School of War - Ep 252: Andrew Lambert on the British Empire’s Strategic Challenges and America’s Today

Episode Date: November 28, 2025

Andrew Lambert, Laughton Professor of Naval History in the Department of War Studies, King's College London and No More Napoleons: How Britain Managed Europe from Waterloo to World War One,  joins the show to discuss how the British Empire maintained the balance in Europe between the fall of Napoleon to the summer of 1914. ▪️ Times 02:59 Studying the Problem of War 06:20 British Perspectives of the European Coast 11:33 The French Likelihood of Invading Britain  21:40 The Scheldt River Estuary  30:33 Marlborough, Wellington, and Eisenhower  36:48 The 19th Century and the Rise of Steampower 47:35 Divided attention and British Mistakes of 1914 54:40 The Failure of British Strategic Off-Shore Balancing Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find more content on our School of War Substack

Today, one of my favorite episodes of School of War so far with one of my favorite recurring guests, Andrew Lambert. Today we're going to try to draw comparisons between the grand strategy of the British Empire in the 19th century and America's strategic dilemmas today. To oversimplify, since 1945, the U.S. has been forward deployed from Great Britain to the Persian Gulf to Japan and a lot of places in between, working through its allies and its partners to prevent first the Soviet Union and now, a new set of challengers from dominating the vast Eurasian landmass. Not everyone loves this strategy, which we might call a strategy of preponderance. And they argue instead for the United States to be a, quote, offshore balancer, achieving a balance of power in Eurasia with fewer of our own forces projected forward,

and they would argue, less expense and less risk. This debate has raged on and off for years, in one form or another. Well, if you're going to think all this through, it would help to take a careful look at how the British pursued their own strategy of offshore balancing on the European continent following the Napoleonic wars all the way up to World War I. What worked, what didn't, what were the purely strategic and military dimensions as opposed to the diplomatic dimensions, and how it all ended catastrophically. This one is really interesting. Let's get into it. away December 7th, 1941, a date which will live in history. A bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state.

We continue to face the rain situation in grand. We'll fight on the beaches. We'll fight on the landing ground. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never arrest. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining School of War. I am delighted to welcome back to the show today.

Andrew Lambert. He is the author most recently of No More Napoleons, How Britain Managed Europe from Waterloo to World War I. He is the Lawton Professor of Naval History at King's College London. And Andrew, I'm going to say something about you that I imagine one or two of my other regular guests might be slightly offended by, so hopefully they'll skip this episode. But as opposed to some spurious claims that this or that podcaster might be the most important historian working today, I actually think that you have a pretty strong claim to the title. of the most important historian working today, not only because your work is excellent, which it is.

And I recommend it to listeners, people who care about either the 19th century or contemporary strategic concerns should read No More Napoleon's. But because of the subjects you've selected and the way in which you go about your work, I just think it's really important, and I'm grateful to you for doing it.

And of course, I'm grateful to you for joining the show today. It's a great pleasure. And more importantly, I have a very fortunate, a set of circumstances. I work in a department of war studies, so I'm not surrounded by historians. I don't feel that I have to restrict my approach to the past, to the historical method. I often find that the past and the present and the future form a synthesis, and if we only look at the past, we miss important things. And if we only look at the present, we're equally ill-equipped. So we study a problem. We study war. What was a problem?

in civilization and has been for generations. And the better we study it and the more effectively we use the intellectual tools we have, everything from strategic theory through to some of the more contemporary social science developments, the less likely it is we will miss important lessons. History doesn't teach us everything, it helps us, but we can expand our repertoire. And with this book, there's some political science. in there, some fairly heavy political science, because it absolutely helped me to pull this material together and find some order in it and then develop a thesis, which the book is about, which allowed

me to deal with the existing historical accounts, which are all essentially this happened, and then that happened, and then a few years later something else happened. And these events don't end up forming a pattern because nobody's imposed some order on them. And so it's not a political science book, but it uses those tools to try and create and understand it. And then test it against the evidence. And my contention is that the evidence does support that analysis. But if at the end of reading the book you disagree with that, well, at least you've been on an interesting journey. And hopefully you've bumped into something that you haven't bumped into before.

and it will provoke some thinking on your part. That's the best we can do. So the political science debate that seems to be the inciting moment for this book or at least the thought from which you're jumping off, this question of, can the United States, has the United States slash can the United States engage in offshore balancing

here in the early 21st century? And by the way, as we reflect on this question, we may as well think about the great offshore balancers, those Brits, back in the 19th century. I want to come back to that debate, and I want to come back to get your thoughts on the contemporary moment. But I want to start with the history and start back at the turn of the 19th century where your account begins. And I thought I would ask you this by way of a first question. If listeners could picture themselves as the British here as Revolutionary France and then Napoleonic France achieves something like hegemony on the European continent, sort of a threatening situation.

Looking from their perspective, the British perspective, at the European coast, how does it look from the point of view of threats? Give us a bit of a tour, would you, of the coast of northwest Europe from the British perspective, its challenges, maybe also its opportunities. What are we looking at? Britain is a constellation of islands, an archipelagic state, off the northwest coast of Europe. It is not militarily, in population terms, able to command Europe, but it can command the sea because it's focused its strategic effort on primarily on the Navy and on coastal defenses. And looking out, what they've seen happen through the French Revolution and emphasized by Napoleon is the steady expansion of France into the other countries of the region. So France in the 1790s takes over what we call Belgium and Holland. This gives them access to serious port facilities which France does not have on its north and northwestern coast

that are able to support an invasion of England. The Shell Estuary in the north of Belgium, it gives them an ideal place to locate a major fleet with the transport capacity to lift possibly 100,000 men for an invasion of England. The Scheld Estuary is less than 100 miles from the Thames estuary, which leads you straight to London. So you can see that this is a clear and present threat. The problem for the British is there are other harbours from which you can also launch quite large fleets. In Northern Holland, around Den Helder, there's a naval base there. The French have got as far as Hamburg, they could possibly use the Vesa River as a base,

and later they're going to look at interfering in Denmark. So the French are using military power to conquer Europe and turn all of Europe into a series of threatening naval bases from which England can be invaded. And the problem this poses is that this forces the British to adopt a defensive position. They commit their army and much of their fleet to the defense of the English Channel, the narrow passage between France and England. A fleet in the North Sea, often a fleet in the Baltic, as well as fleets off the west coast of France, where the French have a major fleet, and in the Mediterranean. So they're being stretched strategically by the number and extent of French bases. And the French are talking about an invasion.

