker, a fine writer, and a first-rate intellect, Salisbury was faced with the gargantuan task of doing nothing less than preparing his countrymen to survive and thrive in a very different global order than the one they had been born into. Given the new state of play, he had to convince the British foreign policy elite, very used to having almost no limitations placed on their policies, to completely change their way of thinking, and in a remarkably short period of time.
This was a truly herculean endeavour. For to see the world as it is was as profoundly emotionally uncomfortable for the British foreign policy elite of the late Victorian era, as it is for today’s American decision-makers. In both cases, London and Washington got used to an easy supremacy, where it was simple heresy to even suggest that their dominance might be passing away, as always occurs in history to every superpower. Salisbury had to contend with rivals who thought him heretical, bordering on treasonous, to merely suggest the need to overhaul British foreign policy, making it fit for purpose in an age where London remained first amongst global equals, even while it was no longer wholly dominant.
The reward for Salisbury’s intellectually heroic effort was that his cultivated allies, the United States and Japan, took up a significant portion of the global ordering slack from Britain, in the Western Hemisphere and Asia, respectively, without unduly harming major British national interests. Salisbury, with his brave, underrated far-sightedness, buttressed Britain’s central role as the global ordering power, by paradoxically having it do less.
Salisbury is one of those curious transition figures in history, part relic of a bygone age and part a very modern man. He was the last British Prime Minister to head an administration while sitting in the House of Lords, to which he had been elevated following the death of his father in 1868. A product of the old conservative British landed gentry to his fingertips (his family held vast land holdings in rural Dorset), Salisbury spent the better part of his adult life a reactionary in terms of domestic politics, skilfully if vainly trying to sweep the tide of universal male suffrage back to sea, even after his Conservative colleague, Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, had shrewdly come to accept it.
Perhaps it is because he was so obviously on the wrong side of history over this central point that Salisbury has become a relatively neglected figure in our own time, which is a great intellectual shame and far too easy a judgment to pass on him. For compared to the pygmies presently dominating both major American political parties, Salisbury ran a surprisingly modern, and very effective, foreign policy in his own day.
In contrast to his domestic failure to hold back modern voting rights, Salisbury’s foreign policy triumphs centred on his shrewd realist understanding of Britain’s historic interests. This was combined with a keen appreciation that he and his country were living through a period of global structural change in foreign affairs: Although the world of of easy British dominance was finally giving way to a more competitive, more multipolar era, Britain remained the most important and powerful political force on the planet. His entire foreign policy was based on his unerring and correct reading of this global shift in power and Britain’s changing place in the world.
Serving as Foreign Secretary for the majority of his three premierships, Salisbury was the undisputed master of late Victorian foreign policy. It is even more to his credit that Salisbury was able to accurately assess that this globalised change in Britain’s place in the world meant a diminution in overall British power. Salisbury’s supreme intellectual ability to bravely look in the analytical mirror and see what was actually there did nothing less than save the British Empire, then the ordering power of the world, from catastrophe a generation later in 1918. With the fate of the modern world resting in the balance, long-cultivated allies, the United States and Japan, rode to Britain’s rescue in that pivotal year.
Salisbury’s entire foreign policy rested on the uncomfortable notion that Britain was in the very curious structural position of being in relative decline, but was still by a long way the greatest power in the world. However, he saw that he ascension of Japan in Asia, the United States in North America, and Germany in Europe to great power status could not be stopped. Instead, if Britain was to retain its pre-eminent place in the world, these emerging powers would have to be accommodated if possible, and opposed by a British-led alliance only if necessary.
A few basic but vital truths underscored this shift in British strategy. Salisbury knew that most people would have little understanding of what he was attempting to do. As he said in criticising British officials grappling with the Orissa famine in India they were ‘walking in a dream…in superb unconsciousness, believing that what had been must be.’ This is a key belief of Salisbury’s: For all his conservatism, he knew it is poison in political risk terms to lazily assume that things will always be as they have been. His whole foreign policy was about avoiding this devilish trap.
The second basic precept followed by Salisbury was to avoid wasting time, energy, and power worrying about what countries were doing in their internal affairs, as outside influences were highly unlikely to change things and would fritter away British power. While still a junior MP, Salisbury had argued in the House of Commons, ‘It is not a dignified position for a Great Power to occupy, to be pointed out as the busybody of Christendom.’
In sharp contrast to today’s debilitating Western foreign policy views, so dominated by moralistic Wilsonianism, Salisbury saw the world in starkly realist terms. His job was to secure Britain’s place in the world, no more and no less. All foreign policy ventures would be judged only by this exacting if simple standard.
