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Northern Europe is home to the densest concentration of wealth in the world

The second feature — the Mediterranean Sea — plays a similar role to the continent’s south

Mix the geographic features that inhibit unification with the features that facilitate trade and communication and Europe becomes a very rich, very violent place.

The first are the Seine and Loire river valleys

The second and third places where the fragmentation pattern does not hold are the Garonne and Rhone river valleys

Mountain chains, rivers and seas therefore enclose France at all points save for one: the North European Plain.

Internally, aside from the Massif Central in the southeast, France is a country of relatively low-lying terrain with occasional hills.

The Beauce region is therefore the French core.

Paris is also close enough to the Atlantic — connected by the Seine — to benefit from oceanic trade routes but far enough away to be insulated somewhat from a direct naval invasion.

In comparison with its continental neighbors, France has almost always been at an economic advantage because of its geography.

The Beauce region of France has always been the core of the French state because of its fertile land and strategic location on the North European Plain.

The first dealt with the plains.

The solution to this military reality was feudalism.

French, one of the Langue d’oil, did not become the official tongue until the 1500s, and linguistic unification was not completed until the 1800s.

England considered continental France their playpen for much of the Middle Ages. In fact, the Norman leaders of England did not distinguish much between their French and English possessions

As in the conflict with the Muslims, it was a technological innovation that forced France’s political system to evolve, and this time the shift was toward centralization rather than decentralization.

Europe’s Hapsburg era was a dangerous time for the French.

In three major wars — the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714), the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-1748) and the Seven Years’ War (1754-1763, against Britain in North America) — France expended great financial resources in efforts to dominate one region or another, only to emerge at each war’s end with little to show for its efforts.

First, the depleted treasury led to a general breakdown in internal order, contributing to the French Revolution of 1789.

Second, Paris’ distraction with England and Spain led it to miss the emergence of Prussia as a serious European power that began to first rival and ultimately superseded Hapsburg Austria for leadership among the cacophony of German kingdoms.

Not only was France the only state to have embraced the concept of nationalism, but it also grafted the concept onto an already centralized system, allowing French power to pour forth across Europe and North Africa.

From 1803 to 1815, France nearly overwhelmed the rest of Europe before a coalition of nearly every major and minor power on the Continent combined forces to defeat her.

as France is concerned, however, STRATFOR views the entire post-World War II era as a single chapter in French history that has yet to come to a conclusion. In this phase, France is attempting to find a means to live with Germany, a task greatly complicated by recent shifts in the global political geography.

And far from being exposed and vulnerable, France found itself facing the most congenial constellation of forces in its history.

Eventually the Cold War ended, and the Soviet collapse was perceived very differently in France. While most of the free world celebrated, the French fretted.

Twenty years on, Germany cannot abandon the European Union without triggering massive internal economic dislocations because of the economic evolutions Maastricht has wrought.

First, the cage breaks, Germany goes its own way and attempts to remake Europe to suit its purposes.

Second, the cage holds, but it constrains France more than Germany.

France is the only country on the North European Plain that has an option for expansion into useful territories beyond its core without directly clashing with another major power.

Being situated at the western end of the North European Plain makes France the only country on the plain that has only one land approach to defend against.

Unlike the United Kingdom, whose expansion into empire was a natural step in its evolution as a naval power, France’s overseas empire was almost wholly artificial.

These colonial assets served one more critical role for Paris: They were disposable.

Louisiana was sold for loose change in order to fund the Napoleonic wars, while Algeria was ultimately abandoned — despite being home to some 1 million ethnic French — so that Charles de Gaulle could focus attention on more important matters at home and in the rest of Europe.

Geopolitics is not ideological or personal, although few countries have the discipline to understand that.

The French government understood that the only way to achieve lasting and sustainable economic growth in France was by ensuring a stable peace with Germany.

Its immediate goal was to create a customs union, which would eliminate trade restrictions between member states and establish a common external tariff for trade with the rest of the world.

It would also seek the consolidation of a common market, to allow the free movement of people, goods, capital and services.

Finally, it would seek the progressive coordination of social and fiscal policies among its members.

The rationale behind the European Communities was that if countries gave up sovereignty in specific areas, over time a greater amount of national prerogatives would be transferred to the supranational institutions.

In other words, the process of European integration would progressively weaken the nation-state and its strategic interests.

However, the remarkable growth of the European project did not bring about the abolishment of the nation-state that many analysts predicted.