And Napoleon in particular is very public about invading England. He actually strikes a medal in France, which says, struck in London. I've come to London and captured the whole country. And he's going to be issuing this, he says, to his truths. Of course, he's bluffing. The problem is that most people in Britain don't understand the difference between Napoleon's bluffs and Napoleon's reality. So it takes a very particular man to penetrate this threat.

And that man is called Chaldemourier, and he is a revolutionary era French general, who's been forced to leave France because he lost a battle, and the Jacobins are going to cut his head off. He's living in North Germany when Nelson passes through on his way back from the Battle of the Nile, and he realizes that this Frenchman is absolutely brilliant, and he knows how the French thinks strategically. He brings him back to London, where he becomes the British government's chief advisor on strategy for the rest of the war. And DeMorese says, it's really simple, they're bluffing. You've got to counterattack, you've got to attack them, you've got to put them on the defensive, because otherwise you're going to be sitting here till the end of time, they're not coming.

Napoleon is assembling an army of 100,000 men at Boulogne, but the 100,000 men don't invade England, they invade Austria. And he does it again in 186, and they invade Prussia. And in 1812, well, they invade Russia. This is where Napoleon assembles his armies, but it is not the point from which he tries to invade England, because the port of Boulogne isn't big enough. So Napoleon is bluffing, and when the English wake up, they destroy the base in the

River Shelt, which is so important to this invasion, at what is now called Lissingen, in Holland, and half of their army, which has been at home defending England, gets sent down to Iberia to open a new front in the war against Napoleon. So the British Gulf, from being completely defensive to being partially defensive, but aggressively positive and once again all the front foot and attacking. So it's about finding a balance and finding understanding of how this relationship works. And until the British start talking to an expert, the Frenchman de Maurier, they absolutely don't penetrate the secret of Napoleon's strategy. He's a great bluffer. He's keeping people on the defensive when if they combine their efforts,

they can overthrow him. After 1812, a combined effort, and Napoleon is gone. But the bluff has to be taken seriously because the moment you shrug your shoulders and say, there's no need to prepare for an invasion scenario, that'll never happen. It's too impractical. It's too ambitious. It's too risky for the French. And so you don't take preventative actions. At that point, of course, the bluff could very easily transition and it's something that's not a bluff. So until de Mourier points out the absolute strategic reality, the British are prepared to accept that the French can invade. This underestimates the Royal Navy's ability to stop any invasion,

which was far greater than I think the contemporaries on the civilian side understood, and the absolute dominance that the Royal Navy had over the French fleet. The French don't win any fleet battles in this period at all, and hardly even a single ship action. So they are absolutely second-rate, and they are not going to defeat the British Sea, which is why Nelson. take such liberties with them at Trafalgar.

Its tactics are highly aggressive and very dangerous, but they work because the enemy is not good enough. So it's the political class having to hoist in that the Navy really is that good, that you don't need a big home defense army. The Navy will deal with this. The French will not put their trust in going to sea any more than Hitler was going to in 1940. He's playing the same game.

Let's bluff the British Indus surrendering. Well, neither of them managed to make that work. So it's very much an elite political level decision. And DeMorye is talking to the Secretary of State for war, the man who's planning, the war is being run. He's also writing a great report on how to defend England just in case the French come. So he's saying, look, they're not coming, but if they do come, this is how we stop them conquering the country. So he's providing the British both with grand strategic advice and also with operational level advice just in case. So you've got a position, which is they're not coming, you've got a fallback.

We do have the resources to stop this process. And that's what Nelson is talking to Wellington about in September 1805. They meet for the only time in their lives in the Secretary of State for Wars ante room where they're both waiting to go and see him. And they have a conversation which many years later, Wellington said, I don't know that any conversation I ever had so fascinated me. And that's what they're talking about. The common element is Demuree.

All three men know Demuree and his work. They are all going to be correspondence with this really interesting Frenchman. And it's in 1809 that the British turned that into effect with this massive operation of 40,000 men, and Tobias operation into the Sheld Estuary. And that changes the war. From that point on, Napoleon is increasingly desperate because he can't knock the British out. and when the Russians leave his alliance in 1811, he attacks them. And that's the end of his empire.

So it's the British have to wait in there until the big battalions line up on the other side. They can't defeat Napoleon. There are too many Frenchmen. French army is far too good. They have to wait for the rest of Europe to come on board. And it's not really until 1813 that the three big Eastern European powers, Russia, Russia, Austria, line up on the battlefield against Napoleon, and they beat him. Shear numbers, overwhelming force.

