In recent years, left-wingers have directed a sustained attack against America’s Founding Fathers. Elite institutions like the New York Times have claimed that "the beginning of American slavery" was "our true founding," not the Declaration of Independence, and that "one critical reason" the colonists fought for independence was "to protect the institution of slavery." After getting lambasted by serious historians, the Times sneakily edited out its most egregious errors but left these misbegotten essays online. Other lefty ingrates have torn down statues of the Founders, and some vandals in Portland, citing the Times, spray-painted "Genocidal Colonist" on a statue of our first president.

To see a real genocidal colonist, look no further than Yevgeny Prigozhin. A Russian petty criminal who rose to prominence as Putin’s caterer, Prigozhin linked up with a bunch of Russian Nazi enthusiasts and in 2014 founded the Wagner Group. Over the next several years, Wagner’s thugs looted, murdered, raped, and tortured across Africa and the Middle East while serving as one of Putin’s proxies. In 2018, several hundred Wagner fighters and their allies attacked an American unit in Syria, only to discover that you don’t mess with Uncle Sam. Reportedly, Prigozhin was furious that the Russian Air Force stood by as American drones, helicopters, stealth fighters, and heavy bombers annihilated his mercenaries.

Prigozhin’s frustrations with Putin finally boiled over in June. For months, he had complained that the Russian government had given Wagner insufficient support in Ukraine. Among his grievances are that the Russian rubber-stamp parliament is "useless" and that Russian defense officials are sitting "like fat cats" and withholding ammunition and equipment from his convict army. On June 23, Prigozhin declared a "march for justice" and sent a column of Wagner tanks and armored vehicles on its way to Moscow, shooting down several Russian aircrafts before abruptly halting his mutinous uprising the next day and decamping to Belarus under mysterious circumstances.

During the Revolutionary War, General Washington encountered similar problems. The trials of Valley Forge, where American troops left a trail of bloody footprints as they marched barefoot to winter quarters without sufficient blankets or food, are legendary. But the army’s supply problems started years before and continued for years after: In October 1775, Washington was already writing home, "We are obliged to Submit to an almost daily Cannonade without returning a Shott [sic] from our scarcity of [gun] Powder." And throughout the war, Washington and his army had to fend off backbiting mediocrities like Horatio Gates, Thomas Conway, and their congressional supporters.

After eight years of shortchanges and broken promises, Washington’s officers had enough of the Continental Congress and were ready to mutiny. Shortly after he initially took command in 1775, Washington had told his army that it was constituted "in defence of the common Rights and Liberties of mankind," not for personal gain or profit. As rumors of the plot spread throughout the army, he summoned his officers and condemned the plan, saying there was "something so shocking in it, that humanity revolts at the idea." Pausing to find his glasses at one point, he asked, "Gentleman, you must pardon me, for I have not only grown gray but almost blind in service to my country." His shamefaced subordinates burst into tears; the mutiny was broken.

This is only one of the many times that Washington saved the republic. If he wanted power, his army would have followed him in an uprising against the elected government. He might have become a dictator, or he might have failed and plunged the country into a civil war, but in either case our experiment in self-government would have failed in the prototype stage. Leftwing cranks today denounce Washington as a murderous tyrant, but when he had the chance to become one, he turned away.

Toward the end of the war, King George III asked the American painter Benjamin West if Washington would remain in command of the army or take over the government instead. When West told him that Washington would resign his command and go home quietly, he replied, "If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world." As usual, George III got it wrong. Washington was not just the greatest man of that time, he is the greatest man in the history of the greatest country on earth—because of what he did not do.

Mike Watson is the associate director of Hudson Institute's Center for the Future of Liberal Society.

The post Why George Washington Is Still the GOAT appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Kurlantzick covers Southeast Asia for the Council on Foreign Relations, but, as he points out, that corner of the world is only one of the places where China is trying to shape the media environment to its advantage. Southeast Asia, Taiwan, Australia, and New Zealand are often "Beijing’s initial laboratory," but China is "expanding its soft and sharp power strategies to many other parts of the world." China has become a master of "sharp power," which is using covert or hidden means to manipulate people and bury negative stories, sometimes even before they are written. Soft power attracts, sharp power distracts.