In line with this point, Salisbury firmly believed that Britain should not threaten other countries in general unless it was prepared to back up these statements with force. Otherwise, it would look increasingly weak and feckless in the world, the last thing he wanted at a time of such global change, as Britain grew relatively weaker.
While the British Prime Minister firmly believed that rising powers should be accommodated wherever possible, he also worked to make sure British security was bolstered, especially regarding the vital Royal Navy. During Salisbury’s second premiership (1886-1892), he crafted the Naval Defence Act of 1889, spending an extra 20 million pounds on the navy over four years, the largest-ever peacetime expansion of the fleet. The new money allowed the construction of 10 new battleships and 38 new cruisers.
Further, it led to the propounding of the new naval doctrine that the British Royal Navy must be maintained at the standard of the next two largest navies in the world combined, preserving the country’s dominant military position even as other great powers were rising. For in the end the bolstering of the navy and the new, novel diplomatic approach Salisbury adopted were both there to serve the same overall purpose: Securing Britain’s dominant position in the world, even though it was in relative decline as other powers rose.
The Merits of Off-Shore Balancing
Historians, in this as in so much else about the man, have generally been very confused as to what Salisbury was up to. The lazy, conventionally accepted view of him is to conflate his foreign policy with his predecessor Disraeli’s and to wrong-headedly assert that they were both pursuing a policy based on what has been termed ‘splendid isolation.’ This term misleads, as it strongly implies that Britain adopted a passive approach to foreign policy at this critical juncture when in actuality the precise opposite is true.
Instead, Salisbury felt that the new world structure called for Britain to function as the global off-shore balancer. Staying aloof from the day-to-day quarrels and shifts in power in the various regions of the world, Britain would bring its power to bear only if these regional balances of power fell apart and any one rising power began to dominate a region and threaten primary British interests.
Far from being a passive strategy, off-shore balancing calls for a constant assessment of what is going on within regional balances of power, as sudden shifts can result in dangers that must be quickly righted by the ordering power in question.
However, if a balance of power failed and one power began to dominate a region—as the Japanese did in Asia, the United States did in the Western Hemisphere, and the Germans did in Europe during Salisbury’s premierships—Britain would be called upon to make a fateful strategic determination: Was the rising power likely to be a status quo power helpful to Britain over the long run, or a revolutionary power determined to upend the British-inspired global order? To answer this central question, it was vital to know in great detail the specific national interests of the rising powers in question before making a strategic determination as to whether they were best co-opted or opposed. Far form being a passive position, the ‘splendid isolation’ of the Salisbury years required an intricate, comprehensive, vigilant understanding of the world as it was.
Salisbury’s overall foreign policy had several key planks. While alliances were acceptable, they must not be entangling, as Britain had to absolutely maintain its sovereignty to quickly and decisively right threats to regional balances of power throughout the world. Here the prime minister was supremely lucky in that the very character of his country—by virtue of its isolated location, dominant navy, and central position in the financial, trading and industrial worlds—could with ease run such an independent foreign policy.
As such, safeguarding these unique national advantages became a cornerstone of Salisbury’s thinking. Under his leadership, Britain was always protecting free trade around the globe, as no other nation benefited from it to such a degree. Likewise, as we have seen, preserving British naval dominance was a central plank of Salisbury’s worldview.
Off-shore balancing freed Britain up to more narrowly focus on its primary national interest of the time: Securing the colonies and dominions that comprised the British Empire, especially seeing to it that the vital sea routes between Britain and India, via the Suez Canal, were absolutely protected. At the core of Salisbury’s overall foreign policy was a fervent desire for Britain—as the world’s foremost status quo power and the global ordering power—to avoid war with rising powers if at all possible, thereby ensuring that these lines of communication throughout the empire were unthreatened and British dominance could proceed in a non-dramatic and secure manner.
To live in this hoped-for peaceful world, Salisbury’s last foreign policy plank amounted to what seemed at the time like an unnerving, almost humiliating climb-down for a proud country used to running the world as it saw fit. Britain as the primary status quo power would not stand in the way of the rising powers if it could possibly be helped.
Maintaining peace meant accommodating rather than opposing the United States, Japan, and Germany as far as possible, as this approach made it far more likely that they would emerge over time as status quo powers themselves—and as such, be prepared to help Britain defend the present global order—rather than as revolutionary powers determined to upend the world that Britain had largely created.
As Britain’s power was due to continue relatively ebbing over decades, these new, emerging powers would determine the nature of the new era Salisbury was trying to birth: Either they would come to safeguard the old order and peace would reign, or they would challenge it by force and inevitably tumultuous war would break out. Far from carving out a placid, reactive foreign policy, as ‘splendid isolation’ is often portrayed, Salisbury could not have been playing for higher stakes with his actual off-shore balancing efforts.