So the British just have to hang on in there, not surrender, not take huge risks, keep the pressure up in the south in Iberia because they have to hold Lisbon, which is far too important as a naval base. If the French have Lisbon, the British Atlantic economy is destroyed, because ships based in Lisbon can destroy the Atlantic passage, much of which is coming around those latitudes. So the British are fighting a war in which they're maintaining enough economic power to support their allies, they're protecting their shipping,

and that protection of shipping means that the city of London, the financiers, are willing to lend money to government. So the British are running this war on a debt, a very big debt, and if the city of London and the financial center turns against them, the war is over. So this is a war shaped by strategy, by ideas, by money and politics, as every war in history ever has been. But this is wide open, easy to see. It's a mile between Lloyds of London, the Marine Insurance Bureau, and the Admiralty that

organizes the convoys. And the two of them are in conversation all day, every day. Lloyds of London arranges the convoys, the Admiralty provides the escort, and they get everything scheduled. So they're moving ships around the world to the East Indies, the West Indies, North America, through the Mediterranean. This is a global trade network, and it's being run with security

by the Navy and the Trade Associations. And it absolutely enables the British to survive, prosper, and continue the war. I want to ask you about a couple of elements of this account that I find confusing. The first is this tension between a strategic gambit, this threat of invasion, that seems to be a bluff pretty consistently throughout.

The British seemed, or at least important, Brits seem to realize or conclude that it's a bluff relatively early in the game. And yet it remains, the bluff known as bluff or suspected by many as bluff, remains a central element of consideration, of planning, and indeed of operations. And indeed, you just pointed out, this operation to destroy the naval facilities in the low countries, changes the tide or contributes to the changing of the tide of the overall war to destroy the facilities

that are mostly valuable to mount a bluff invasion. So can you help me understand that apparent tension? Yeah, a lot of what is happening is the government is certainly using the possibility of an invasion as a way of holding the country together. So whenever you go to war, you have to demonize the enemy, you have to make them 10 feet tall and tell everybody they're coming if we don't together and worked very hard to defend the country. So you'll have found some of this in late 1941 in the US. The Japanese are coming out. They will, no, they're not.

But that's those that, so you tell those stories because your object is to mobilize the support of the nation. Much of the defense of Southern England is conducted by entirely voluntary military organizations. These are not paid regular soldiers. They're literally volunteers. They're self-selected, self-mover. civilized amateur units.

And they look great because they're well-dressed and they turn out on parade and it looks like the Brits have got a lot of soldiers. They haven't. They can't deploy these men outside their home county. So this is a local defense force of no great military value. But it looks good and they're prepared to go out and do this because they are supporting national security. So the government is happy with that.

And it remains happy with that kind of support all the way through the 19th century. There's a massive explosion of volunteering in 185960 when the French mutter small threats about an invasion. And we suddenly have a million armed men in Britain who are prepared to put on a uniform of the weekend and play at soldiers. And while militarily they're not particularly significant, they are politically, enormously significant. It says the middle classes are right behind the war effort.

They are ready to fight if the enemy comes. And that's a big thing to say when you're facing either a bluff or a real invasion. You've got the country behind you. Unlike watercratic countries where people have to be commanded to operate, in the British system, you get this voluntary mobilization. And the political message of that is really important. Military efficiency is not significant. What is this significant is the sheer scale of this national effort. And you find it across all parts of the national effort.

Artists, poets, writers, everybody is mobilizing themselves to support the war effort. This is a total war. If the British lose, it's over. The monarchy goes, the church goes. England becomes a French-speaking Republican province. And the threat of that is enough to get everybody in line, with the exception of a few rather radical Irish fellows who fancy their own country. my other confusion is about the centrality in everyone's thinking of this one particular river system in the Shelt in northwest Europe,

as opposed to other potential launch points for an invasion. And this is a question really more about the broad scope of the period you're covering, the full 19th century through to the First World War. You know, the British strategic preoccupation with the shores. immediately across the channel from it and extending out a bit in either direction, say to Normandy, maybe even Brittany in one direction, and then up into the low countries and the other. That makes perfect sense, and it's been a British preoccupation since, well, since before there was an English preoccupation before there was a Britain.

So there's nothing particularly confusing about that. However, by the 19th century, we're going to have the advent of steam soon. Sail itself has made much longer range as possible or sophisticated, you know, modern sailing technology has made longer range as possible. You see where I'm driving with this. As late as 1914, everyone is preoccupied with Belgium, with this very particular piece of northwest Europe that's sandwiched between Germany and France. But the reality is if you wanted to invade Britain, my sense is it's not the only game in town. And yet it's treated as by far the most important game in town consistently throughout. So it seems to me, why? The Scheldt is the most important

because it is so close to Britain, less than 100 miles into the Thames estuary. If you want to knock Britain out, come up the Thames and take London game over. It's not a dispersed country like in some larger states. It's a very small centralised state. The situation in the age of sail is that if the wind is blowing from the east and allowing an attack from the shelt, that will make it very difficult for British shipping to come up the channel to join in the defence effort. you'll be left with whatever is there.

And there simply isn't anywhere else on any of the other European rivers where you get this broad, relatively shallow estuary, where you can pull together a large number of sailing ships to carry your troops, your horses, your artillery, your stores. 100,000 men needs an awful lot of heavy lift. And the shelter estuary is the obvious place to do that. It is also still the obvious place because it is. it's so close in the First World War. And when Belgium is created in the 1830s, it's the British who created, and they create it

to stop the French having it. And after 1870, they're very much equally keen that the Germans don't have it, particularly after 1900 when Germany becomes a naval and global threat. So it is the obvious place. Fortunately, for the British in 1914, the Germans do not invade Holland. So they're not able to use the shell estuary, but they do use the ports on the north coast of Belgium, Ostend and Zabrugge as bases for submarine and torpedo boat raids on British merchant shipping. And that is just about the most serious threat that the British are going to face in the whole First World War, the cutting of their economic and supply lifeline with the rest of the world. Because Fort London is the biggest port in the world, and the whole British logistic system revolves around London.

