Scarcely a day goes by when Crimea is not in the news. The Crimean Peninsula, the home of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, is the focal point of an escalating global power struggle. Yet the Crimean War (1853-1856) is rarely, if ever, mentioned by Western statesmen and media outlets. The silence is particularly striking given its many parallels with the still nameless war now being fought in the same region and for similar reasons. Posterity might have other ideas, but we might call the current conflict the “Second Crimean War” for the sake of convenience.
As Crimean War II rages, a strange historical amnesia blots its predecessor from Western consciousness. The 19th-century conflict pitted the British and French Empires, the Ottoman Caliphate, and Sardinia against the Russian Empire. It shattered the rules-based European order established by the post-Waterloo settlement of 1815 and claimed over half a million lives in the process.
Awareness of the Crimean War may have been lost in the West, but not in Russia. Putin reminds his public that it was an “invasion by foreign hordes” in which “every inch of that soil was soaked with the blood of Russian … soldiers.” He goes further by placing it in the historical context of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 and Hitler’s in 1941-42. When CIA Director William Burns threatens “deep penetration strikes in Crimea” to “cement a strategic loss for Vladimir Putin’s Russia,” recollections of the Crimean War come to life and resonate deeply with a patriotic Russian public.
Putin, of course, suffers from his own self-serving, selective historical amnesia. He forgets to acknowledge that Russia’s “Holy Land”, as he calls Crimea, had been the center of a Muslim Tartar Khanate under Ottoman Turkish suzerainty before it was conquered and annexed by Russia’s Catherine the Great in 1783. The Khanate incorporated most of the Black Sea coastal regions of what is now Ukraine. The indigenous Muslim Tartars were largely displaced during waves of violence and were replaced by Russian colonists. This rarely acknowledged past continues to haunt a Russian leadership that is acutely aware of the spirit of Islamic revanchism that continues to permeate the political culture of contemporary neo-Ottoman Turkey.
History never repeats itself exactly. But “what’s past is prologue.” To ignore the Bard’s wisdom would be foolhardy. So, let’s start recovering from historical amnesia by reminding ourselves that the Crimean War was a mid-19th century clash of two imperial world systems. One was led by Britain, then the preeminent global superpower, the hub of a complex, unprecedented network of allies, formally ruled colonial possessions, and informally dominated spheres of influence. The other was the socially and economically underdeveloped but militarily powerful Russian Empire, spanning three continents from Poland in the West to Alaska in the East.
The interests of these two empires collided in the Black Sea and eastern Mediterranean regions of the decomposing Ottoman Caliphate, once the scourge of Christian Europe. Russia’s southward expansion at the expense of the Caliphate had been steady since the rule of Peter the Great (1669-1739). Russia’s strategic goals were to acquire political ascendancy in Constantinople, have unhindered access to the Mediterranean, and function on the world’s stage as the “Third Rome.” This Russian version of “Manifest Destiny” appeared within reach when the Caliphate became a de facto Russian protectorate following defeat in the Russo-Turkish War of 1828-9.
Meanwhile, as Britain’s imperial reach rapidly expanded following victory in the Napoleonic Wars, London came to see securing a shorter route to the Orient as a vital interest: at the time, reaching India from Britain by ship still required a long trip around the Cape of Good Hope. The two leading candidates—the Gulf of Suez and the Euphrates River—passed through Ottoman territory. Reversing Russia’s advances and drawing the Caliphate into Britain’s world system as a sphere of influence through a combination of economic and military leverage, became an imperative for empire builders in Westminster and the City.
The Anglo-Russian competition for mastery in the Ottoman Caliphate was militarized in the summer of 1853. The British fleet was dispatched to the Dardanelles and Russian troops were ‘temporarily’ deployed in the Caliphate’s Danubian tributary states of Moldavia and Wallachia in a special military operation. Britain’s conservative Prime Minister Lord Aberdeen was alarmed. He sensed his country was “drifting into war” contrary to his wishes. He was right. When it came to questions of war or peace, Aberdeen’s broad coalition Cabinet was led not by the prime minister, but by his longstanding foreign policy rival the Home Secretary Lord Palmerston.
The differences between these two experienced former foreign secretaries were profound. Aberdeen strove to contain Russia using, if possible, traditional “Concert of Europe” diplomacy. Palmerston’s “beau idéal,” as he branded his war goals, was tantamount to Russia’s strategic defeat, or its “annihilation” as a Great Power, to use the unambiguous language of historian Herman Wentker. The beau idéal involved stripping Russia of Crimea, Circassia, and Trans-Caucasia (Georgia and Armenia). They were to be given to the Ottoman Caliphate. An independent Kingdom of Poland was to be reestablished. The Russian-occupied Danubian Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia were designated for Austrian ownership. Fulfillment would reduce Russia in Europe to a size approximating the medieval Grand Duchy of Moscow.