EU institutions tend to generate their own agendas, which often go against the national strategies of some member states. As a result, the clash between national and supranational interests is often unavoidable.

This friction did not begin with the current economic crisis. In 1965, the French government withdrew its representation in the European Commission in protest of a plan that would give more power to Brussels in the management of the Common Agricultural Policy. To resolve the crisis, the Europeans reached an agreement under which a de facto veto power was given to member states on issues that were considered crucial to national interests. This agreement (commonly known as the Luxembourg Compromise) was designed to protect the intergovernmental nature of the European Communities and virtually froze the process of supranational integration in the 1970s and 1980s, until the Single European Act in 1986 introduced new mechanisms for qualified majority voting.

On top of the traditional tensions between national governments and supranational institutions, in times of crisis member states also tend to distrust each other.

Governments must find a balance between their foreign policy objectives, pressure from the European Union and their desire to be re-elected -- which means decisions that may make sense for the future of the European Union (such as fiscal consolidation efforts) would probably not be made if governments consider them too unpopular among voters.

Other institutions, such as constitutional courts, often threaten to block decisions accepted by national parliaments. The recent investigation by the German constitutional court on the validity of the European Stability Mechanism and the decision by the Portuguese constitutional court to block some austerity measures promoted by Brussels and implemented by Lisbon are examples of this situation.

The deep unemployment crisis in the eurozone adds yet another complication to this problem. The European elites are still largely pro-European, and most of the voters in the eurozone want to keep the euro. But with the European Union's promise of economic prosperity weakening, its members have begun to rethink their strategies. Fidelity for the European project is not unbreakable. Nor is it strong enough to support an indefinite period of extremely high unemployment.

Non-eurozone countries in Central and Eastern Europe have also begun to think of a more independent foreign policy. They remain formally aligned with the European Union and NATO, but the pursuit of closer ties with Russia is no longer taboo. And for most of them, joining the eurozone is no longer a priority.

Like most economies in Mediterranean Europe, France's has lost competitiveness since the creation of the euro, and the common currency has led to a constant trade deficit with Germany. France will seek to change its relationship with Germany without breaking it (as Paris is still interested in containing Berlin), but Paris is increasingly aware that the European project should be remodeled.

The Germans are interested in preserving their alliance with France and protecting the currency union because it benefits its exports to its neighbors and out of fear of the immeasurable financial consequences of a breakup of the eurozone.

Europe's main challenge will be to prevent these frictions from paralyzing the bloc. The European Union will also face the test of mitigating the alienation of its eastern members and closing the gap between eurozone and non-eurozone countries. In the meantime, Brussels and national governments will have to find ways to alleviate the bloc's corrosive unemployment crisis before it leads to dangerous levels of social unrest. In all these challenges, the European Union is running a race against time.

Rather than split France and Russia, the threat of a united Germany drew them together. It was clear to France and Russia that without an alliance, Germany would pick them off individually.

During both World War I and World War II, Germany first struck at France and then turned to deal with Russia while keeping the United Kingdom at bay. In both wars, the strategy failed.

The issue was to prevent Germany from returning to the pursuit of an autonomous national strategy, both because it could not resist the Soviet forces to the east by itself and, more important, because the West could not tolerate the re-emergence of divisive and dangerous power politics in Europe.

First, it had to defend itself against the Soviet Union in concert with an alliance that would effectively command its military through NATO.

Second, it would align its economy with that of the rest of Europe, pursuing prosperity without undermining the prosperity of other countries.

Third, it would exercise internal political sovereignty, reclaiming its rights as a nation without posing a geopolitical threat to Western Europe.

Russia, or what was left after the collapse of the Soviet Union, was relatively secure so long as Germany remained part of European structures. The historical strategic problem Germany had faced appeared solved.

Germany is the second-largest exporter in the world. It exports to many countries, but Europe is a critical customer. The free-trade zone that was the foundation of the European Union was also one of the foundations of the German economy.

However, the European Union no longer functions as it once did.

One was that the countries in crisis impose austerity in order to find the resources to solve their problem.

The other was that the prosperous part of Europe underwrites the debts, sparing these countries the burden of austerity.

the German price for underwriting part of the debt is that European bureaucrats, heavily oriented toward German policies, be effectively put in charge of the finances of countries receiving aid against default.