Starting in the 1990s, China’s communist leadership believed that China "was failing, in a world dominated by Western private media outlets and Western governments’ state media outlets, to get its preferred narratives across." Accordingly, it tried to charm other countries by offering foreign journalists junkets and cushy fellowships, opening Confucius Institutes in universities around the world, and exporting Chinese state-controlled media. By one estimate, China devoted $10 billion annually to soft power by 2015.

Unfortunately for them, it did not work. To be sure, Xinhua, a newswire service that charges less than Reuters or the Associated Press, has been very successful. Kurlantzick warns that "newswire stories often establish initial details about a story and frame the coverage of it," so "Xinhua will increasingly define many outlet’s news agendas." But China’s increasingly aggressive behavior toward its neighbors has alienated public opinion in many countries. For example, Pew found that 63 percent of Filipinos viewed China favorably in 2002, but by 2014 that had dropped to 38 percent. COVID drove China’s approval rating down sharply elsewhere. China’s soft power offensive failed as miserably as Russia’s attack on Kiev last year.

Unfortunately for us, China has other tools. Kurlantzick calls Australia and New Zealand the "canaries" of China’s sharp power strategy. Business leaders there who were friendly to China took over Chinese-language news media, manipulated ethnic Chinese voters, funded research institutions that might otherwise ask probing questions about China, and lined the pockets of influential retired political leaders. This worked for a time, but as journalists like John Garnaut exposed China’s ill deeds, it sparked a backlash. Australia has stood firm under a torrent of Chinese threats and insults over the past few years, and New Zealand is quietly cutting out China’s infiltrations.

China’s sharp power offensive has been fiercer, and the backlash even stronger, in Taiwan. China is a latecomer to the disinformation game, but it experiments constantly on Taiwanese society. In one case, the shame from a deluge of false stories drove a Taiwanese official to commit suicide. Chinese propagandists tried to unseat President Tsai Ing-wen in the 2020 election, but popular anger at China’s heavy-handedness carried Tsai to a huge victory.

Although China has not made itself lovable, it is still exporting its model for controlling information. Kurlantzick shows that Chinese firms are taking an increasing share of the "pipes" through which information flows around the world: Huawei erects 5G internet and lays underseas internet cables, and StarTimes’s satellite TV coverage offers access to Chinese state media—and requires consumers to pay extra for Western media—in the developing world. Countries in the Global South are copying China’s model of a closed, tightly controlled internet, and many are backing China’s attempts to seize control of organizations, such as the International Telecommunications Union, that set global technology standards.

Since Xi Jinping’s disastrous mishandling of the COVID outbreak and self-defeating "wolf warrior" diplomacy has turned public opinion in much of the world against China, it would be tempting to downplay China’s attempts to manipulate media. This would be a mistake: China has successfully intimidated American news organizations and academics for decades, its propagandists learn from their mistakes, and its capabilities are growing.

Over the past few decades, acquiring and processing information has become an increasingly important part of economic activity, and it is not surprising that adversarial governments are increasingly interested in exploring other ways to gain power from information. Back in 2000, Bill Clinton blithely stated "there’s no question China has been trying to crack down on the Internet. Good luck! That’s sort of like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall." Since then, China has demonstrated that hammering hard enough can make a lot of that Jell-O stick.

Beijing’s Global Media Offensive: China’s Uneven Campaign to Influence Asia and the World
by Joshua Kurlantzick
Oxford University Press, 560 pp., $29.95

Mike Watson is the associate director of Hudson Institute’s Center for the Future of Liberal Society.

The post The Middle Kingdom’s Media Blitz appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Their book challenges an important piece of conventional wisdom, that rising powers like China are more likely to fight established powers like the United States when they are on the ascent but tend to back off when they pass their peak. Brands and Beckley show this is not necessarily the case. Once they realize that time is no longer on their side, some countries make bigger and bigger gambles to try to stave off stagnation. Germany before World War I and Japan in the leadup to Pearl Harbor are only the two most dramatic of the examples they list.

