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.

Disraeli's ascent to political power was highly improbable. In an age
of religious controversy, he was a converted Jew who described
himself to Queen Victoria as "the blank page between the Old and the
New Testament." To the burden of his origin he added fashionably bad
habits. Disraeli bedded many women and borrowed much money;
ultimately he was forced to find a respectable and wealthy lady of
good standing simply to escape the scandals. His Mary Anne turned out
to be not only his rescuer but the love of his life.

Then there was the Disraeli style. A man of medium height and a
rather large head surmounted by carefully curled black hair, he
dressed like a regency rake in his younger and middle years, sporting
highly colored waistcoats and gold chains. Disraeli early exhibited a
failing common to gifted men; he could never resist a witticism even
if it made him unnecessary enemies. He offended intellectuals by,
among other things, dismissing Darwin ("I am on the side of the
angels"), and opposing "scientific government." Disraeli thought a
large permanent bureaucracy would be dangerous and able men could be
just as easily recruited through the spoils system.

Disraeli also made enemies in high society. His first successful
novel, Vivian Grey, was a brilliant satire on the political and
social life around him. Its characters were thinly disguised; some
editions have "keys" at the back for the uninitiated, identifying the
real protagonists. It haunted Disraeli's relationships for years.
These were qualities that ordinarily took a man out of politics.
"Dizzy", as he was universally known, was often his own worst enemy.

"A Spirited Foreign Policy"

Despite all, Disraeli made it to the top of the "greasy pole" twice.
His first premiership in 1868 was brief but succeeded in passing a
landmark expansion of the voting franchise. The second, lasting from
1874 to 1880, came near the end of his life but also marked his
greatest achievement in foreign affairs.

Although his political program was primarily domestic, Disraeli saw a
"spirited foreign policy" as the international dimension of his
patriotism. He had entered public life in the 1830s and supported
Britain's balance-of-power habit: no continental power or group of
powers should become strong enough to threaten Britain or its
"permanent" interests. In his view, a superior navy and alliance with
at least one substantial land power could best safeguard these
interests; sentiment in foreign policy, whether for personal reasons
or past services, should be rigorously excluded.

Disraeli was not a professional student of foreign affairs and,
notoriously untutored by the facts, imagined many things. European
domestic politics, for example, appeared to him merely as a contest
between overbearing moneymen and desperate revolutionaries that could
be influenced best by Her Majesty's secret service. He thought Louis
Napoleon, an old social acquaintance, was a great statesman. Disraeli
believed that the aristocratic lords of the American South would win
the Civil War. These flirtations with fantasy, however, do not seem
to have affected his grasp of reality when it came his turn to
conduct the affairs of state.

Throughout a decade in opposition, Disraeli castigated Gladstone's
foreign policy for its cant and inactivity. He complained that
Britain had sat out the Franco-Prussian War, allowed Russia to
violate military restrictions on the Black Sea, and caved to the
Union's claims over the Confederate raider Alabama. Worse, Gladstone
had failed to keep up the navy while wasting millions on a useless
army. Sustained by two bottles of white brandy, Disraeli collected
these denunciations in a great three-hour speech on April 3, 1872,
which also contained this delicious depiction of the Gladstone
cabinet:

". . . their eminent chief alternated between a menace and a sigh. As
I sat opposite the Treasury Bench the Ministers reminded me of one of
those marine landscapes not very uncommon on the coasts of South
America. You behold a range of exhausted volcanoes!"

Upon becoming Prime Minister with a solid majority in 1874, Disraeli
set about to assert neglected British interests. He was already 71
years of age, prone to gout and bronchitis. Never inclined to
activist government, he left much of the cabinet's work to his
ministers and, Reagan-like, could sometimes be surprised to learn
what they had done. But foreign affairs was different. "After rates
and taxes and shipping bills, la haute politique is refreshing; worth
living for", he confided to a lady friend. He had mastered the
parliamentary platform and England; now he would take a grander
stage. But an obstacle stood before him: Disraeli's activism
contrasted oddly with his first Foreign Secretary, Lord Derby. Derby
had been Tory Party leader, a sometime rival but consistent friend of
Disraeli. But Derby was a determined "Little Englander" who saw in
most international issues snares for Britain best avoided. A singular
tension thus ran through the cabinet on foreign affairs. Eventually,
Disraeli's greatest foreign policy triumph would cost him both
Derby's friendship and political support.