It is difficult to imagine a vast surrender of sovereignty to a German-dominated EU bureaucracy, whatever the economic cost. It is also difficult to imagine Germany underwriting the debt without some controls beyond promises

In short, there is substantial synergy between the Russian and German economies. Add to this that the Germans feel under heavy pressure from the United States to engage in actions the Germans want to be left out of, while the Russians see the Americans as a threat to their interests, and there are politico-military interests that Germany and Russia have in common.

NATO is badly frayed. The European Union is under tremendous pressure and national interests are now dominating European interests.

However, Germany's strategic interest is not necessarily a relationship with France but a relationship with either France or Russia to avoid being surrounded by hostile powers. For Germany, a relationship with Russia does as well as one with France.

If Germany faces an impossible situation with the European Union, the second strategic option would be a three-way alliance, with a modified European Union or perhaps outside of the EU structure.

Germany's strategy, therefore, is still locked in the EU paradigm. However, if the EU paradigm becomes unsupportable, then other strategies will have to be found.

First, it allied with Britain, less for its land capabilities than for the fact that Britain's navy could blockade Germany and therefore deter it from going to war. The second ally was Russia, the sheer size of which could threaten Germany with a two-front war if one began.

The combination of forces facing Germany convinced Berlin that it had to strike first, eliminating one enemy so that it would not be faced with a two-front war. In both the first and second world wars, Germany attempted to eliminate France first.

Charles de Gaulle recognized that France was incapable of competing with the United States and the Soviet Union on the global stage. At the same time, he wanted France to retain its ability to act independently of the two major powers if necessary. Part of the motivation was nationalism. Part of it was a distrust of the Americans. The foundation of post-war American and European defense policy was the containment of the Soviet Union.

De Gaulle was not convinced of the American guarantees, in part because he simply didn't see them as rational. The United States had an interest in Europe, but it was not an existential interest. De Gaulle did not believe that an American president would risk a nuclear counterattack on the United States to save Germany or France.

This was not because he was pro-Soviet. Quite the contrary, one of his priorities upon taking power in 1945 was blocking the Communists.

De Gaulle, above all others, understood national self-interest. But he did not believe that American national self-interest was identical to France's.

De Gaulle settled on the next best strategy, which was developing independent military capabilities sufficient to deter a Soviet attack on French territory without coming to the Americans for help.

De Gaulle objected to NATO's structure because it effectively limited France's sovereignty. NATO's Military Committee was effectively in command of the military forces of the constituent nations, and at a time of war, NATO's supreme allied commander in Europe -- always an American -- would automatically take command.

The foundation of this alliance had to be economic and military. But with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the urgency of the military threat dissolved. France's presidents since the end of the Cold War, Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, believed that the Gaullist vision could be achieved solely through economic ties.

If it chose to, Germany could become Russia’s greatest roadblock. It is geographically more of a threat than the United States, due to its position on the North European Plain and the Baltic Sea, and it is a leader in the European Union and could offer Ukraine and Belarus substantial political and economic alternatives to their ties to Russia.

France and Germany are important partners for Russia because Moscow needs guarantees that its resurgence in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus will not face opposition from a united EU front.

Russia has less leverage over France than over any of the other regional powers discussed. In fact, Russia and France have few overlapping geopolitical interests.

Russia gives France and Sarkozy the respect reserved for Europe’s leader, for example by allowing Sarkozy to negotiate and take credit for the peace deal that ended the Russo-Georgian war in August 2008.

Russia wants to manage its relationship with Turkey for two main reasons: to guarantee its dominance of the Caucasus and assure that Turkey remains committed to transporting Russia’s — rather than someone else’s — energy to Europe. Russia also wants to make sure that Turkey does not use its control of the Bosporus to close off the Black Sea to Russian trade, particularly oil exports from Novorossiysk.

Russia maintains a considerable military presence in nearby Kaliningrad, with more than 200 aircraft, 23,000 troops and half of Russia’s Baltic fleet stationed between Poland and Lithuania.

Ultimately, Moscow’s strategy is to assure that Germany, France, Turkey and Poland stay out of — or actively support — Russia’s consolidation efforts in the former Soviet sphere. Russia does not need the four powers to be its allies — although it certainly is moving in that direction with Germany (and possibly France). Rather, it hopes to reach an understanding with them on where the Russian sphere ends, and establish a border that is compatible with Russian interests.

The French, in other words, are neither lazy nor illogical. The protesters see the reforms as a threshold that, if crossed by the government, could undermine the foundation of the last 150 years of French society. Thus, while only 7-8 percent of the working population belongs to a labor union — the lowest percentage in the EU and even lower than that in the United States — nearly 70 percent of the population supports the ongoing strikes and believes they should continue if the proposed reforms pass, which they likely will by Oct. 23.