China's rise has been remarkable since Mao Zedong's death, but Beckley and Brands note that China enjoyed many advantages in that period that have eroded away. The United States and its allies embraced China and hoped to reform it through trade for decades; today, China's aggressive behavior is alarming its neighbors and provoking the strategic encirclement Beijing has long feared. Mao's successors, particularly Deng Xiaoping, promoted economic reforms and ruled through interparty consensus, but Xi Jinping's one-man rule threatens to return China to the days of Mao's erratic and often catastrophic leadership—and the brutal struggles for power when the strongman dies.

What the Marxists in Beijing may appreciate most clearly is the change in material factors. China's enormous demographic dividend has now expired: In the early 2000s, there were 10 workers for every retiree, but by 2050 there will only be 2. "To prevent senior citizens from dying in the streets," China will have to devote 30 percent of its GDP to elderly care, as much as it spends on its entire government today. China also ruined its previously abundant natural resources: It has roughly as much water per person as Saudi Arabia, it became a net importer of food in 2008, and by 2011 it was the largest agricultural importer in the world. All told, these trends "imply that China will be economically sluggish, internationally hated, and politically unstable by the 2030s."

Without insight into the high-level conversations within the Zhongnanhai, it can be hard to tell what China's senior leadership really thinks, but there are some indications that they realize all is not well. China's military has grown significantly, but the "internal security" budget is higher. The authors note that "careful analysts of Chinese politics detect subtle anxiety in government reports and statements." Other signs, such as Xi's guidance to make sure that "nobody can beat us or choke us to death," are less subtle.

This means that we have entered the "danger zone," a period where China may take risks to lock in gains before its power diminishes. An attack on Taiwan is the most well-known—and in many ways most worrying—scenario, but Brands and Beckley describe other possibilities.

To prevail against China without a catastrophic war, the authors take lessons from America's last experience in the danger zone. During Harry Truman's presidency, the Soviet Union had some important military advantages and Western Europe was teetering on the verge of falling into Moscow's orbit. Truman and his staff prioritized ruthlessly, made major changes to American foreign policy, and took calculated risks to firm up America's strategic position and set the stage for victory in the Cold War. Beckley and Brands offer a range of policies, from increasing the defense budget to cutting China and its fellow autocracies out of the global internet.

We know how the first Cold War ended, and that analogy can be comforting for Americans, but the confrontation with China will be grimmer than many realize. Brands and Beckley warn that even a successful "danger-zone strategy" will "fundamentally alter the structure of world politics, and not entirely for the better." The world is getting harder, and we must act accordingly.

Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China
by Hal Brands and Michael Beckley
W.W. Norton, 304 pp., $30

Mike Watson is the associate director of Hudson Institute's Center for the Future of Liberal Society.

The post Will a Desperate China Take Desperate Measures? appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Even before the Soviet Union collapsed, removing the greatest threat to American well-being and the rationale for the Sino-American partnership, the D.C. consensus was shifting away from the realpolitik-inflected anti-Soviet policy toward a more hopeful one. The Chinese Army was no longer needed to tie down Soviet forces, but the Chinese market could be almost as beneficial for Americans. Even after the Tiananmen Square massacre, many Americans thought that opening China economically would make Americans wealthy and the Chinese free.

A new policy emerged of engaging China openly while quietly maintaining a balance of power in Asia. Friedberg, a professor at Princeton University, points out that "engagement was a gamble rather than a blunder, but the odds were always extremely long." Although never fully and explicitly articulated, the strategy was to encourage market liberalization in China that would create internal pressures for democratization. As George W. Bush put it in May 2001, "We trade with China because trade is good policy for our economy, because trade is good policy for democracy, and because trade is good policy for our national security." Unfortunately, Friedberg notes, "engagement failed because its architects and advocates got China wrong."

