Queen Victoria's favorite prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli
(1803-81), seems at first glance impossibly far removed from our
experience. Novelist, wit, orator, arguably the founder of Britain's
modern Conservative Party, Disraeli was an exotic to his
contemporaries and remains an endless fascination to those who study
his life. There were none like him in his time, and not in our time
either.
Still, there is good reason to revisit Disraeli's career. He grappled
with problems astonishingly similar to those facing the United States
today, and in some of the same places, notably the Balkans. Among his
legacies was a settlement that conferred peace for thirty years in
that tortured region without the posting of a single British soldier.
And Disraeli achieved that feat despite a highly popular agitation
for a humanitarian intervention that offended his skepticism about
moral crusades and that, in his view, would have seriously injured
the national interest. This success he owed in no small part to a
keenly held concept of that interest. He also possessed rare traits
of statesmanship: he knew what he wanted to do, and he persisted in
his purpose. To these qualities Disraeli joined a dramatic
imagination. His instructive and entertaining career holds relevant
lessons even for the dilemmas we face after September 11.