The context of the 2010 unrest is therefore not very different from 1995. The French budget deficit is forecast to hit 8.2 percent of GDP, and Paris is being forced by Germany to rein in spending to conform to the EU’s fiscal rules. Germany is making EU-wide fiscal discipline an essential condition of its continued support for EU institutions, a message that was elucidated during the Greek sovereign debt crisis but understood to apply to everyone.

In addition to protests from the French middle classes and workers demanding a continuation of the established social contract, there are protests from French citizens who feel they were never offered that social contract in the first place.

The protests of the last couple of days in France have seen both groups pour out onto the streets. The rioting and violence are still not in any way at a level that could be construed as threatening to the government; both the 2005 and 2007 riots were more intense. However, the protesters are using more strategic tactics, targeting the country’s energy infrastructure, and hence are less reliant on drawing out the masses to the streets.

The youth need a flexible labor market and thus would need substantial portions of the French welfare state to be eroded if their employment situation were to be remedied. Therefore, Paris will have a hard time satisfying both groups.

Ultimately, the commitments Paris has made to its people over the last 150 years are incompatible with the commitments it has made to Berlin in the last 20 years.

However, the French state has a very clear history of conceding to its population’s demands. At the very least, it is inevitable that Paris will have to give in to one of the groups, either by admitting that the social contract cannot be changed or by offering it in an amended form to the disaffected youth and citizens of immigrant descent.

Second, France has stood firm regarding plans to sell Mistral helicopter-carrier amphibious assault ships to Russia

Third, Germany has in the last few weeks boosted its military relationship with Russia

Europe should continue to engage Moscow, and the United States and Central Europe should not stand in its way, since aggression will only turn Russia inward.

Russia knows how to play the game with Western Europe. Specifically, it knows how to show hints of internal “reform” to satisfy the “soft power” complex of Europe. But at the same time, it is using its enhanced military relationship with France and Germany as a way to counter American influence in countries like Poland and Romania.

The Rocky Mountains dominate the Western third of the northern and central parts of North America

Farther east of this semiarid region are the well-watered plains of the prairie provinces of Canada and the American Midwest

East of this premier arable zone lies a second mountain chain known as the Appalachians.

North of the Great Lakes region lies the Canadian Shield, an area where repeated glaciation has scraped off most of the topsoil.

The continent’s final geographic piece is an isthmus of varying width, known as Central America, that is too wet and rugged to develop into anything more than a series of isolated city-states, much less a single country that would have an impact on continental affairs. Due to a series of swamps and mountains where the two American continents join, there still is no road network linking them, and the two Americas only indirectly affect each other’s development.

Very few of its tributaries begin at high elevations, making vast tracts of these rivers easily navigable. In the case of the Mississippi, the head of navigation — just north of Minneapolis — is 3,000 kilometers inland.

The unified nature of this system greatly enhances the region’s usefulness and potential economic and political power.

This factor is the primary reason why the major economic powers of the past half-millennia have been Japan, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and the United States.

The vast bulk of the prime agricultural lands are within 200 kilometers of a stretch of navigable river.

First, navigable rivers by definition service twice the land area of a coastline (rivers have two banks, coasts only one).

Second, rivers are not subject to tidal forces, greatly easing the construction and maintenance of supporting infrastructure.

Third, storm surges often accompany oceanic storms, which force the evacuation of oceanic ports.

First are the severe indentations of North America’s coastline, granting the region a wealth of sheltered bays and natural, deep-water ports.

Second, there are the Great Lakes.

Third and most important are the lines of barrier islands that parallel the continent’s East and Gulf coasts.

There are many secondary stretches of agricultural land as well

The rivers of the American Atlantic coastal plain — flowing down the eastern side of the Appalachians — are neither particularly long nor interconnected. This makes them much more like the rivers of Northern Europe in that their separation localizes economic existence and fosters distinct political identities, dividing the region rather than uniting it. The formation of such local — as opposed to national — identities in many ways contributed to the American Civil War.

What is now Mexico lacks even a single navigable river of any size. Its agricultural zones are disconnected and it boasts few good natural ports.

Canada’s maritime transport zones

Its first, the Great Lakes, not only requires engineering but is shared with the United States.