Years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Chinese elites sensed that the rebuilt Europe and rising Asia would reconfigure global politics. Deng Xiaoping’s "reform and opening up" policy would bring in Western investment and technological knowhow, which would allow China to grow stronger and eventually take a leading role in global affairs. In the meantime, China would "hide its capabilities and bide its time."

Even as Deng’s successors continued his policies, they saw that too much uncontrolled economic growth could foster democratic aspirations in China, just as the Americans had hoped. Through a variety of economic maneuvers, ideological entrepreneurship, and new methods of repression, the Chinese Communist Party prevented that outcome, and the Western democracies decided against using their leverage to demand reforms. "Where Beijing has been fixed in its ends but flexible in its means, the democracies have tended to be rigid with respect to both, clinging to forlorn hopes and failed policies."

Several events reshaped Chinese calculations after the turn of the millennium. China’s accession to the World Trade Organization provided opportunities for greater economic growth, and the September 11 attacks pulled American attention toward the Middle East. Shortly thereafter, the new leadership team of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao realized that their development model was running out of steam. China could no longer grow by merely shifting its workforce into simple manufacturing. To Wen, China’s growth was "unstable, unbalanced … and unsustainable." Fortunately, America’s focus on terrorism gave China a two-decade "window of opportunity" to turn to high-tech industrial policy.

The Iraq war, the global financial crisis, a series of riots and demonstrations across China, and the publication of the pro-democracy Charter 08 prodded the Hu regime to try to achieve its objectives faster. Foreshadowing Xi Jinping’s more belligerent approach, Chinese ships began aggressively probing in the South and East China Seas, Chinese domestic security budgets rose, and Chinese media broadcast xenophobic rhetoric.

The Obama administration’s halfhearted "pivot to Asia" convinced Beijing that the Americans would try to stop China’s rise, but that they were too weak and unfocused to succeed. Xi interpreted the Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s election as inaugurating "great changes unseen in a century." Now, he regularly proclaims that the "East is rising and West declining."

Americans have woken up to the China threat: The question is what to do about it. Friedberg recommends that the United States, its allies, and its partners mobilize their societies for a long confrontation with China, partly disengage economically and rebalance trade toward friendly countries, strengthen their defenses against Chinese aggression, and challenge China’s ideological narratives about the coming world order.

These efforts will be challenging, but a new development since Friedberg finished his manuscript may ease the way. Russia’s unprovoked attack on Ukraine has destroyed German trust in Moscow and will force a fundamental restructuring of Germany’s—and Europe’s—economic model. The Biden administration has a once-in-a-generation opportunity to refashion the U.S.-European relationship to strengthen both sides against Chinese depredations. Great changes, indeed.

Getting China Wrong
by Aaron L. Friedberg
Polity, 246 pp., $29.95

Mike Watson is the associate director of Hudson Institute’s Center for the Future of Liberal Society

The post Fooling Ourselves in the Far East appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

Marshall’s art is one of this book’s many delights. Kennedy originally planned to write the foreword and accompanying text for his friend’s collection of naval paintings, but Marshall’s passing made Kennedy set aside other projects to return to World War II. The two pair nicely: Marshall’s meticulously detailed paintings illustrate Kennedy’s point that, although the production statistics tell part of the war’s story, "the deficit in all deterministic explanations—the substructure alters, therefore the superstructure is changed—is that they lack human agency."

The war forced a remarkable change in world politics: After centuries of global domination, the European colonial empires collapsed under Germany’s and Japan’s combined blows, leaving the United States as the leading global power. As Kennedy argues, this change became manifest in 1943 and was "the natural culmination, though delayed by almost half a century, of the huge shifts in the world’s balances once the American continent industrialized."

Japan is the major power American readers will benefit most from studying. Primarily due to interwar arms control treaties, which restricted fleet tonnage and ship size, Britain had the most well-rounded navy, albeit with a weak aircraft carrier wing, while the United States chose not to build up to its treaty limits. Much like the United States today, Japan’s navy was less numerous than its Pacific rivals’ but it had exquisitely trained naval aviators who flew from grouped aircraft carriers.