The Prime Minister's primary target was the Dreikaiserbund. This
league of what the British called the "Northern Courts" (St.
Petersburg, Berlin and Vienna) supplanted a defeated France after
1871 as the major force in Europe. But the three Emperors were
themselves not entirely agreed on every issue. In May 1874, the
Russians suspected Bismarck of planning another strike against the
embittered French and protested. Disraeli got Derby to associate
Britain with the Russian move, all of which greatly irritated
Bismarck. The Prime Minister espied an opening to divide Germany and
Russia, but Derby was reluctant. "We have been lucky in our foreign
policy", he wrote, the implication being that such luck should not be
tested.

The Eastern Question and "Humanitarian Intervention"

Disraeli saw a fresh op-portunity to loosen the Dreikaiserbund when
in July 1875 the wild Ottoman Balkan province of Herzegovina
revolted, raising the Eastern Question to the center of European
diplomacy once more. This complex diplomatic, military and political
query arose from an indisputable fact: the Ottoman Empire, once
feared for its strength, was now feared for its weakness. A vast
Muslim military dictatorship that stretched from the Danube to the
Persian Gulf at its height and ruled many people, a quarter of whom
were not Muslim, the "Grand Turk" had threatened Vienna as late as
1683. More recently, however, the empire had become, as a czar once
put it, like a man suffering from a sickness.

Today we might call "the sick man" a "failing state", but in 1875 it
was a very large state not yet finally failed, and not lacking
diplomatic skill. The Ottomans played off the various Europeans
encroaching on their territory, all the while seeking reforms to
restore the empire's military strength. Constantinople became a
favorite destination for 19th century political reformers,
economists, financiers and military experts, few of whom made much
impact. Meanwhile, the Eastern Question expanded: Could the Ottomans
ever be reformed? How long would it take? If it could not be done, or
not done in time, then who would benefit from the Sick Man's terminal
illness?

Most British leaders, beginning with Lord Palmerston, greatly feared
the death of the Sick Man. To protect India the Sultan must be
upheld, even at the cost of war. A British fleet had ended Napoleon's
march toward Anatolia at Acre in 1799 and thirty years later another
such bombardment from the seas dissuaded the ambitious Egyptian ruler
Muhammed Ali's attack up the coast. In 1854, Britain and France made
war against Russia in the Crimea; though it halted the Russian
advance, the campaign had been otherwise a disaster, symbolized by
the charge of the Light Brigade down the wrong valley. "A just but
unnecessary war" had been Disraeli's verdict.

The new Balkan revolt and the Sultan's impending bankruptcy (Britons
held one third of the debt) inspired Disraeli on November 3, 1875 to
write Lady Bradford, one of his lady friends (alas, sighed a French
diplomat, they were all at that point grand-mères!):

I really believe the 'Eastern Question' that has haunted Europe for a
century and which I thought the Crimean War had adjourned for half
another will fall my lot to encounter--dare I say to settle.

Barely three weeks after this letter, Disraeli arranged the secret
purchase of Egyptian Khedive Ismail's shares in the Suez Canal. This
sensational surprise was fully exploited by the Prime Minister, who
added delicious if fanciful details. Britain now had a defensible
interest in a vital waterway but, contrary to the views of Gladstone
and others, this was not a prelude to the abandonment of
Constantinople. Disraeli meant to defeat the Dreikaiserbund in
Europe; Suez had been a lucky circumstance.