The second, the St. Lawrence Seaway, is a solid option (again with sufficient engineering), but it services a region too cold to develop many dense population centers.

The eastern end of the border could be anywhere within 300 kilometers north or south of its current location (at present the border region’s southernmost ports — Brownsville and Corpus Christi — lie on the U.S. side of the border). As one moves westward to the barren lands of New Mexico, Arizona, Chihuahua and Sonora, the possible variance increases considerably. Even controlling the mouth of the Colorado River where it empties into the Gulf of California is not a critical issue, since hydroelectric development in the United States prevents the river from reaching the Gulf in most years, making it useless for transport.

In the north, the Great Lakes are obviously an ideal break point in the middle of the border region, but the specific location of the line along the rest of the border is largely irrelevant. East of the lakes, low mountains and thick forests dominate the landscape — not the sort of terrain to generate a power that could challenge the U.S. East Coast.

So long as the border lies north of the bulk of the Missouri River’s expansive watershed, the border’s specific location is somewhat academic, and it becomes even more so when one reaches the Rockies.

On the far western end of the U.S.-Canada border is the only location where there could be some border friction. The entrance to Puget Sound — one of the world’s best natural harbors — is commanded by Vancouver Island.

It is common knowledge that the United States began as 13 rebellious colonies along the east coast of the center third of the North American continent. But the United States as an entity was not a sure thing in the beginning

Most of the original 13 colonies were lightly populated by European standards — only Philadelphia could be considered a true city in the European sense — and were linked by only the most basic of physical infrastructure. Additionally, rivers flowed west to east across the coastal plain, tending to sequester regional identities rather than unify them.

With European attentions diverted elsewhere, the young United States had an opportunity to carve out a future for itself relatively free of European entanglements.

This was not England, an island that forced the early state into the expense of a navy. This was not France, a country with three coasts and two land borders that forced Paris to constantly deal with threats from multiple directions. This was not Russia, a massive country suffering from short growing seasons that was forced to expend inordinate sums of capital on infrastructure simply to attempt to feed itself.

The early nation was particularly vulnerable to its former colonial master.

There are only two ways to protect a coastal community from sea power. The first is to counter with another navy.

The second method of protecting a coastal community is to develop territories that are not utterly dependent upon the sea.

Achieving such strategic depth was both an economic and a military imperative.

The United States was entirely dependent upon the English imperial system not just for finished goods and markets but also for the bulk of its non-agricultural raw materials, in particular coal and iron ore.

The Appalachians may not be the Swiss Alps, but they were sufficiently rugged to put a check on any deep and rapid inland expansion.

The Ohio River faced the additional problem of draining into the Mississippi, the western shore of which was the French territory of Louisiana

At the time, Napoleon was girding for a major series of wars that would bear his name. France not only needed cash but also to be relieved of the security burden of defending a large but lightly populated territory in a different hemisphere.

This single road (known in modern times as Interstate 40 or Interstate 70 for most of its length) allowed American pioneers to directly settle Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and Missouri and granted them initial access to Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa and Minnesota.

The trail was directly responsible for the initial settling of Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming, Idaho and Oregon. A wealth of secondary trails branched off from the main artery — the Mormon, Bozeman, California and Denver trails — and extended the settlement efforts to Montana, Colorado, Utah, Nevada and California.

From beginning to end, the entire process required less than 70 years.

The Columbia River Valley and California’s Central Valley are not critical American territories.

among other things, they grant the United States full access to the Pacific trading basin — only that control of them is not imperative to American security.

The first land threat to the young United States was in essence the second phase of the Revolutionary War

the British navy could outmatch anything the Americans could float

Geopolitically, the most critical part of the war was the participation of semi-independent British Canada.

Canadian forces, unlike the British, did not have a supply line that stretched across the Atlantic.

Canada is far enough north that its climate is far harsher than that of the United States, with all of the negative complications one would expect for population, agriculture and infrastructure.

What few rivers Canada has neither interconnect nor remain usable year round.

Most of these river connections also have rapids and falls, greatly limiting their utility as a transport network.

the St. Lawrence Seaway — a series of locks that link the St. Lawrence River to the Great Lakes and allow full ocean access — was not completed until 1959.

Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island — are disconnected from the Canadian landmass and unable to capitalize on what geographic blessings the rest of the country enjoys

what population centers Canada does have are geographically sequestered from one another by the Canadian Shield and the Rocky Mountains.