So all of your bulk goods come into London and get distributed. If, as in the Second World War, you can't use London, you've got a real problem because the railway network doesn't work the other way around. It's a central feeder system out from London to all of the provinces. It's much harder. So it's the obvious place to land from. The French do not have a base of that capacity anywhere on the north coast of France. They build one at Sherbourg later. which the British paying a lot of attention to.

So it is critical. And what the British are doing, both in the war and particularly afterwards, is creating a world in which the French will not be in Belgium. And it's not accidental that the last battle of the Napoleonic Wars is fought on a fairly steep rise just south of Brussels by a British army. And at 9 o'clock on the morning of the battle, the Duke of Wellington, on horseback, writes a note to the governor of Antwer,

the great city that controls the shelf. and he says, do not give up the position, open the ward of defences, and be ready for a flood of refugees coming up from the south. Do not give up the position. He says the same to the governor of Ostend. They're both British paid officers. They are under his command and they will obey his orders, keeping open the British supply line to his army, but preventing the French getting back into Antwerp, which is a huge strategic threat. Wellington is thinking not about Brussels or Belgium, he's thinking about Antwer.

How do you stop the French recovering this position from which they had been such a threat? Because if the French rewrite the peace process, which is going on at Vienna, and keep Belgium, as Lord Castle Ray says, we will be forced to maintain wartime levels of defense expenditure. And that will be ruinous. We cannot afford wartime levels of defense. expenditure. But that's what would happen if the French are in Belgium. That's what we're fighting for. We're fighting for a peace in which we can run down our armed forces and get on top of this enormous debt burden that has been acquired during the 20-odd years of war that have just

finished. And Wellington knows this because far from just being a red-jacketed soldier, he is also a government minister. And in 1815, when he fights at Waterloo, he is actually the in-post ambassador of the British government in Paris. He wasn't in Paris at the time because Napoleon had come in and he very wisely departed. So he's a diplomat, he's a government minister, he's a protege of Pitt the Younger, as are all of the cabinet. His political master, the Duke of the Earl of Liverpool, is a profound at Brexiteer. He wants out of Europe ASAP because of the money question.

And Lord Castleray, the Foreign Secretary, with Wellington, as a very important, Strategic Advisor and Liverpool providing political cover creates a system, a balanced system, where the order of Europe is structured such that there should not be another hegemonic claim by any of the major powers. And that's the purpose of removing Napoleon. It's the purpose of the Vienna Congress and the fabulous, intricate level of interconnected diplomacy that goes on. The British revived the French once they put.

the king back on the throne, and they align France, Britain and Austria against Prussia and Russia, who they see as aggressive and dangerous. But they also align themselves with Russia and Prussia against France, just in case the friends broke out. And they put Belgium and Holland into one country, and call it the United Netherlands. But it doesn't work. The Belgians and the Dutch hate each other. If you ever want to hear really humorous jokes, you want to get into a Dutch Belgian session. They have very interesting ways of insulting each other, most of which involves

chips, potato, rather than... Yeah, I was going to have, you're going to have to define for an American audience, what you mean? Oh, you know, good old-fashioned. Or fries, as you might call. French fries, French fries. In 1830, this rather forced alliance that the British created breaks.

The Belgians revolt. They don't want the Dutch in that country, and it turns into a political crisis. Wellington is now the prime minister. He grabs this process and he says, right, we're going to settle this in London. And I'm going to be in the chair and we're going to get this done. And nine years later, the treaty is signed. The Treaty of London took nine years to get the great powers of Europe and the Dutch and the Belgians to agree that Belgium and Holland were separate countries under separate governance. And the British

insisted that Belgium was to be neutral and it was to be guaranteed its territorial integrity by all of the great powers. That means that if any one great power crosses the Belgian border, they are at war with the other four. And that means the British don't need to send much of an army. Wellington's calculation is the British army will be probably not even as big as the one that fought at Waterloo,

and he will command it, and he'll be an overall charge of the military effort, because he is the main military figure. After 1815, Napoleon is a long way away. Wellington is the superstar commander of the era. so politically, militarily, he's the obvious leader of an anti-French coalition. And it nearly happened. He was summoned to command that operation very shortly after the treaty was signed.

And that's the treaty that gets the British into World War I. They declare war on Germany because the Germans have invaded Belgium, not France. They were under no obligation to defend France. The French had plenty of soldiers. Belgium was a special case. It was a British treaty. signed for British reasons, and it was the rationale for World War I with the British. I'd like to linger on Wellington for a bit.

I wonder if there's anyone else besides the First Duke of Marlborough who shares his, I guess Eisenhower. I guess it would be Dwight Eisenhower, somebody who both commands coalition armies on the continent while also being either head of government or head of state. It's really just the three of them, isn't it? And it's quite, I know that, and you talk about Wellington paying attention to Marlborough, I know that Eisenhower paid attention to Wellington. I wonder if he paid attention to Marlborough. I don't know.

It would be fascinating if the three of them were kind of in communication with each other. Well, I think if Eisenhower is reading Wellington, he's also reading Marlborough. I see. Because Wellington read Marlborough's journals on his way, on his voyage out to India back in the 1790s, and he was commanding general there. his brother was the Governor General of India so he was a fortunate position he knew Malbara very well

not personally obviously but from his literary remains the battlefield at Waterloo is a Malbara battlefield Malbara was marching up the road in the same way that Napoleon was coming up coming from the south towards Brussels in 17056 and he looked at the battlefield

and from the position that Napoleon fought from and he decided this was a terrible place to fight and he put a right-wing flank march of five miles and got round the position and forced the enemy off it by manoeuvre. Malbara, I think in terms of picking terrain to fight on is just about the best. He's certainly better than Napoleon. And Napoleon has other skills, but Malbara reads ground brilliantly.

