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Wall Street Journal

‘No More Napoleons' Review: Keeping Watch Over the Channel

Britain was one of the great ordering powers of modern history, first in Europe and then across the world. It was a leading voice in all of the major settlements—from the Congress of Vienna, which ended the Napoleonic Wars, through the Treaty of Versailles, which followed World War I, to the conferences of Yalta and Potsdam, which established the parameters of the postwar world, to the North Atlantic Treaty, which continues to shape global security today. At its height, the British Empire famously extended so far that the sun never set on it. Today those days are long gone, but Britain still plays a major role in the defense of Europe, leading the Nordic and Baltic containments of Russia. In this context, the appearance of Andrew Lambert's 'No More Napoleons: How Britain Managed Europe From Waterloo to World War One' is a salutary reminder that there is more than one way to achieve strategic effect. Much of the time, Britain ordered the Continent through large-scale interventions by legendary figures such as the Duke of Marlborough, the Duke of Wellington, Field Marshal Montgomery and the British Army of the Rhine, which never fired a shot but fulfilled its mission of deterring a Soviet attack on Western Europe. In recent times, the United States has taken on this role and its consequent global footprint of military bases and force deployments. Yet as Mr. Lambert, a professor of naval history at King's College, London, points out, during the long 19th century and up until World War I, London pursued a much more arm's-length policy in Europe. Exhausted by two decades of war against France, saddled with a huge debt and confined by a laissez-faire 'small-state' orthodoxy, British strategists sought a less expensive and intrusive way to maintain their interests on the Continent. They did this with a small army but a large navy and by knitting together a defensive system of forts and alliances designed to preserve the overall equilibrium—what Lord Liverpool, Britain's prime minister from 1812 to 1827, called a 'fair and proper balance of power in Europe between the different continental states'—on which Britain's security depended. We tend to think of the 19th century as the apogee of the British Empire, and that is not wrong given Britain's stupendous growth during that period, but Mr. Lambert shows that Europe was the main focus throughout. One particular bit of Europe—the English Channel—mattered most of all. The British government watched very closely the French building works at Cherbourg and their designs on the Belgian port of Antwerp because it was from there that an invasion of the south coast of England could be mounted. Security was very local.