Even before the United States entered the war, it was clear that the Americans would be a naval juggernaut. The day the news of France’s surrender reached Washington, Congress doubled the Navy’s budget request, effectively building from scratch a navy as large as Japan’s. In Berlin and Tokyo, timetables shifted accordingly: If they could not lock in their gains quickly, the odds would turn against them.

In the meantime, Britain struggled against the Germans and Italians. Germany’s few but powerful surface combatants threatened to break out into the Atlantic until British bombers demonstrated the folly of venturing into the open sea without air cover. In the Mediterranean, the tables were turned: The Royal Navy made forays from Gibraltar and Alexandria to support Greece and resupply Malta, but at immense cost. At one point, the Admiralty counted on only one quarter of the Malta convoys’ supplies making it through. Britain pulled off a first when its torpedo bombers ambushed the Italian fleet in port at Taranto, which Japan’s strategists studied carefully as they prepared to attack Pearl Harbor.

By mid-1943, the naval war near Europe was effectively over. Germany’s U-boats might have starved Britain into submission in 1942 if Hitler had agreed to build more of them, but allied technological advances in cryptography and radar and better convoy tactics blunted the U-boat threat. Landings in North Africa, Sicily, and southern Italy knocked Italy out of the war and allowed the allies relatively free access across the Mediterranean. After the Normandy landings, Britain was able to send a carrier group to the Pacific.

The Pacific’s naval battles were the largest and most dramatic of the war. Starting in December 1941, Japan executed one of the most extraordinary campaigns in military history. Simultaneously attacking American and British garrisons from Hong Kong to Hawaii, then sinking British naval reinforcements and conquering Southeast Asia, all while continuing the war in China, Japan in six months rivaled or surpassed every other conqueror. And then, it stopped.

Kennedy argues that the turning point of the Pacific war was not the Battle of Midway—soon after, the U.S. Navy was reduced to only one aircraft carrier—but rather when the fruits of that massive shipbuilding program ventured out of Hawaii in late 1943. In that intervening year, Japan failed to capitalize on American weakness. This is partly because the Americans killed the formidable Admiral Yamamoto, but also because Japan could not replace its lost carriers and air crews fast enough. To compensate, in 1944 Japanese admirals tried to bait the Americans into elaborate traps in the Philippine Sea and Leyte Gulf, but they were mauled by superior American numbers and tactics. By the end of the war, America’s formidable new battleships had little to do other than shoot down kamikazes.

World War II is a natural source of triumphalism, but there is a hidden warning within Victory at Sea. China’s navy already possesses more ships than ours does, and the Navy’s proposed budget will shrink the fleet even further. The current plan is to compensate for China’s greater numbers and production with technology and élan. The Japanese tried that too. They lost.

Victory at Sea: Naval Power and the Transformation of the Global Order in World War II
by Paul Kennedy with paintings by Ian Marshall
Yale University Press, 544 pp., $37.50

Mike Watson is the associate director of Hudson Institute’s Center for the Future of Liberal Society.

The post How We Achieved Naval Supremacy—And How We Could Lose It appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

In his new book The Twilight Struggle, Johns Hopkins professor Hal Brands provides clarity for these discussions by drawing lessons from the Cold War that can be applied to today’s competition with China. Unlike other recent books about the China challenge, such as Elbridge Colby’s The Strategy of Denial, The Twilight Struggle focuses less on where Washington ought to allocate resources for the next few years and more on how Americans should think about preparing for the next few decades, perhaps even centuries.

This perspective is necessary for winning a long-term competition, which Brands describes as an "ongoing, open-ended contest for influence between great powers." When managed well, these kinds of struggles do not tip into war, but they are never quite peaceful either. Rather, they are a series of interactions over a span of decades between adversaries who endeavor to amass enough partial victories to eventually force their opponent to collapse from exhaustion. Any individual success or failure is not likely to determine the ultimate outcome of the confrontation, which involves all aspects of national power and is "a test of systems as much as statecraft." Because Beijing seeks to ruthlessly exploit American weaknesses at home and abroad—and to prevail, Americans will have to respond in kind—"there are no purely domestic issues."