And he always picks a good battlefield. Blennon, for example, it's a magnificent place to fight. Once he's got it, he sorts of tactics. to suit the terrain perfectly. So Marlborough is in there. Wellington knows because Marlborough has been the coalition leader as well as the general, much as Wellington is going to be. And they are, I think, particularly good studies

for Anglo-American senior leaders because they are working in relatively democratic political situation where they have a high command at home, which is civilian and is looking to them for military guidance to translate that civilian requirement into military effect. And they're looking at these men as transitional figures who turn war aims into war success. And as they become more notorious, famous,

they become more effective because the government is increasingly persuaded that they do know the right answers. And that means they get cut a bit more slack. They can take more dynamic approaches. So they buy their credibility by success. And they have to protect their success because otherwise if they stop winning, games out, games over.

So Wellington never lost a battle because he would have lost his career if he had. I'm struck, and I don't think it's natural for American listeners to appreciate this fact that I'm struck by that for all that changes over the centuries in European warfare, so much stays the same. even as the technology changes, the significance of different locations remains constant such that the battlefields happen again and again, or at least in close proximity to each other.

Here in the United States, our history of sort of modern organized warfare at home is so limited. We've only had a couple big wars, not counting sort of expansionist stuff with the Indians out to the west. You know, we had the Revolutionary War. We had the Civil War. But, you know, in Northwest Europe, it's just round after round after round. of stuff. You know, I'm struck by, I'm reminded that isn't Hitler's objective in what we call the Battle of the Bulge? It's Antwerp, is it not? That's where he's, that's where he's driving towards, which I wonder if he had in sort of grandiose, slightly psychotic fashion by this stage of the game, similar naval ambitions in mind by seizing Antwerp. No, in the main, he's

trying to stop the Allied forces getting logistics through Antwerp. Antwerp's very big poor. The British have just launched a big amphibious operation, not far from the 18, 2009-Vlyssigan campaign to capture Valkeran Island, which is the island on which Lissingen, the port they captured in H-Nine is. So they can open the Sheld Estuary to send their supplies because Antwerp is captured, but the coast is still held by the Germans, so they have to lever the Germans off the coast. And that's a classic British operation. It's the last time a British battleship fired its guns in anger in Europe,

major amphibious assault, British War Marines, troops, big air attack. And yes, they opened up that position, the logistics flow, and that then leads the Germans to try to counter that by taking out Antwerp, because the docks and the facilities of Antwerp enable you to supply the rapidly advancing allied armies, whereas there is no other port in that section of Europe that could do that. So Antwerp is critically important. It's the second biggest port in northern Europe after Rotterdam. It's huge. and it fits perfectly into the logistics linkages, which means your resources coming out of the US are coming up the English Channel now,

and they can go straight into Antwerp. Or resources from Britain can go straight from London, a very short passage. So it's about ship tonne hours at sea. It's about the sheer weight of material you can get in there. And in 1815, Wellington knows that's where the reinforcements will come from, if he needs them,

If there is going to be another round of fighting after Waterloo, that's where his reinforcements will come. So having just lingered on the continuities, I want to ask you now about change over the course of the 19th century. We have this Wellington system that gets constructed, so-called Wellington system, fairly cold. And your book is really interesting for among other reasons, emphasizing the strategic dimensions of the post-war order. A lot of people have emphasized the diplomatic dimensions. It's Henry Christinger makes his career talking about the nature of the concert of Vienna's diplomacy and its outcomes. But there is this hard military element or hard naval element or a bit of both from the British perspective that you emphasize. But of course, then a lot does start to change in particular in terms of technology.

The age of sale comes to an end. How does this begin to affect things? And then obviously there's other things we need to discuss as the 19th century proceeds, like the British Empire. India. What starts to change your revolve or devolve as the 19th century proceeds? Essentially, by the mid-1820s, steam shipping is crossing the channel regularly. This means that you don't have to wait for the wind to blow to move, but the ships are quite small. They're not strategic level. They would be useful for carrying messages, but they wouldn't carry you a regiment of infantry, let alone of cavalry. So it's the slow, steady increase in steam shipping,

which makes it easier, but not easy, to invade England from France. The French still don't have any decent harbors to operate out of, and the British make a big effort to ensure they understand exactly when the French harbors are full of water. So in the event of a war, they will be ready for them and to prevent them leaving harbour. So there's massive retidal research, hydrographic research, meteorological research. The British are getting on top of the entire ocean system.

as a way of limiting the risk of invasion. And they're doing all the same for D-Day. They're just going in rather than stopping the enemy coming out. It's the same places and they're doing the same things. It's just a new version of those systems. What's also happening is artillery is improving, almost invisibly that the guns look the same, but they're more accurately cast. They're bought out with a drill rather than being cast around a mold.

and you can make these smoothbore guns shoot further and more accurately than ever before. So by the 1850s, the British are firing eight-inch guns, three and a half thousand yards, and they're hitting small targets. This is impossible in Nelson's Day. You certainly get much, much closer. So the British realized that the French are building a substitute for Antwerp at Sherbourg, massive, the world's largest artificial harbour at the time. Big project, begun by Louis XVIth, during the American War of Independence, because he realized he couldn't use his Navy effectively in the channel.

And eventually finished by Louis Napoleon III in 1858. And what the French is saying, we've got an invasion base, we can assemble enough ships, battleships, and everything else here. We can invade England, and it's only 60 miles away. So why don't you come and talk to us and let's have an alliance and reorganize Europe to suit, well, me personally, Louis Napoleon. And he's one of the no more Napoleons that the British have to stop. Literally. And the British go along and they join in the Giamboree and the Queen goes along and she's got a sketch pad out and they're sketching the defences of Sherbourg.