This radically different British policy of accommodating—rather than thwarting—rising powers required that Salisbury directly challenge the mindsets of the majority of the British foreign policy practitioners of his own time, who were complacently used to living in a world where they could largely do as they pleased without having to worry over-much about accommodating anyone.
A similar problem bedevils American foreign policy at the present moment. Today’s United States finds itself eerily in the same global power position as Salisbury’s Britain: It is still far and away the world’s dominant power (and will be so for quite some time), even as it is relatively in decline as other great powers, such as China and India, rise from a low base.
As was true in the late Victorian era, the American foreign policy elite of today—as I witness every time I attend a Council on Foreign Relations meeting—still can’t get its collective head around this basic fact of our own complicated new era. Superpower rival China can and indeed must be bested; but this can only happen by America forming alliances with emerging powers such as India, while buttressing ties with established powers such as the Japan, the Anglosphere countries, and the EU.
As Anatol Lieven and I pointed out in Ethical Realism, Democratic foreign policy elites may think they can charm the world into doing what they want, and Republican elites may think the world can be bullied into doing as they wish, but the bottom line in both cases s that both parties still think they can pretty much tell the world what to do and it will happen.
They are living in a time warp, still harkening back to the long period—during the Cold War and then the brief unipolar moment—when the United States had far more global power that it presently possesses and could easily afford to pursue a more aggressive and less subtle strategy. Salisbury ran into precisely the same sort of opposition, as he lived in a hauntingly similar structural world in terms of global power.
His nimble intellectual success contrasts sharply with the cloddish, dinosaur-like refusal of much of the present American foreign policy elite to simply recognise that the world has fundamentally changed, as has the country's place in it, and to act on this precious knowledge. Failure to do so, in political risk terms, poses the gravest threat for the United States today, as its elites fail to adjust to the basic power realities of the new era we presently find ourselves in. Salisbury’s supreme triumph in accurately seeing Britain’s true place in the changing world of the late Victoria era amounts to an argument against complacency and arrogance in political risk analysis, and in favour of the intellectual flexibility that is necessary to being strategically successful.
Salisbury Finesses America over the Venezuelan Crisis
Salisbury’s brave and correct analytical take on Britain’s changed position in the world not only conditioned his overall foreign policy strategy but also provided the outlines for the tactics necessary to make such a game plan work.
Given Britain’s relative decline, the three rising regional powers London had to try to accommodate—and if not, confront with a broader coalition—were the United States in the Western Hemisphere, Japan in Asia, and Germany in Europe. Matters with America were to come to a head first.
By 1895, an obscure border dispute between Britain and Venezuela had been simmering at a low boil for half a century; no one would have thought such a minor crisis would take London and Washington—Venezuela’s champion—to the brink of war. The original dispute had arisen centuries before between the Spanish and Dutch Empires and was inherited by Venezuela (after its independence was declared from the former in 1830) and Britain (after it took over British Guiana from the Dutch in 1814).
The disputed territory had always contained the strategic mouth of the Orinoco River, and the dispute assumed more importance when lucrative gold mines were discovered in the region. More importantly, political feeling grew in the US that Britain was throwing its weight around in the Western Hemisphere. From an American perspective, this was a clear violation of the Monroe Doctrine, then the primary pillar of American foreign policy, which had been formulated by Secretary of State John Quincy Adams in 1823.
The doctrine stated that any further attempts by European powers to colonise land or interfere with countries in the Western Hemisphere would be viewed as unfriendly acts of aggression against the United States, requiring American intervention; in essence, Washington was declaring that the entirety of the Western Hemisphere was its specific sphere of influence.
While the Monroe Doctrine was unenforceable at the time, the US had been lucky that, as it rose over the course of the nineteenth century as a great power, it had suited the ordering power in London to uphold the doctrine based on the fact that it did not wish its own rivals to bolster their positions through the acquisition of colonies in the Americas. Now, however, the shoe was firmly on the other foot, as a rising US saw Britain as the primary meddling outsider.
In February 1895, President Grover Cleveland signed into law the congressional injunction that Britain and Venezuela should settle the dispute by arbitration, meaning that Britain could not continue to blithely ignore Venezuelan claims to the territory.
Initially, the British behaved as it had throughout much of the nineteenth century: It haughtily dismissed American objections and went about its business as if it could do as it pleased in the world. But the enraged Americans would not let the matter drop.
July 1895 saw Secretary of State Richard Olney send a diplomatic note to Britain, firmly insisting on the application of the Monroe Doctrine to the crisis and making it clear that Washington believed that ‘today the US is practically sovereign on this continent,’ and that British claims in the disputed region threatened primary American interests. Still the British, so used to getting their own way due to their old structural position of dominance, did not budge.