With that frame in mind, Brands describes 10 aspects of the Cold War and American strategy. Some of them, such as George Kennan’s Long Telegram that proposed the "containment" strategy, are well known to most students of American foreign policy. Others, including the American-Soviet collaboration for eradicating smallpox and the proxy wars in Africa, are more obscure but reveal important lessons for aspiring strategists.

The book is most disquieting for China hawks and reassuring for doves. Brands argues that because strategic competitions are an ongoing interaction with an intelligent adversary, each side can make many mistakes without losing the competition if they learn and correct their behavior: The series of poor American decisions that led to defeat in Vietnam, stagflation, and domestic turmoil, for example, did not doom the United States to defeat. Yet it is hard to imagine that the free world could have triumphed if the Truman administration had not secured the industrial heartland of Europe and Japan at the onset of the competition and consigned the communists to a war-ravaged Russia and a few undeveloped countries.

The competition with China will be different in many aspects than the Cold War, but if the early moves are as consequential as they were 75 years ago, then the intellectual confusion and ongoing failures of both the reigning elite and their populist challengers could soon doom the American people to a poorer and more dangerous future.

On the other hand, the costs of engaging in the competition may be lower than China doves fear. Civil libertarians are wary of foreign adventures because of the impact they have at home, but the United States repeatedly veered away from creating a "garrison state" or trampling civil liberties underfoot.

Many progressives worry that confronting China will undermine their campaign to reduce greenhouse gases, but the United States and the Soviet Union collaborated on global issues, such as smallpox eradication and nuclear weapon proliferation, even at the height of the Cold War. Presumably the Chinese communists will cooperate with Americans when they perceive it to be in their interest: If a country that relies heavily on glaciers for freshwater is unwilling to reduce its emissions, there is little chance that Washington can offer enough inducements to change that behavior.

Brands packs a great deal of information on a range of topics into The Twilight Struggle’s 250 pages, but the book moves along at a steady clip because of his straightforward, readable prose. Unlike some academics, he does not hide his point in a thicket of jargon, but he also avoids the popularizer’s trap of talking down to his audience.

Brands points out that the surest way to defeat an enemy is to know them well, to address your own weaknesses, and to use asymmetric advantages to weaken your rival at low cost. Although the United States made plenty of mistakes during the Cold War, enough Americans became proficient enough at these skills to force the Soviet Union to collapse. Will we do it again?

The Twilight Struggle: What the Cold War Teaches Us about Great-Power Rivalry Today
by Hal Brands
Yale University Press, 328 pp., $32.50

Mike Watson is the associate director of Hudson Institute’s Center for the Future of Liberal Society.

The post Lessons from the Last Cold War appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

That emperor was Maximilian, the artistically minded second son of the Austrian Habsburgs. He had capably administered the Austrian Navy and a province in Italy but had been replaced because he disapproved of his older brother Franz Joseph's autocratic tendencies.

In Mexico, meanwhile, conservatives were willing to give monarchy a chance, having lost the Mexican-American War, the 1855 election, and a civil war. They thought an underemployed Habsburg would make an excellent choice.

But since their countrymen disagreed, the conservatives needed an army—from Napoleon III. The nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon III was elected president of France in 1848 and, after winning 90 percent of a plebiscite, crowned emperor in 1852. He had overseen rapid economic growth, broken France out of its post-Waterloo diplomatic isolation, and added onto the French empire in Africa and Asia.

At the same time, prominent French intellectuals began to view the United States as the newest Anglo-Saxon rival to the Latin people, and these pan-Latinists clamored for France to protect Central and South America (dubbed "Latin America") from American and British expansion.

By 1861, France had the opportunity and motive to strike: Benito Juárez's Mexican government suspended foreign debt payment as its U.S. benefactor was engulfed in the Civil War. Britain, France, and Spain agreed to invade Mexico to force repayment but not interfere with Mexico's internal politics. The French attempted to do so anyway and lost the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862, which is celebrated today as Cinco de Mayo. Napoleon III massively reinforced the French expeditionary force, which occupied Mexico City in 1863, and proclaimed the new Mexican empire.