The Royal Engineers take a camera so they can take some pictures. The French take pictures and hand them over. And the British just tell the French they don't do preemptive reordering of the European state system. They just do case by case. They're waiting on events. And that's the end of Louis Napoleon because without the British, his options in Europe are limited. He ends up messing around in Mexico and annoying everybody.

And he gets kicked out by the French in 1870 after he loses the war with the Prussians. So that's perfect for the British. The Prussians are a threat. Queen Victoria's eldest daughter is married to the Crown Prince of Prussia. What could possibly happen? Well, their son is the Kaiser, who is the next ultimate Napoleon? So, funnily enough, the very thing that was meant to establish security against France, Anglo-Prussian alliance, ends up being the basis of World War I. So you can't ever legislate for the final outcomes of your measures.

What the British do to keep up to speed here is they build some massive strategic harbors at Dover, at Portland, they improve a big harbor at Harwich. And they improve the harbors on the British and Irish coast to speed up the movement. of troops and information between London and Dublin. And what they're enabling is the rapid movement of reinforcements and intelligence so that they can focus on particular areas. So the speed of movement between London and Dublin is increased by 100% very quickly after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. When troops extracted from Ireland were moved very rapidly through England

into Belgium to fight at Waterloo. And now they've speeded this process up another level. These big new harbors, the one at Dover, is best known because if you're crossing the channel by boat, that's where you go from. You can see France from Dover. So there's a massive fortress, there's a huge harbor, and you could park the entire Navy in Dover Harbor, because that just might be the front line in the next war. In the next war, it ends up as a front line against the Germans.

It has a different role, but it's still quitely important. So there's huge strategic engineering to reduce risk. So you're reducing costs, but you're also reducing risk, and that allows you to proceed with the cost reductions. Every time you improve your security, you possibly need less active service personnel. So you're using hard infrastructure as a substitute for numbers of troops and numbers of ships.

And this is all being presided over by Wellington, who ultimately is shaping a system that means that Britain has allies in Europe to stop the French, it's able to address its national debt, and it's able to make progress. And the breakthrough in the mid-1850s is that Britain ends up with a militia force which can replace the entire regular army in the UK,

which is now released as an expeditionary force. So 1852, the new militia is put in place. 1854, almost the entire garrison of England, England is in the Crimea, attacking Sevastopol. All the defenses are now manned by the militia, including the defenses of Britain's empire in the Mediterranean at Gibraltar and Malta and Corfu. So the British have turned their army from defending to attacking because the best way to stop an invasion as they demonstrated at Blesingen in 1809 is to destroy the base and

any ships you can catch. And after the destruction of Sevastopol, the Russians can do nothing in the Black Sea because they have no ships, no base, no facilities. They're not interested in the Crimea. That's of no interest in it at all. They want to take out the Navy and the base, and that's it. As soon as they've done that, they blow up the dockyard, they wreck all the equipment, and they go home.

And they go home in a very ceremonial way. The Admiral, who leads part of the evacuation force, is the brother of the General commanding the Army in the Crimea. And so these two officers, both the sons of an Admiral, lead the expeditionary force back to Britain on the same ship. It's a marvelous piece of theatre, which the two brothers came up with and persuaded the government to do this.

So Britain now has an expeditionary strategy, and it's emphasizing the role of military power as an adjunct to naval power. So in Britain, the Navy is the senior service. It's the most important, because small country, global connections, maritime security. And so the army has always been rather nervous about being second in the pecking order,

and they've often wished not to be. But Britain is a country where the Navy is preeminent because it has to be. And turning the army into a mobile expeditionary force happens then, and it's revived in 1907 when the British are planning for any contribution to European war. They create a British expeditionary force. That's the official title. And it is fully understood by everybody that in the event of a war, which starts with the invasion of Belgium or the sent to Germany, the B.E.F will go to Antwerp and will join the Belgians in garrisoning and defending this critically important strategic position. When the war starts, the government has forgotten all of this and the army goes to join the French in some other part of the battlefield.

field. Most of Belgium falls into German hands and the impact on the British from the maritime strike coming out of Ostend and Ziburg, it is really serious. It comes close to defeating Britain. So a failure of not just policy, but just common sense. Having created a small, non-strategic expeditionary force to do a particular job, you then throw it into another battle to do something that nobody in Britain had even dreamt of doing. apart from a few senior soldiers. So basically this grand plan, the Wellington system, which had worked for a hundred years,

is just thrown aside with very little thought, and we plunge into a war as if Britain was a major continental military power, which it is not. You've been on the show. I think this is your third time, and I remember being struck on your first appearance when we were discussing Julian Corbett and your excellent book on Corbett,

the vehemence and motion really when the first world war came up it sort of took me by surprise a bit how strongly you feel about this point and so I want to I want to draw you out on it a little bit so we have the British expeditionary force which is you know it's meant to be what what is the expression it's a bullet to be fired by the Navy was that the yeah is that the projectile sorry projectile to be fired by the Navy but instead of being fired by the Navy for sort of the sort of traditional Wellington system friendly aims contemplated throughout the 19th century, it's just fired right into the heart of this maelstrom of terrestrial warfare. But help us, Andrew, help us understand, I guess, the alternative history here.

What if it had gone to these northern ports as opposed to further into the heart of the ground fighting? How would that have actually worked out? Can you just help us understand the superior alternative? And then also, second closely related question, these are reasonably intelligent people around the table in 1914, some of whom go on to distinguish themselves pretty well in the years to come. Why did they make such a, in your account, obvious mistake? Well, we'll start the obvious mistake because it's fairly straightforward.