His prestige soaring, Disraeli soon took Britain into a defense of
the Ottoman Empire even as the Sultan conducted a bloody suppression
of the spreading Balkan revolts. Matters began badly when in June
1876 news reached London of Turkish massacres in Bulgaria. Uninformed
by a bungling Foreign Office, the old orator had dismissed the
reports as "coffee house babble"; he doubted stories of Turkish
torture because they "generally terminate their connection with
culprits in a more expeditious manner." Disraeli was therefore quite
unprepared for Gladstone's famous pamphlet, "The Bulgarian Horror and
the Question of the East", issued on September 6.

Gladstone clearly embodied British moral indignation; some 200,000
copies of this striking essay were sold by month's end. "Let the
Turks now carry away their abuses in the only possible way", he
concluded, "namely by carrying off themselves." Britain was now
fiercely divided into "Bulgarians" versus "Turks." Partisanship was
laced with anti-semitism and personal insult. Gladstone himself
believed Disraeli a "crypto Jew" with a "race antipathy" toward the
Eastern Christians. Disraeli, for his part, privately called his
opponent an "unprincipled maniac . . . never a gentleman!" He
regarded the famous pamphlet as "ill-written. Indeed in that respect,
of all the Bulgarian horrors, perhaps the greatest."

Disraeli feared the worst. Gladstone's agitation might facilitate a
Russian war to seize Constantinople in the guise of rescuing the
Ottoman Empire's Christ-ian population while Britain applauded,
blinded by a moral rage against the Turks. The Crimean War had come
about in part because the Russians did not believe Britain would
fight for the Ottomans. Disraeli was determined not to repeat the
earlier blunder.

Czar Alexander II, his Chancellor Prince Gortchakoff and his
Ambassador Count Shuvalov all hastened to assure the British
government that Russia had no such warlike intentions. But
pan-Slavism influenced the Russian Court,and Russian actions often
differed markedly from their proclaimed intent. (In 1873, for
example, the Russians had annexed Khiva in Central Asia despite
promises not to do so. A massacre of the Turcomans at least equal to
the Bulgarian atrocity had followed.) For Disraeli, then, the Balkan
uprisings meant not freedom for the oppressed but a contained
rebellion likely to deliver the region to the Czar, with British
interests the main casualty of a Turkish defeat. This would not do.

Meanwhile, to everyone's surprise, the Turks had beaten the Serbs
badly after that nominally Ottoman but Christian province declared
war on the Ottomans with open Russian sympathy (including a general
to run the campaign). Sensing that the Czar would not allow Serbia's
defeat, and momentarily deprived by the "humanitarians" of public
support for aiding the Ottomans, Disraeli instructed Derby to arrange
a Serb-Ottoman armistice. The Czar, however, demanded a full Turkish
withdrawal. In Constantinople, Sultan Abdul Hamid accepted Derby's
proposal for a conference of the six powers (Britain, France,
Austria, Germany, Russia and the Ottomans) to decide the future. But
even before the conference convened, in December 1877, the Russians
were mobilizing. Disraeli prodded the War Office to prepare a defense
of Constantinople while warning in a speech, "She [England] enters
into a campaign which she will not terminate till right is done."

Disraeli's conception of what was "right" differed not only from
Gladstone's but also from that of many Tories. Propping up the "Sick
Man" at the cost of Christian lives looked immoral. Doing so in an
exaggerated belief that it would protect India from the Czar seemed a
strategic error to many. Leading Conservatives, including Lord
Salisbury, Secretary of State for India and Disraeli's hand-picked
representative to the Conference, discounted any Russian drive
overland either toward the Suez Canal or through the Persian Gulf.
Disraeli had discovered, too, that the very religious Salisbury
favored the Christian cause in the Balkans.