All four provinces have been forced by geography and necessity to be more economically integrated with their southern neighbors than with their fellow Canadian provinces.

The British were exhausted from the Napoleonic Wars in Europe and, with the French Empire having essentially imploded, were more interested in reshaping the European balance of power than re-engaging the Americans in distant North America.

the Americans were mobilized, angry and — remembering vividly the Canadian/British sacking of Washington — mulling revenge.

Using a combination of illegal settlements, military pressure and diplomacy, the United States was able to gain control of east and west Florida from Madrid in 1819 in exchange for recognizing Spanish claims to what is now known as Texas

the United States’ efforts to secure its southwestern borders shifted to a blatant attempt to undermine and ultimately carve up the one remaining Western Hemispheric entity that could potentially challenge the United States: Mexico.

the United States quickly transformed itself from a poor coastal nation to a massively capital-rich commodities exporter.

the biggest potential security threat to the United States was newly independent Mexico, the border with which was only 150 kilometers from New Orleans. In fact, New Orleans’ security was even more precarious than such a small distance suggested.

In the United States, the cheap transport system allowed early settlers to quickly obtain their own small tracts of land.

in time the wealth accumulated to the point that portions of the United States had the capital necessary to industrialize.

Mexico, in contrast, suffered from a complete lack of navigable rivers and had only a single good port (Veracruz).

First and most obviously, the lack of navigable waterways and the non-abundance of ports drastically reduced Mexico’s ability to move goods and thereby generate its own capital. Second, the disassociated nature of Mexico’s agricultural regions forced the construction of separate, non-integrated infrastructures for each individual sub-region, drastically raising the costs of even basic development.

Third, the highland nature of the Mexico City core required an even more expensive infrastructure, since everything had to be transported up the mountains from Veracruz.

very different economic and social structure

Instead of small landholdings, Mexican agriculture was dominated by a small number of rich Spaniards

The Mexican landowners had, in essence, created their own company towns and saw little benefit in pooling their efforts to industrialize. Doing so would have undermined their control of their economic and political fiefdoms.

In just two generations — by 1870 — the American population had ballooned to 38.6 million while Mexico’s was only 8.8 million.

The first was Texas, and the primary means was settlement as enabled by the Austin family.

America's geopolitical position required that it continue to position itself in terms of this European struggle.

The Jeffersonian Democrats wanted to support the French. The Federalist Party, cautious of British naval power and aware of American dependence on trade, supported an alignment with Britain.

With minimal north-south transportation and dependence on the sea, the United States needed strategic depth.

The conflict between France and Britain was intensifying once again, and by 1803, Napoleon was planning an invasion of Britain. Napoleon's finances were in shambles, a fact Jefferson took advantage of to solve America's strategic problem: He negotiated the purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France.

He probably did just that, but either way he had managed to expel the French from North America and achieve strategic depth for the United States, all without triggering a crisis with Britain. For a man who didn't care for entanglements, it was a tangled, but brilliant, achievement.

The Americans had been protected before independence because they had treaties with Britain, but the treaties did not apply to the independent United States. Rather than negotiate a treaty, Jefferson chose to go to war, fighting on the same Libyan soil that is so discussed today: The Marines' Hymn, which references the shores of Tripoli, is talking about Benghazi, among other places.

The geopolitical reality was that the United States could not maintain its economy on domestic trade alone. It had to trade, and to trade it had to have access to the North Atlantic. Without that access it would fall into a depression. The idea that there would be no entangling alliances was nice in theory. But in reality, in order to trade, it had to align with the dominant naval power in the Atlantic, namely, the British.

All of this culminated in the War of 1812.

The British lack of manpower led London to order the seizure of U.S. ships and the impressment of British-born sailors into the Royal Navy. The British were also allied with Indian tribes to the west, which could have led to a reversal of the achievements of the Louisiana Purchase.

The British were not particularly interested in the Americans. Instead, it was their obsession with the French that led them to restrain trade and impress seaman.

Regardless of desires for peace with everyone and the avoidance of war, the United States accordingly declared war on Britain. Although the war resulted in the burning of Washington, the ultimate strategic outcome of the war is generally regarded as satisfactory to the United States.

This account wouldn't be complete if I didn't mention the Monroe Doctrine, issued in 1823 with the goal of regulating the extent to which European powers could be involved in the Americas.

Interestingly, the United States was in no position to enforce the doctrine; it could do so only in cooperation with Britain. Yet even so it asserted its unwillingness to allow European powers to intrude in the Western Hemisphere.