The British government was transfixed by a problem in Ireland, Irish home rule, the Irish wanted to run their own country within the British Empire. And British security experts, particularly, soldiers, many of whom were Ulster Protestants, advised against this. So there was a looming crisis. So everybody's attention is not on the European crisis, it's on the Irish crisis. And if you read the correspondence of these people at the time. Secondly, it's a liberal government which has a very limited engagement with defence. Prime Minister is just completely uninvolved. The Chancellor of Exchequer is wishing not to spend any more money. So there's nobody in the

cabinet who has real expertise in this. Apart from Winston Churchill, and he's a cavalry subaltern. He's in charge of the Navy, but he's a cavalryman. And he responds, and it's his call. There's a small group of cabinet ministers, some generals and a single admiral, in a room, and they're saying, we're at war with Germany, what do we do? And Winston Churchill says, we send the army to join the French. And everybody else goes, yeah, I guess.

It's not an intelligent process. us. So after 100 years of getting ready to do something intelligent and support an intelligent position, and the importance of Corbett is he's the man who reduced all of this to order, and he'd written it all out, and it's in a book, and you could read it. It's not even a confidential text. It's a book you can buy in any bookshop. And yet it's all just thrown away, because instead of thinking, assessing, and understanding what the Treaty of London of 1839 men for Britain, they send 120,000 men, which is nothing in a war which involves several million troops on all sides.

So it's a gesture. That gesture was enough to hold Antwerp, but it wasn't enough to do anything of any consequence on the main fighting front. What would they have done if they'd gone to Antwerp? Well, they would have secured Ostend and Ziburger, first and foremost, which would have been a massive step up. And secondly, an Anglo-Belgian army based in the fortress of Antwerp, which is a fairly powerful fortress, would have hung on the flank of any German advance on Paris and would have threatened their logistics. It's a perfect position from which to strike south.

After the main German fighting forces have pushed on for Paris, the Anglo-Belgans could run south, block their logistics, hold their advance, and bring the wall to the stalemate that was necessary. actually what happened. The German logistics broke down even without British and Belgium attacks. Had those attacks gone in, they would have stopped even sooner. So it's a failure of strategic imagination. It's a political failure to learn lessons. And the liberal cabinet ministers, most of them had served in the cabinet of William Gladstone, great liberal political hero. And one of the men in the cabinet had actually written the official biography. It's a big three-volume book. And it deals with the Franco-Prussian War when the British mobilized army and navy

and told France and Prussia to keep out of Belgium. And they did. The British didn't do that in 1914. They couldn't mobilize the Navy because they'd actually mobilized it for a test. They usually did actually exercises. But 1914, for economic reasons, they just mobilized the fleet, got all the reserves, got everybody on board ships, and they had a big meeting in Portland Harbor on the south coast of England. So they couldn't mobilize the fleet and say, look, we're mobilizing. They would have had to

send it somewhere quite threatening for the Germans, and they didn't decide to do that, and then they didn't decide to send the army to the right place. They couldn't have done much more to give the Germans the sense that if they got on with it, and what a quickly they'd possibly get away with attacking France. They set very bad signals, signals which were inconsistent, relatively weak, had no sanctions behind them, and the Germans who were hell-bent on doing this anyway, there was nothing in the British position to deter them

and sending 120,000 troops, one of the German generals said, we'll just make sure they all get killed. We're not trying to do 120,000 Brits, that's nothing. We've got three and a half million. We're going to win this war. And if we don't, Germany is going to hell in a handcartes, so we have to win this war.

This is a desperate play by, a country that is profoundly disturbed by the rising power of Russia and when allied with France and linked up with Britain, that looks like a block on Germany's plans to become a world power. So they're fighting to become something they're not, which is a world power. The British are fighting for stability and order, which allows them to continue to be a great power on the world stage. And that's really what both this book and the Corbett book are looking at,

How this tiny little country off the north coast of Europe managed to become a global power with enormous reach and resources. This is the country that brought the First World War to an end in December 1914. There's no world war after the last German cruiser squadron is sunk. It's just a big war in Europe. And the world resources are flowing into Europe to fight it, but they're flowing to the British and the France, not the Germans. So it's a war of resources which the British win early. They win by crushing Germany abroad, taking his colony, sinking his overseas fleet, and then doubling down, putting a pressure on the North Sea. And the only thing they can't do is defeat the German army quickly.

So when we were talking about Corbett, you chided me for drawing two easy comparisons in the spirit of Nicholas Speakman between British strategic concerns and American strategic concerns, the basic idea being, of course, as Britain looks at continental Europe, so the United States in the 20th, now the 21st century, looks at Eurasia, and you can draw a lot of parallels between the two. And you pointed out that, you know, unlike Britain, America is not a small island. Even if we do the sort of zooming out on both sides to stay consistent with the analogy, it is a proper continental power and a local regional hegeman by virtue of position and economy in its own right. And that's just different. And I have been so chided, and I have kept that well in mind the last couple of years in my own thinking. I think you tried the political scientists a bit as well in your book, in their efforts to draw, on some level useful and other levels, too easy and too simplistic comparisons between their arguments. Well, they might say their analysis of offshore balancing as a strategy at the turn of the 21st century.

To me, it seems a little bit more like their arguments for offshore balancing at the turn of the 21st century. There's a bit of attention between those two things. and what the British actually got up to in the 19th. Where does the thinking get too easy? What are the differences we should linger on as much as there may be some similarities? I'm always struck by the way in which it's possible to imagine an alternative reality

where the First World War doesn't happen, things like that. I think so much of the offshore balancing doesn't work because the first world. World War does happen. So the British are in a perfect position to balance from offshore. And yet when everything starts and the war nurtures into being, the British are caught out. They're not fully understanding just how weak Russia is politically. How the Russians have to go to war, otherwise they're going to lose credibility and

that whole state will start to crumble. How desperate the Germans are. They're still thinking the Germans are serious about challenging the embassy. they've actually given up and they think the French are even weaker than they really are. So what they're trying to balance looks like a harder task, which is possibly why they throw the army

into the mix and they do. But to be a proper offshore balancer, you need to be literally offshore. You need to be as far away as Britain is from Europe. It probably helps in the 21st century to be as far away as the US is from Europe. If you go off, it's a balancer, because you don't want to be dragged into this quickly.