Moreover, Disraeli was accused then (and by later historians) of
being totally blind to the new force of the age, namely nationalism.
In fact, Disraeli's writings and speeches evince an interest in two
nationalisms. The first was English (he hardly ever said British).
Exotic and foreign though he may have seemed to his contemporaries,
Disraeli had a good grasp of popular aspirations and beliefs,
although he preferred aristocratic rule. To us he therefore appears
simultaneously ahead of his times and behind them. The second
nationalism that interested him was the Jewish sort. Disraeli's
novels such as Tancred and Alroy offer a literary precursor to the
secular Zionism that had just begun to develop near the end of his
life. Disraeli was immensely proud of his origins and, in general,
helpful to the struggle of British Jewry for equal rights. His novels
advocate a return to Zion and the re-establishment of ancient
glories, the latter infused by his peculiar reading of the Bible and
convenient belief that Judaism and Christianity completed each other.
He had once told Constance de Rothschild, "All is race, not religion,
remember that." She observed, "he believed more in the compelling
power of a common ancestry than in that of a common faith."

It was not, then, that Disraeli missed the emergence of nationalisms
but that, beyond the English (and the Jewish), he opposed them. Like
every English politician, Disraeli knew the Irish problem. As for the
continent, although Disraeli was a worshipper of Byron, the advocate
of Greek independence, he was also part of a generation (which
included Otto von Bismarck) that soured on the nascent nationalisms
of the Balkans. He regarded these movements as sinister, their
ambitions insatiable, and their grievances certainly not worth a war.

Disraeli wanted to keep the Russians out of Turkey and he thought
this could best be done by mobilizing Britain for conflict while
pressing the Sultan to promise yet another set of reforms that would
allow the Powers to applaud and go home. But the Ottomans viewed
Disraeli's maneuverings as a British pledge to stand behind them;
besides, they had beaten the Serbs and were in no mood to take
unsolicited advice. The Constantinople Conference thus failed on
January 20, 1877, and a subsequent Anglo-Russian effort called the
London Protocol was also rejected by the Sultan. Disraeli's only
other hope of preventing war, an arrangement with Austria to deter
the Russians, also came to naught; St. Petersburg had gotten to
Vienna ahead of him, the two powers having reached a secret agreement
fixing spheres of interest by mid-March 1877. (Notably, the very able
Austrian Foreign Minister, Count Andrassy, had insisted that Russia
not set up a greater Bulgaria.)

Thus fortified, on April 24 Russia declared war against the Ottomans
on the basis of the London Protocol. Derby replied with a note
stressing British neutrality if the war did not jeopardize Britain's
vital interests, which included the Persian Gulf, Egypt, the Suez
Canal, Constantinople, and the Straits. Gladstone then overreached by
supporting Russia to the hilt and, with the switch of focus from
suffering Christians to the insufferable Russians, the humanitarian
faction in British politics quickly lost ground. Public passion now
switched dramatically into an anti-Russian fever that gave birth to a
new expression, "jingoism." (The music halls rang with the refrain
"we do not want to fight but, by Jingo if we do, we've got the ships,
we've got the men, we've got the money too.") Disraeli's policy had
outlasted popular indignation against the Turks.

Reassured of public support for protecting Turkey, Disraeli now faced
a sudden political and personal crisis. Lord Derby opposed his policy
to the point of conveying cabinet dissent to the Russian ambassador,
apparently hoping to reassure the Czar that England would not fight.
This was the final breach between the two old colleagues, ending a
thirty-year relationship. Salisbury was poised to succeed him.
Salisbury had been a forthright skeptic of defending the Sick Man
but, unlike Derby, he was an internationalist. Meanwhile, though
checked temporarily at Plevna in July, the Russians were on the verge
of capturing Constantinople by year's end. This turned Salisbury
around; he saw great danger to British interests, not so much in
India but in the Mediterranean. When Disraeli gained secret cabinet
agreement for military action to seize Cyprus or Alexandretta, Derby
resigned and Salisbury took his place.