In his farewell address, frequently cited as an argument for avoiding foreign adventures, George Washington had a much more complex and sophisticated approach than Jefferson's one-liner did (and Jefferson himself was far more sophisticated than that one-liner). It is worth extracting one section:

Our detached and distant situation invites and enables us to pursue a different course. If we remain one people under an efficient government, the period is not far off when we may defy material injury from external annoyance; when we may take such an attitude as will cause the neutrality we may at any time resolve upon to be scrupulously respected; when belligerent nations, under the impossibility of making acquisitions upon us, will not lightly hazard the giving us provocation; when we may choose peace or war, as our interest, guided by justice, shall counsel.

Washington noted that American distance gave it the hope that "the period is not far off when we may defy material injury from external annoyance." For him, this was a goal, not a reality.

nlike the French Revolutionaries, who took the revolution to its bloody reduction ad absurdum, the Americans had modest expectations for their revolution

It's not clear that that time has come or that it will come. What undermined the peace Washington and Jefferson craved was the need for trade. It made the United States, weak as it was, vulnerable to Britain and France and even the Ottomans and forced the United States to engage in the very activity Washington and Jefferson warned against.

The desire of the president, the left and the right to limit our engagement is understandable. The founders wanted their prosperity without paying the price of foreign entanglements, but prosperity depended on careful management of foreign relations.

You cannot be economically entangled in the world without also being politically and militarily entangled.

his polyglot Habsburg system, lying at the geographical center of Europe, constituted a morality in and of itself, necessary as it was for peace among the ethnic nations. This is why Metternich's system survived, even as he himself was replaced in 1848.

While there is no equivalent in the Middle East of the Habsburg system, not every dictatorial regime in the Arab world is expendable for some of the same reasons that Habsburg Austria's was not.

Iraq in 2006 and 2007 proved that chaos is in some respects worse than tyranny. Thus, a system is simply not moral if it cannot preserve domestic peace.

nobody is saying that conservative-reactionary orders will lead to social betterment. Nonetheless, because order is necessary before progress can take hold, reactionary regimes could be the beneficiary of chaos in some Middle Eastern states, in a similar way that the Habsburgs were after 1848. For it is conservative regimes of one type or another that are more likely to be called upon to restore order.

To wit, if the military is seen to be necessary for communal peace between Muslims and Copts in Egypt, that will give the generals yet another reason to share power with Islamists, rather than retreat entirely from politics. The overthrow of Mubarak will therefore signify not a revolution but a coup.

So one should not confuse the formation of new regimes in the Middle East with their actual consolidation.

If new bureaucratic institutions do not emerge in a more socially complex Middle East, the Arab Spring will be a false one, and it will be remembered like 1848.

Syria is at this very moment a bellwether. It is afflicted by ethnic and sectarian splits -- Sunnis versus Shia-trending Alawites versus Druze and Kurds. But Syria also can claim historical coherence as an age-old cluster of cosmopolitanism at the crossroads of the desert and the Mediterranean, a place littered with the ruins of Byzantine and medieval Arab civilizations. The Western intelligentsia now equate a moral outcome in Syria with the toppling of the present dictator, who requires those sectarian splits to survive.

1848 had tragic repercussions: While democracy in Europe flowered briefly following World War I, it was snuffed out by fascism and then communism. Thus, 1848 had to wait until 1989 to truly renew itself.

First, they seemed to come out of nowhere.

This introduced a new dimension into American culture.

The two shocks created a dark sense of foreboding that undergirds American society to this day.

Catastrophe therefore might come at any moment. The American approach to the Cold War is symbolized by Colorado's Cheyenne Mountain.

The Americans analyzed their forced entry into World War II and identified what they took to be the root cause: the Munich Agreement allowing Nazi Germany to annex parts of Czechoslovakia.

If the origin of World War II was the failure to take pre-emptive action against the Germans in 1938, then it followed that the Pacific War might have been prevented by more aggressive actions early on.

Pearl Harbor (and the 1929 crash) not only led to a sense of foreboding and a distrust in the wisdom of political and military leaders, but it also replaced a strategy of mobilization after war begins, with a strategy of permanent mobilization.

The Soviet Union had its own Pearl Harbor on June 22, 1941, when the Germans invaded in spite of the friendship treaty signed between them in 1939.

The Soviets made a single miscalculation: They assumed a German campaign in France would replay the previous Great War.