But the US upped the strategic ante. In December 1895, President Cleveland delivered an address to Congress, reaffirming the Monroe Doctrine and its relevance to the Venezuelan dispute. Couched in undeniably menacing tones, the address seemed to amount to a direct threat of war if London did not seek to take the matter to international arbitration, as Washington insisted on. Cleveland said that America would ‘resist by any means in its power’ if Britain continued to ignore US and Venezuelan concerns and exercise jurisdiction over the disputed land.
It was at this critical moment that Salisbury showed his true greatness. Surely no one in the haughty (to modern eyes) nineteenth century was so full of his own importance as was the British prime minister. However, at this pivotal juncture he managed to master his own pride—as well as that of his country—in the service of his evolving foreign policy of accommodating the rising powers of the day.
In line with the later ‘Serenity Prayer’ of that arch-realist, the American theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, Salisbury was guided by the pivotal notion, ‘God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.’
In January 1896, Salisbury’s government decided to formally recognise the American right to intervene in the territorial dispute, accepting the US position that arbitration was necessary to resolve the controversy. Negotiations were conducted in a personally highly cordial manner, greatly and immediately improving US-UK relations. The tribunal met in Paris, where Britain largely persuaded the United States of its claims. In October 1899, the tribunal awarded Britain 90 percent of the disputed territory—and all of the gold mines.
However, and far more importantly, what had just happened was that the global ordering power, still by far the most important country in the world, had accepted that the United States—as the rising power in the Western Hemisphere—held regional primacy over what went on there. In recognising America’s right to intervene in the dispute as asserted by the Monroe Doctrine, Salisbury’s Britain implicitly acknowledged American dominance of the Western Hemisphere itself.
Salisbury, in working through a seemingly obscure territorial dispute halfway around the world from London, had successfully broken the old mould of British foreign policy, making it fit for purpose in the new era that was just dawning. This was the very last time in the modern era that a possible war between the two great Anglo-Saxon powers would ever be contemplated. From here on out, the two great powers, as Salisbury had so presciently seen, worked together hand in glove as status quo forces, determined to defend the British-inspired global order.
Reaching an accommodation with rising Japan proved far easier—as well as far less dramatic—for the British. The Anglo-Japanese alliance, which came into force in 1902, implicitly did in Asia what the Venezuelan crisis had done in the Western Hemisphere: Britain as the ordering power tacitly ceded regional dominance to the primary rising regional power, transforming it into an ally.
The treaty was renewed and expanded by the two great powers in both 1905 and 1911. The elderly Genro, who still remembered with gratitude that Britain had supported their drive for modernisation over the past two generations, had proved easier than the Americans to bring on board as a status quo power.
Tokyo’s stunning victory in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 confirmed Britain’s analysis that it was Japan and not Russia that was the rising power to watch in Asia. Crucially, it was the alliance’s provisions for mutual defence that prompted Japan to enter World War I on the British side, riding to the empire’s rescue in Asia, much as America was to do in Europe.
Salisbury Saves His Country, Long After His Death
Salisbury’s tragedy was that while his creative foreign policy saved the British Empire, it did not do so without the shedding of massive effusions of blood in a world war. For while the United States and Japan both proved malleable to his plans for rising power accommodation, the Kaiser’s Germany did not.
The dramatic German efforts to threaten Britain’s naval supremacy from 1898 onwards—a cornerstone of Salisbury’s foreign policy strategy—led to the Anglo-German arms race, causing Britain (unlike in the cases of the US and Japan) to perceive German efforts to achieve regional dominance in Europe as fundamentally hostile to its interests.
The off-shore balancer would now have to get far more involved in the intricacies of European politics, using its weight to directly offset growing German power. As such, the British entente with first France and then Russia—originally agreements limited to colonial affairs—gradually over time became a fully-fledged alliance. The civilisational disaster of World War I was not far away. And for all Salisbury’s imaginative foreign policy, it could not avert the catastrophe.
But if Salisbury’s innovative foreign policy—predicated on the looking at the world (and yourself in it) as coldly and clearly as possible—had not averted war, it largely managed to win it. For in 1918, it was Salisbury’s cultivated rising powers, the United States in Europe and Japan in Asia, that contributed mightily to ultimate victory and the securing—for a little while longer yet—of Britain’s preeminent place in the world.
Far before those pivotal years, on July 11, 1902, in failing health (largely due to his great weight) and distraught over the recent death of his beloved wife, the old man finally resigned the premiership in favour of his nephew, Arthur Balfour. Salisbury died quietly a year later in 1903. But this forgotten man, by mastering the key political risk tenet of seeing the power structure of the world as it actually was and Britain’s place in it, saved his country from disaster a full 15 years after his death.