Disraeli and Salisbury made a very odd couple. Salisbury was formal,
careful, cool and logical; he counted on skill, not luck. His family,
the House of Cecil, had been at the center of government, or
consulted by it, since the time of Elizabeth I. Disraeli, by
contrast, was theatrical and imaginative; he moved comfortably
between fact and fantasy, the way things were and the way he wished
them to be. Disraeli knew his skill but he also counted on his star.
Supremely self-confident, he considered himself superior to the
English lords. He had once rejected an anti-Jewish gibe in the House
of Commons by declaring that his ancestors had been offering
"sacrifices to the Most High when London was a marsh." (Accused of
being a sexual adventurer above his station on another occasion, he
joked: "Me! Whose ancestors may have had personal relations with the
Queen of Sheba!") As for Salisbury himself, Disraeli had already
seduced an entire aristocracy; the Marquis, who had often been
critical of Disraeli, was merely the last to succumb. Both shared a
sarcastic wit. Disraeli's enthusiastic visions combined with
Salisbury's cynical efficiency made them a formidable team.

Then came disaster. Plevna did fall to the Russians and in
desperation the Sultan sought a loose armistice, signed at Adrianople
on January 31, 1878. In great alarm, Disraeli dispatched a fleet of
six ironclads to Constantinople, which arrived on February 15. A war
credit was voted by Parliament and an expeditionary force organized;
reserves were mobilized on March 27. Meanwhile, in St. Petersburg,
the Czar temporized over whether to seize Constantinople; the local
commander, his brother the Grand Duke Nicholas, also hesitated before
the British mobilization. A month elapsed while the Czar changed
commanders and, at this point, the Austrians, who also thought Russia
had gone too far, declared their opposition to the seizure of the
Ottoman capital. The Russians then imposed in March 1878 the Treaty
of San Stefano on the Ottomans, a punitive peace, but one that saved
Constantinople from Russian assault.

Organizing a Coalition

Disraeli's threat of war saved Constantinople. He had overcome both
severe cabinet dissent and Gladstone's campaign, but the political
atmosphere was poisoned and Derby was gone. Still, Disraeli had
gotten the focus right: the apparent Russian intention to seize the
Straits appeared an intolerable bid to alter the international
balance of power, threatening vital British interests.

Buoyed by a united Britain, Disraeli then organized international
opposition to the Treaty of San Stefano which, despite the
Austrian-Russian agreement of March 1877, would have created a large
Bulgaria athwart the Balkans, touching the Aegean to the south and
Albania to the west. Other provisions extended Russian control in
Asia Minor. Austria, among others, felt betrayed by San Stefano.
Disraeli's diplomacy was therefore able to rally a broad coalition
against such a drastic change to the Ottoman frontiers, which had
been set by the Treaty of Paris in 1856. The Russians recognized that
they needed international consent to impose the terms of the treaty;
they hoped to get it at the Congress of Berlin, capital of their
ally, the German Empire.

The Congress was a coming-out party for the young Reich, and
Bismarck, chairman of the Congress, was determined to make it work.
The German Chancellor had established Germany's bona fides with his
famous expression of disinterest, saying on December 5, 1876, that
"no German interest worth the bones of a Pomeranian musketeer" was at
stake in the Balkans. This meant that Germany saw no reason to go to
war, but not that Germany lacked serious reason for diplomatic
intervention. Its two allies, Russia and Austria, might collide;
England and Russia might fight, putting Berlin on the spot. Nor was
Bismarck under any illusions about the motivations of the
participants. When the Russian Chancellor Gortchakoff wrote to him
that the crisis was "European", Bismarck noted: "I have always found
the word Europe on the lips of those statesmen who want something
from a foreign power which they would never venture to ask for in
their own name."

The preliminary to Berlin was the Anglo-Russian Convention negotiated
by Shuvalov with Disraeli and Salisbury. Allowed leeway by the
irresolute Czar, the Russian diplomat focused on two objectives:
Besserabia and the Black Sea towns of Batum and Kars. The British
held no brief for Besserabia and they had in mind a counter for the
extension of Russian influence: a base in the eastern Mediterranean.
On May 26, in utmost secrecy, Disraeli offered the Sultan a defensive
alliance with Britain; in return the Ottoman Empire ceded Cyprus. Not
knowing this, Shuvalov was pleasantly surprised when the British gave
way on Batum and Kars. Shuvalov then conceded that Bulgaria would be
not "greater" but split, the north to be autonomous, the south under
Turkish rule as modified by the Congress. The Austrians were then
brought into a "gentlemen's agreement" that would constrain north
Bulgaria against expansion. The question of Bosnia-Herzegovina was
left open, although Bismarck urged the Austrians to occupy it quickly
even before the powers met.