That the moment of attack was a surprise compounded the challenge, but the real problem was strategic miscalculation, not simply an intelligence or command failure.

The Soviet forces were not ready for an attack, and their strategy collapsed with France, so the decision for war was entirely Germany's.

The Warsaw Pact was less an alliance than a geopolitical reality. For the most part it consisted of states under the direct military, intelligence or political control of the Soviet Union. The military value of the block might be limited, and its room for maneuver was equally limited.

nuclear attack was not the Soviet's primordial fear, though the fear must not be minimized. The primordial fear in Moscow was an attack from the West. The Soviet Union's strategy was to position its own forces as far to the west as possible.

The Soviets were not ideologues. They were geopoliticians, and China represented a potential threat that the Soviets could not control. Ideology didn't matter. China would never serve the role that Poland had to. The Sino-Soviet relationship fell apart fairly quickly.

Beneath communist fervor, cynical indifference and dread of the Soviet secret police, the Russians found something new while the Americans found something old.

One was that the English Channel, combined with the fleet and the Royal Air Force, would hold the Germans at bay. The second was that in due course, the United States would be drawn into the war. Their two calculations proved correct.

The Americans did not take the British Empire. It was taken away by the shocking performance of the French. On paper, the French had an excellent army — superior to the Germans, in many ways. Yet they collapsed in weeks. If we were to summarize the British sensibility, after defiance came exhaustion and then resentment.

The Americans retain their dread even though World War II was in many ways good to the United States. It ended the Great Depression, and in the aftermath, between the G.I. Bill, VA loans and the Interstate Highway System, the war created the American professional middle class, with private homes for many and distance and space that could be accessed easily.

Rather than a Machiavellian genius, Putin is the heir to the German invasion on June 22, 1941. He seeks strategic depth controlled by his own military. And his public has rallied to him.

While we are celebrating the end of World War II, it is useful to examine its beginnings. So much of what constitutes the political-military culture, particularly of the Americans, was forged by the way that World War II began.

What started to draw the United States into the matter was a statement made by the president in 2012, when he said that the use of chemical weapons would be a red line.

A significant faction pressed him on this in his foreign policy apparatus.

The point is that, leaving Iraq, this faction felt that the United States failed to carry out its moral obligations in Rwanda, and applauded the intervention in Kosovo. 

That war was more complicated than that, but there was an element of truth to it. And the world, on the whole, approved of American involvement there.

There was a romantic belief that the crowd in the street was always more virtuous than the tyrant in his palace. Sometimes they were right. It is not clear that the fall of the Shah reduced the sum total of human suffering.

Obama had learned a thing or two about the crowd, Arab and otherwise. He was far less romantic about their intent, particularly after Libya. After Libya he was also aware that after the self-congratulations, the United States would have to live with the chaos or new tyranny. He didn't want to attack, and that was clear in the first days after the affair.

First, he had lost confidence in the crowd.

Second, he had vowed not to go to war as Bush had, without international support validated by the United Nations

Obama resisted not the principle of attack but the scale Turkey wanted. 

This was one that the British had helped concoct, and the parliament voted against it, with many parliament members saying the United Kingdom was no longer the Americans' lap dog.

The Russians were completely committed to the survival of the regime.

The Russian calculations came down to its read of the United States, which is that it was not in a position to impose an international system in the region because of internal political weakness.

Others, like Poland, that had been with the Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan also bowed out. The Poles are interesting because they had been the most eager for collaboration with the Americans, but felt the most betrayed by not getting an American commitment for significant military aid and collaboration.

The French -- and France's interventionist flow is fascinating (Libya, Mali, now Syria) -- stood with the United States. This is a tale to consider in itself, but not here. And the Canadians decided that much as they disliked chemical weapons use, they would not be available. The wheels just came off the strategy.

It is easy to blame Obama for losing control of the situation, but that is too simple. Every administration has its ideologues, and every president wants allies and no one wants to go to war without those allies flying aircraft beside them. And it would be nice if the United States could be just another country, but it isn't. The moment that it enters a coalition, it leads a coalition.

It is a strategy that is impossible to maintain, as the United States learned after World War I, Vietnam and Desert Storm. It is a seductive vision but a fantasy. The world comes visiting.

This is not over yet. If Congress votes for strikes, it is likely that Obama will do something. But at that point he will be doing it by himself, and the inevitable death of innocents in even the smallest attack will bring him under fire from some of those most insistent that he do something about the war crimes in Syria.