In 1862, shortly after taking office in the midst of a parliamentary crisis over defense spending, Prussian Minister-President Otto von Bismarck famously argued: "The position of Prussia in Germany will not be determined by its liberalism but by its power. … Prussia must concentrate its strength and hold it for the favorable moment, which has already
Notable Books & Documents calls attention to notable works of scholarship or commentary which closely examine critical topics or challenge familiar notions of strategy. These include writers and historians such as William Robertson, Francis Parkman, and Harold Nicholson; as well as contemporary scholars including Paul Kennedy, Edward Luttwak, and
Much has been written about the Iron Chancellor, of course, and like all significant figures in history, he and his policies are subject to various interpretations.
Two general schools of thought regarding Crowe and his famous Memorandum have emerged. Some scholars paint Crowe as a latter-day Cassandra who foresaw the structural trends that were hurling the two powers toward confrontation and articulated the necessary course of action, which his government failed to undertake until it was too late. Harvard’s Graham Allison compares the Crowe Memorandum to the writings of Thucydides, whose History of the Peloponnesian War identified the dilemma that a dominant power faces when it must either accede to the rise of a challenger or risk eventual war with it. The other school of thought argues that Crowe delivered only self-fulfilling prophecies by helping to institutionalize an attitude of anti-German animus. One prominent German historian even dubbed Crowe the “evil spirit of the Foreign Office.” With these two schools of thought forming in play, the bulk of the literature on Crowe has accordingly sought to determine the precise extent and manner of his influence on British-German relations both before and after the First World War.
Professor Harold W. (Bill) Rood (1922-2011) taught courses in International Relations, Diplomacy and Military Power, American Foreign Policy, Constitutional development in the West, and Politics and Technology, at Claremont McKenna (Men’s) College and Claremont Graduate School (now University), and in the Defense and Strategic Studies programs at
If statesmanship or the political art is synonymous with the art of war or the art of acquisition on the grandest scale, then mastery of geography becomes "the first part" of the statesman's arsenal. "[H]e should learn the nature of sites, and recognize how mountains rise, how valleys open up, how plains lie, and understand the nature of rivers and marshes—and in this invest the greatest care.… And the prince who lacks this skill lacks the first part of what a captain must have." If the "desire to acquire" or the "lust for power" is inherently unlimited and is the governing principle of politics, then the primary concern of politics with geography, the concern with acquisition of territory, in principle knows no bounds. The concern of politics with geography, at a certain point in history, expanded its scope, not just in principle but in fact, to encompass the world.