These arrangements allowed Bismarck to schedule the Congress knowing
that at least some business would be transacted. In this, the
statesmen of the 19th century offer a great lesson to those of the
21st: Summits raise hopes, and the dashing of those hopes superheats
an already overheated situation. World leaders should always bring
with them edible fruit, ripened ahead of time. (This lesson seems to
have been lost, forexample, on those who prepared the abortive Camp
David Summit in July 2000.)

Toward the end of the Congress of Berlin (June 13-July 13, 1878)
Bismarck paid Disraeli a supreme accolade: "Der alte Jude, das ist
der Mann" (the old Jew is the man!). Bismarck, who had expected to
run it, realized that in fact Disraeli had done so. This testified to
a simple yet surpassing quality that so few statesmen possess: a
well-defined objective persistently pursued. Disraeli knew what he
wanted; it was only a matter of which tactic to choose; and here the
political novelist's imagination chose the final stroke. As Lord
Redesdale, one of his appointees to the Foreign Office wrote, "He was
a master of the stage effect!"

Matters did not go so well at first, however. On June 14 a needy
foreign office clerk leaked the Anglo-Russian Convention to the
British press. This threatened to make the Congress a farce and so
Lord Salisbury simply lied about it to assuage the honor of the
participants. In late June, another press leak--this time in
Germany--revealed the Cyprus deal. This too was denied while,
secretly, British diplomats hastened to secure the missing
proclamation by the Sultan that would legally cinch the transaction
(it took until July 7). But Cyprus excited Bismarck's admiration and
respect. "This is progress!" he exclaimed, which prompted Disraeli to
write the Queen: "Evidently his idea of progress was to seize
something."

In truth, Disraeli and Bismarck had plenty in common: Byron worship;
dislike of cant and cliché; a sharp eye for human foibles; love of
witty cynicism. Neither Disraeli nor Bismarck had any use for Balkan
nationalism and when the Greek delegation secured a half-hour at the
Congress to argue for a larger Greece, it was observed that both
statesman "slept the sleep of the just." They were both supreme
realists in politics and, while preferring aristocratic domination,
knew a nobly defective brain when they saw one. Naturally, then, they
both detested Gladstone. They soon impressed each other and Disraeli
wrote the Queen about Bismarck's "piquant" conversations, which
included many astonishing utterances, including the German's
complaint about the Kaiser's conduct! Bismarck in a later
conversation also expressed his appreciation of another Disraeli
trait: "It was easy to transact business with him; in a quarter of an
hour you knew exactly how you stood with him." Precise objectives and
concise transactions, rare enough then, are qualities well worthy of
imitation today.

There was a final note of drama in Berlin when the Russians sounded
to Disraeli as if they were retreating from the arrangement on
Bulgaria. Disraeli let it be known that he had ordered a special
train, the better to hasten back to England to prepare for war should
the Congress fail. In this he called the Czar's bluff, and with it
Bismarck's bluff; Germany could no longer pose as honest broker but
had to decide whether it was for or against a Russian effort to seize
the Straits of Constantinople. Germany was against, and this
re-inforced the Czar's hesitations, already evident to his
representatives. (The Russian archives indicate that he had decided
to compromise even before the train episode, but Disraeli did not
know this and, in any event, the story is too good to dismiss.) As
for the final piece of the puzzle, Bosnia-Herzegovina was to remain
under Ottoman sovereignty but with Austrian administration, thereby
giving Andrassy what he wanted: a strategic piece in the Balkans but
without incorporating a Slavic population that would upset the
Hungarians in the Dual Monarchy.