You want to be able to judge the situation. So in 1914, let's say that instead of the Germans marching into Belgium, the French decide to use Belgium as a quick way of getting at the Germans. With the British have declared war on the French? Possibly. They would have been under a legal obligation to do so, but they might have decided it was in their best interest not to, whereas with the Germans, they had a clear case and they did follow right. So for all of the elegance of some of these

theses, they're always going to be challenged by events. The British view of the world in 1914 is can we keep this place quiet while we're doing really interesting things elsewhere? We're just getting control of Middle East and oil. That's quite useful. We just founded British Petroleum or the Navy has switched our ships from British coal to the Iranian oil, the primary fuel, so we need to secure the oil fields. Britain is a global operator and Europe is in many ways a problem, not an opportunity. The British don't want Europe.

They want Europe to be stable, peaceful, and as far as possible, own for business. And if that is all available, then Europe is fine. So the periods of the 19th century that suit the British best are when the major powers are none of them dynamic, all of them relatively worried about each other. And when we see the Russians, the Austrians, the Russians and the French all focused on each other, the British can carry on doing what they like doing, which is not in Europe and is very much about control of the sea. So the British empire is how the British fund all of this, and it enables the British to continue operating for as long as it exists. but ultimately, unlike the great land empires of Russia and China,

this empire is an empire which will ultimately fold at the end of the Second World War. And Britain goes from being a world power to being a small power, because it is only a small power. And it's achieved astonishing things, but it couldn't turn its empire into a pro-o-nation state in the way that Russia and China have done or that the United States has done.

The continental location gives you a different set of rules. You can't be a small insular maritime empire and become a superpower. That's not available. It is available if you're a continental imperial state with those kind of continent-sized resources. And you don't have to go to sea in the 21st century because there are other weapon systems that can enable you to defend yourself without. So Britain's unique selling point, it essentially evolved itself out of business. No empire, no empire human, material resources, simply not possible in you being a great power.

So the Wellington system is a very clever way of keeping that going for as long as possible. And when the wheels were always going to fall off, the question was how far could you get before the wheels fell off? And how limited, how much could you limit the damage that was done when the wheels fell off? last question for you i suppose another problem with the comparison is as you put it the offshore balancing of the continent the wallington system etc those are all to deal with this very close range problem as britain is off doing other interesting things in places like india and so forth it's not really like the united states is off doing really interesting things in antarctica and sub-saharan africa and sort of what's left that's not in eurasia i suppose we

have the Western Hemisphere, and that is the major comparison. But I don't think the economic opportunities for the Western Hemisphere all in can compare to what's available for being fully engaged in Eurasia. So our problem, order in Eurasia, the threat of Eurasian collapse, the threat of World War III is in the same place as our opportunity set. It's not like we're holding the problem off with one hand as we engage in the opportunities with the other. It's all in the same It's not accidental that geopolitics emerges in the 1890s. We've got a British man writing about this, Fulford McKinder, close friend Julian Corbett. And we've got an American Alfred T. Mahan.

He's writing, McKinder is writing about Russia as a threat, and Mahan is writing about the U.S. in East Asia as an opportunity. Mekindra is selling a slightly gloomy perspective, and Mahan is selling a much more outgoing one. Neither of them get what they want. Russia doesn't become this superpower very quickly, and the United States doesn't get to push the open door all the way open in China. Because the Russians and the Japanese already got that.

So as America finishes, this is the Frederick Jackson-Turner thing, as the frontier disappears, and you have a homogeneous coast-to-coast state, it's inevitable that the economic power that's been evolving during that process is going offshore. When the new Steel Navy is built, the first place that it's deployed is Rio de Janeiro

to bully the Brazilians into a trade deal. It's just sounding the least familiar. American fleet, South American country, trade deal. Yeah, that sounds pretty familiar. And after that, they're off on the West Coast and they're grabbing Hawaii, they're taking the Spanish out of Manila, and they're grabbing those Spanish tiny little islands

all across the Pacific. And they're turning the U.S. into a Pacific and through that a global power. But that's just the expansion of resources, the expansion of ambition and the sheer scale of the industrial base that's able to do that. Having finished them with the frontier, yes, you want some new markets and the government is persuaded by the industrialists that they need a Navy. It's not the Navy saying they need a Navy, it's the industrialists.

The people are selling things. want America to be able to support them on the other side of the Pacific, or indeed in universe they need that. And all of a sudden, America reaches out and those huge resources then become critical. By 1941, obviously they're exponentially critical to the outcome of that world. Because the British Empire on its own can't deal with these threats. That ultimately emphasizes that Wellington's system and Corbett's state. analysis takes Britain as far as it can go, but that isn't all the way.

It's not ever going to be that state. It's not going to be a superpower. It's a world power in a world where there are four or five, six world powers. It's not a superpower. It doesn't make that transition. And at the moment, we've got one superpower and a couple of wannabe gigantic empires, which haven't quite made the grade. And then we've got some regional powers.

So the world is different now. and still Americas to lead if they want to. Professor Andrew Lambert, author of No More Napoleon's, How Britain Managed Europe from Waterloo to World War I. As always, totally fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for coming up. I'm a pleasure, Aaron. See you again soon.