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After Jerome arrived, Napoleon appointed an ambassador to Warsaw, and sponsored the re-establishment of the Polish Confederation. All signs seemed to point to the resurrection of the Kingdom of Poland, with Jerome on the throne. In mid-June, while his army moved forward roughly on schedule, Jerome remained in Warsaw to confer with Prince Adam Czartoryski,1 head of the Confederation

Napoleon had planned all along that the experienced and skilful Marshal would command the right wing

Napoleon intended Westphalia to be a model state, one that the other members of the Rheinbund might admire and copy. In many respects it so became, and perhaps would have fully become, had not Napoleon himself wrecked its finances

For a country with a basically agricultural economy, and a population of only two million, this was a heavy burden. To make matters worse, Napoleon established tax-free Imperial fiefs within the Kingdom, and demanded extraordinary contributions from time to time

With most of his troops serving Napoleon in Austria, he found himself faced by what might have become a serious uprising, led by Colonel Dornberg, late of the King’s own Guard. Five thousand men marched on Cassel, where Jerome had only fifteen hundred Guardsmen, almost all Westphalians

Napoleon gave him minor commands during the 1806-1807 campaign in Germany and Poland, from which he emerged a Major-General. Then, in July 1807, the Tilsit treaties recognized the new Kingdom of Westphalia; and Jerome, duly married to Catherine of Württemberg in August, entered Cassel in December

Your Kingdom is without police, without finances, without organization,” wrote the Emperor in April 1809

Though Napoleon refused Jerome any important command, some Westphalians fought with the Emperor to the end

A good part of Jerome’s Guard voluntarily saw him safely across the Rhine. Jerome returned to fight at Waterloo, and lived to see his nephew, Napoleon III, Emperor of the French. The descendants of his son by Elizabeth Patterson were prominent in the United States until the line became extinct in 1945. is perhaps just that the great-great-grandson of Jerome and his sturdy, gentle Catherine is the Bonapartist pretender in 1964.

This order has preserved the longest peace in human history.

Notwithstanding the outbreak of conflicts between smaller states, Asia has enjoyed a considerable degree of peace since World War II. The wars of the Greater Middle East pale in comparison with the region’s violent history, only tamed by European imperialism.

And Europe, a continent plagued by continental wars, has been at peace for a quarter century.

This has resulted in unprecedented prosperity, growth in life expectancy, and decline of violence

All American wars have been against autocracies. Especially in the recent era, at every point, America has tried to leave behind a democracy.

Most Americans though don’t remember the pre-American world. They tend to take the world they live in for granted, not realizing the enormous investment their leaders make in preserving it.

If one studies history, it is obvious that in comparison the American world is a beautiful garden. If unattended, however, the unforgiving law of the jungle will rule.

The core of the American order is a legacy of the Westphalian peace, that the sovereignty of other states must be respected

Detractors argue that America has also broken this rule. True enough. But as much as it is unpopular to say that America is not the world’s policeman, our country has acted as the world’s law enforcement officer. And while citizens do not have a right to be violent with each other, the police have the right to use force against lawbreakers.

A second flaw of this false comparison could be explained by the late Bill Buckley, “to say that we and [Russia] are to be compared is the equivalent of saying that the man who pushes the old lady into the way of an oncoming bus and the man who pushes the old lady out of the way of an oncoming bus are both people who push old ladies around.”

Most importantly, due to the simple fact that America is the judge, the jury, and the executioner of this order, it has disproportionately benefited Americans

And unlike the Russian military, the U.S. military has never permanently stayed in a country against the will of a democratic host.

Consider Imperial Russia’s claim to be the patron of Orthodox Christendom, a claim mainly targeted at its major regional rival, the Ottoman Empire. Following the Ottoman defeat in the Russo-Turkish War of 1768 to 1774, the Treaty of Kutchuk Kainardji allowed Russia to represent Orthodox Christians in Ottoman lands.

The most spectacular efforts to employ the geopolitics of religion were made by the Ottoman Empire during World War I. In 1914, the sheikh al-Islam, who oversaw the empire’s religious affairs, issued five fatwas, translated into numerous languages, urging Muslims in the British, French and Russian empires to revolt.

The politics of religion undermined the Westphalian order, based on the principles of state sovereignty and territorial integrity.

To weaken the order of transnational sectarian protectorates in the region, their underlying conflicts need to be resolved. The clients — Sunni or Shiite — must be sensibly accommodated in their states’ power structures, which will reduce the appeal of foreign patronage.

More important, the international community must prevent any further escalation of the struggle between their main protectors, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

The first question they ask is: what is this like? And, yes, this sudden escalation of Sino-American antagonism is a lot like the early phase of the Cold War.

But the next question the applied historian asks is: what are the differences?

The Thirty Years’ War was as much about power as it was about religion, however. Unlike the Cold War, which was waged by two superpowers, it was a multiplayer game.

today’s strategic rivalry is being played out in a near-borderless world, altogether different from the world of early John le Carré.

Catholics and Lutherans had been given a certain amount of clarity by the Peace of Augsburg of 1555, which left it to each individual prince to decide the denomination of his realm without fear of outside interference. But that principle seemed under threat by the early 1600s.

it had created an incentive for the proponents of the Counter-Reformation to replace Protestant rulers with Catholic ones. The war of religion had no respect for borders: Jesuits infiltrated Protestant England

2019 isn’t 1949, not least because of the profound economic, social and cultural entanglement of America and China, which is quite unlike the almost total separation of the United States from the Soviet Union 70 years ago.

The Thirty Years’ War was a time of terrorism and gruesome violence, with no clear distinction between soldiers and civilians.

There was no deterrence then, just as there is none now in cyber-warfare. Indeed, states tended to underestimate the costs of getting involved in the conflict. Both Britain and France did so — only to slide into civil war.

The implications of this analogy are not cheering. The sole consolation I can offer is that, thanks to technology, most things nowadays happen roughly 10 times faster than they did 400 years ago. So we may be heading for a Three Years’ War,

we need to learn how to end such a conflict.

What the Westphalian settlement did was to establish power-sharing arrangements between the emperor and the German princes, as well as between the rival religious groups, on the basis of limited and conditional rights. The peace as a whole was underpinned by mutual guarantees, as opposed to the third-party guarantees that had been the norm before.

The democratic and authoritarian powers can fight for three or 30 years; neither side will win a definitive victory. Sooner or later there will have to be a compromise — in particular, a self-restraining commitment not to take full advantage of modern technology to hollow out each other’s sovereignty.