This empire, however, still needed an emperor. Napoleon III and the Mexican conservatives courted Maximilian, who agreed to take the throne once he had the "clearly expressed" support of the Mexican people and backing from both Britain and France. Napoleon III eventually persuaded Maximilian to take the throne without fulfilling either precondition, but Franz Joseph forced his brother to renounce his place in Austrian succession before departing (Maximilian burst into tears as he boarded the ship for Mexico).

Maximilian had several urgent tasks when he reached his destination in May 1864. Juárez had retreated north, and French and imperial troops occupied central Mexico and some key towns on the periphery, but little else. Defeating the Juáristas required a capable imperial military, but the empire's finances were tightly constrained by Napoleon III's onerous loan terms. Economizing was a challenge for Maximilian, whose monthly spending quadrupled the annual presidential salary of the Juárez government that had reneged on its debts.

Maximilian, who wanted to rule as a liberal monarch, tried to win over the Juáristas by issuing a manifesto patterning his empire after Napoleon III's. He then went to work on his main passions: authoring codes of court etiquette, building imperial residences, and undertaking multi-month tours of his new empire.

The main political fault line concerned church property that the liberal government had seized, sparking the earlier civil war. Conservatives expected Maximilian to return the property to the Catholic Church, but he hoped that a papal envoy would endorse his decision not to. Unfortunately for him, that envoy represented Pope Pius IX, who had just published the anti-liberal Syllabus of Errors. Maximilian decided to authorize the earlier confiscations anyway, which infuriated his supporters and forced him to disband a large part of his army.

By 1865, the tide turned against the emperor: The Union won the Civil War and was finally able to deal with France. A month after Appomattox, a flood of American volunteers and surplus weapons was on its way to reinforce Juárez, and General Ulysses S. Grant sent a large force to the Texas border. Secretary of State Henry Seward, meanwhile, sent a special envoy to Napoleon III to warn him of the consequences of a continued French presence in Mexico. An intimidated Napoleon III informed Maximilian that French troops would withdraw in 1867.

Finally roused to action, Maximilian tried to organize his government and deployed his most formidable negotiator. Empress Carlota, who was only 26, had already faced off with Franz Joseph and the papal envoy when her husband shrank back. In many ways the most interesting character in the book, Carlota had effectively ruled when her husband was off on his interminable tours of the countryside and was by far the more decisive of the two. After steeling Maximilian's resolve against abdicating, she sailed for France to persuade Napoleon III to renew aid. She failed in Paris, however, and by the time she reached the pope in Rome she had succumbed to a mental illness that plagued her until her death in 1927.

Maximilian was not as lucky. The French nearly convinced him to abdicate and leave, but after weeks of delay he decided to lead his remaining forces into battle. His chronic dithering doomed him: Rather than attack any of the three Juárista armies converging on him, he held off until they combined and besieged him in Querétaro. He broke a hole in their siege line, but the Juáristas called in reinforcements and cut off his line of retreat. He delayed a second attack long enough for one of his officers to betray him and deliver the town to the Juáristas. And as the republicans prepared to court martial and execute him, he slow-rolled an escape plan until the bribed guards were replaced. Over the objections of U.S. and other diplomats, Maximilian and two of his generals were executed by firing squad in 1867.

Like many defeats, this one had many fathers: Maximilian suffered the same fate as nearly every monarch who attempted to liberalize without relinquishing his hold on power, and he wasted his time on vanity projects rather than address the issues that were obviously destroying his empire. The largest portion of the blame, however, lies with Napoleon III. He could not afford to allocate enough resources to Mexico to maintain control of the country, so he sent only enough French troops to infuriate Mexican nationalists. An effective Mexican imperial government was the only hope of finding a settlement favorable to his interests, but he chose a flawed emperor, whom he crippled with unfavorable loan terms. This empire-on-the-cheap strategy ultimately prevented France from recouping those loans. This was not Napoleon III's only foreign policy blunder: His failed attempts to outwit Otto von Bismarck doomed his empire a few years later.