Because Disraeli knew what he wanted, he turned the Congress into a
triumph despite infirmities that would have disabled most men.
Salisbury himself (and his nephew, Arthur James Balfour, who assisted
his uncle at Berlin) noted that the chief was too deaf and too
ignorant of French to follow much of the proceedings. Lord Odo
Russell had evidently talked Disraeli out of addressing the Congress
in French on the opening day by pointing out that he would thereby
deprive the audience of the "greatest living master of English
oratory." Dizzy smiled his sphinx smile; Russell was never sure
whether he took the compliment or the hint. In the event he spoke
English, which offended the Russians.

Peace with Honor

After signing the Treaty of Berlin on July 13, Disraeli returned in
triumph to England. He proclaimed "peace with honour" from his office
at Downing Street, a phrase that still echoed sixty years later when
Chamberlain brought neither peace nor honor from Munich. But then
there was Gladstone thundering against yet another deal with the
"unspeakable Turk." Disraeli delivered a glorious counter-stroke,
calling Gladstone "a sophistical rhetorician inebriated with the
exuberance of his own verbosity." In the peals of laughter attending
that phrase, Gladstone's pieties had no chance.

It is easy enough to be critical of the Congress of Berlin. Much of
it merely ratified decisions already made. Imperial interests
overrode the local peoples. There was a surfeit of vanity, arrogance
and ignorance. It did not solve the Eastern Question, but only
delayed its reckoning. Many have read back the blunders of 1914 into
the settlement of 1878, while forgetting that blunders are made by
blunderers. Those who stumbled into the Great War were a very
different cast from those who avoided a great war at Berlin. When all
was said and done, the handiwork of the Congress put off such a
conflict for more than thirty years.

Disraeli had managed his part without committing a single English
musketeer. Ennobled as Lord Beaconsfield, he closed the chapter in
August 1878 with a notable description of the Balkans to the House of
Lords:

No language can describe adequately the condition of that portion of the Balkan Peninsula--Serbia, Bosnia, Herzegovina. No words can describe the political intrigue, the constant rivalries, a total absence of all public spirit, a hatred of all races, animosities of rival religions, absence of any controlling power. Nothing short of 50,000 of Europe's best troops would produce anything like order in those parts.

How strikingly similar to the Balkans of the 1990s, right down to the number of soldiers deployed by NATO. But Washington has not been so fortunate or skillful as that London of so long ago. American troops are in the region, and some of them, at least, will be there for a long time.

There was a final and curious footnote to the Bismarck-Disraeli relationship, one that bore directly on Disraeli's aim to sink the Dreikaiserbund. It took a year to accomplish the always difficult task of keeping the Russians to their word, but by August 1879 they were out of the Balkans. A month later the German Ambassador, Count Munster, came to Disraeli's country home (Hughenden) for dinner. There, on September 26, they discussed what Disraeli described later as Bismarck's proposal for an Anglo-German-Austrian alliance. Historians differ over whether this was a German proposal, or, as the Count reported to Bismarck, a British one. Munster apparently asked Disraeli what England would do if Germany and Russia went to war over the Balkan settlement, and Disraeli answered, "We will in that case keep France quiet." To which Bismarck said to Munster: "Is that all?" (In 1914, of course, that would have been more than enough!)

This conversation may simply have been an adjunct to Bismarck's negotiations with Austria-Hungary, which resulted in a military alliance announced on October 7. Bismarck understood that Disraeli's policy at the Congress of Berlin had indeed splintered the Dreikaiserbund, and Bismarck's recreation of a Zweikaiserbund was a form of protection against the Czar, who had been complaining ominously about the German propensity to side with the British on the international commissions set up to carry out the Congress of Berlin's "peace with honor." Going to London might have been part of Bismarck's tactic to bring the always reluctant Viennese to a conclusion. In any event, it seems highly unlikely that Disraeli would have fallen in with a permanent plan to isolate the French.