After our own humiliating defeat in Afghanistan, American policymakers should take a hard look at the extent to which our foreign policy resembles Napoleon III's. Failures in Mexico and Afghanistan were embarrassing; losing to Bismarck or Xi Jinping would be far more dangerous.

The Last Emperor of Mexico: The Dramatic Story of the Habsburg Archduke Who Created a Kingdom in the New World
by Edward Shawcross
Basic Books, 336 pp., $30

Mike Watson is the associate director of Hudson Institute's Center for the Future of Liberal Society.

The post REVIEW: 'The Last Emperor of Mexico' appeared first on Washington Free Beacon.

When Adams argued that the Declaration of Independence was "the only legitimate foundation of civil government" and had "demolished at a stroke the lawfulness of all governments founded upon conquest," his audience understood that he was throwing down a gauntlet at the European monarchies struggling to contain the aftermath of the French Revolution.

As if to underscore this point, Adams ended the speech encouraging "each one of us, here assembled, our beloved country, Britannia ruler of the waves, and every individual among the sceptred lords of humankind" to follow the Declaration's example. Russian diplomat Pierre de Poletica reported to his home government that the speech was "an appeal to the nations of Europe to rise against their governments," lamenting that "it is a Secretary of State … who permits himself language like this on such a solemn occasion."

But isolationists have interpreted the speech as a call for restrained foreign policy because Adams remarked that America "goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy." Today, this group of foreign policy thinkers cites it to support their arguments against democracy promotion and an expansive foreign policy.

With that line, Adams argued against diplomatically intervening in the Latin American wars for independence. After Napoleon invaded Spain and overthrew its monarchy, anticolonial insurrections had erupted across Spain's colonies in Latin America. These revolutionaries were immensely popular in the United States, and many Americans wanted to formally recognize their nascent governments as independent states.

Adams did not, since he was in the middle of negotiations to acquire Spanish territories in North America and doubted that the Latin Americans would create liberal democracies once they won their freedom. The United States opened formal relations with the new countries after the treaty with Spain had been ratified and Adams directed his diplomats to negotiate for religious freedom and promote constitutional governance in Latin America.

These measures caused concern in Europe, which was still wrestling with the fallout of the Napoleonic Wars. A group of absolute monarchs had formed a Holy Alliance to defend their countries from French aggression and their thrones from popular sovereignty. Earlier that year, the Holy Alliance had convened at Laibach and coordinated efforts to crush liberal movements in modern Italy.

Some members of Adams's audience worried that his strident denunciations of monarchy would disrupt an emerging détente with Great Britain. Poletica noted that "from one end to another" the speech was "a virulent diatribe against England." Adams, however, wrote to one critic that the speech was aimed not at Britain, but at "the Holy allies of Laybach and their subjects."

At a time when many Americans worry that the United States is overextended abroad, a foreign policy based strictly on not going abroad "in search of monsters to destroy" seems to offer an alluring alternative. Reducing American commitments abroad could remove obstacles to good relations with current adversaries such as Russia or China, and a withdrawal from the Middle East could make terrorist groups like al Qaeda focus their attacks on other, non-American targets. Many of these thinkers have coalesced in organizations, like the Quincy Institute, that have adopted this admonition as their motto.

The controversies over Adams's remarks demonstrate the core dilemma for this foreign policy. The Declaration of Independence and the success of the country it created are a formidable ideological threat to autocracies worldwide. By stating American principles forthrightly, Adams had antagonized the Holy Alliance, which comprised most of the major powers of Europe.

As Adams realized, the United States poses an existential threat to autocratic regimes, whether or not it wishes to do so. "The influence of our example has unsettled all the ancient governments of Europe," Adams wrote two years later. "It will overthrow them all without a single exception."

Mike Watson is the associate director of Hudson Institute's Center for the Future of Liberal Society.

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