This story, of course, had another significance. It reflects the fact that England and Disraeli in particular were being taken seriously in Europe. But Disraeli's satisfaction with his achievements was short-lived. Britain was soon involved in distant wars to punish Afghanistan and subdue the Zulus, both campaigns begun by imperial officials disinclined to inform London of their plans. A sour economy completed Disraeli's undoing. In the general election of 1880, the Tories were badly defeated by Gladstone's Liberals, and Gladstone lost no time in repudiating his predecessor's politics. Disraeli (now Lord Beaconsfield) watched helplessly from the House of Lords where, as he put it, "I am dead; dead but in the Elyssian fields."

Before long, the Russians, sensing Britain's retirement from continental engagement, browbeat the Sultan into forbidding the passage of warships into the Black Sea. The Sultan, in turn, never carried out the reforms promised to the Western powers. It was Gladstone, the anti-imperialist and little Englander, who occupied Egypt in 1882. In Europe, freed of Disraeli, Bismarck went back to his imperial knitting. The Dreikaiserbund never entirely recovered, but England ceased to matter much in continental calculations until Lord Salisbury reasserted British power in the 1890s. Disraeli himself was spared all of this, dying peacefully at home on April 19, 1881, already a legend.

Constancy of Purpose

HISTORICAL comparison between our time and Disraeli's requires a leap of the imagination. The differences are stark: Disraeli's world was Eurocentric, ours arguably centered on America. The United States is far more powerful relative to other powers than was Britain at its imperial zenith. And instead of having to manage a shifting balance of power, America counts on NATO and Japan as the linchpins of stable alliances west and east.

Still, let us take a leap. Might not Russia and China form a kind of Zweikaiserbund, their objective to diminish American influence in their respective spheres? If and when the United States decides to act against Iraq or, better yet, Iran, could we find our European allies, Bismarck-like, proposing an international conference to avoid a conflict? One smiles, of course, to imagine Bush as Disraeli, Putin and Jiang Zemin as the Czar and Franz Josef, and Javier Solana (or Blair or Chirac or Schroder) as (gasp) Bismarck, not to speak of Saddam or Ayatollah Khamenei as the Sultan Abdul Hamid. Yet, as Marx observed, history may repeat itself as farce.

Even if it doesn't, Disraeli's story still offers obvious and immediate lessons for American statesmen grappling with the aftermath of September 11. Our public opinion, no less than Victorian England's, is volatile and morally aroused; we sympathize with the oppressed, and we suspect foreign autocracies. Americans expect their leaders nonetheless to heed the national interest, to avoid dead ends, and nor to spill blood, especially American blood, without good cause. We like to lead coalitions but not to be bound by them. And when the crisis abroad subsides, we want our president to deal with fires at home.

At the dawn of the democratic age, Disraeli dealt successfully with all of these challenges save the last. He advised others that "the secret of success is constancy of purpose", and this was his secret, too. His purpose was to disrupt the Dreikaiserbund before it harmed England's security, and he used the Eastern Question to do so despite a ferocious demand for a wrong-headed humanitarian intervention. And he was willing to pay the price, losing a vital political ally in the process. Peace in the Balkans for thirty years was a humane by-product of his single-minded pursuit of Britain's national interest.

For Disraeli, power was either applied to purpose or it was not power at all. He knew how to create an international coalition around a common objective, and how not to lose his way in the warmth of its company. The summits of Disraeli's day, no less than his private conversations, were meals well cooked before they were served. Last and surely not least, Disraeli understood with a novelist's imagination how dreams and color could be used to arrest public attention and train it upon essential issues.

Since September 11, Washington has rediscovered some of these virtues. When George W Bush proclaimed that "we have found our mission", he and his administration had also found a Disraelian purpose. But will the President be constant? Can he work without as well as with the floating coalition fighting the war against terrorism? Can he keep the American people -- and the Congress -- attentive to his objectives? Across the divide of history, we can imagine Disraeli's thin smile fixed upon us. He would have understood.

Harvey Sicherman is president of the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He advised Secretaries of State Haig, Shultz and Baker.