Palmerston’s scheme was, of course, contrary to the rules-based international order established by the Congress of Vienna in 1815—an order that Aberdeen wished to preserve. But when tensions mounted between the Russian Empire and the Ottomans in the 1850s, Palmerston seized what he saw as an opportunity to enhance the might of Britain’s empire. War, as he privately admitted, was required for the realization of the beau idéal. He found an invaluable, but ultimately unreliable, ally in the new Emperor of France, the glory-seeking adventurer Napoleon III, who also had an interest in shaking up the established order.
Palmerston’s beau idéal was never revealed to the public. Instead, Palmerston and his Cabinet hawks projected the Crimean War as a defensive one to secure the “independence and integrity” of the Ottoman Caliphate. It was a necessity, they argued, for the protection of Europe, the British Empire (especially India) and civilization itself. Defeat, they claimed, would result in the descent of the British Empire to the status of a “second rate” European power. In other words, it was presented as an historical inflection point with existential implications.
The British public had been well primed for conflict with Russia during the two decades preceding the outbreak of hostilities. During his first term as foreign secretary, Palmerston identified Russia as Britain’s principal, “barbaric” enemy. Throughout his career, he mobilized his political agents to undertake a massive anti-Russia propaganda campaign whenever he wanted to pressure the czar, as he usually did. Never before had the press been used so effectively to shape public opinion against a foreign power as a precursor to war. The efforts are well documented in Kingsley Martin’s classic, The Triumph of Lord Palmerston, published exactly one hundred years ago.
The Crimean War did not end in the six-week victory expected by Palmerston. As the war dragged on, the costs mounted. Palmerston replaced Aberdeen as Prime Minister. The new premier failed in his attempts to strengthen the anti-Russia coalition with the addition of Austria and Prussia, mercenary foreign legions made up of impoverished adventurers and ultranationalist revolutionaries, and Circassian jihadists. After two years of tough combat, Britain’s war fever dissipated. France had also had enough. The eventual conquest of Russia’s naval base at Sevastopol provided an opportunity to end the war on an honorable note. Palmerston’s beau idéal remained a costly pipe dream.
The Treaty of Paris of 1856 obliged Russia to evacuate the Danubian Principalities, return a sliver of Bessarabia to Turkey, and accept the neutralization of the Black Sea and the internationalization of the Danube. But the evil consequences of the war were far greater than suggested by the mild terms of the settlement. Russia had been weakened. While Britain was far more resilient, the painful expenditure of blood and treasure for such meager results caused Britain’s mood to swing from cocksure continental interventionism to cautious non-interventionism. Meanwhile, the pre-Crimean balance of power between Britain and Russia had been destroyed. Conditions had been created for the unexpected.
Within fifteen years of the Crimean War’s end, Prussia launched and won wars against Austria and France. This smallest of Europe’s five Great Powers, junior to Austria in the German Confederation, thereby became the driving force of a new, ambitious, and militarily aggressive German Empire. War-weary Britain and Russia did not act to hinder this geopolitical revolution. The catastrophic long-term consequences for Europe and the world are known to all.
As Britain entered the Crimean War, Aberdeen observed that while Britain had “abstract justice” on its side, entry as a belligerent would prove to be “impolitic and unwise.” He furthermore upbraided himself for not exercising a “little more energy and vigour” in his efforts to avoid it. The war’s outcome only confirmed his view that it had been a “most unwise and unnecessary” enterprise, as he confided to a friend.
Four decades after the Crimean War’s end, Lord Salisbury—then prime minister and doyen of Britain’s foreign policy establishment—assessed his country’s role in that conflict in the House of Lords. As he spoke, imperial Germany was flexing its muscles, the collapsing Ottoman Caliphate had already massacred hundreds of thousands of Armenian Christians in a precursor of the subsequent Genocide (1915-1923), and the ailing Russian Empire was showing signs of the internal decay that would ultimately lead to the Bolshevik Revolution. Salisbury curtly admitted, “We backed the wrong horse.” Indeed! It would have been better, the prime minister added, for Britain to have accepted conditions for peace offered by the czar on the eve of hostilities, as Aberdeen wanted.
What Salisbury did not say, however, was that no British government could have come to terms with the czar in 1853 and survived. By then, media-driven war hysteria in Britain had reached the point of no return. Parliament and the public alike would have viewed such an act as cowardly appeasement of a brutal autocrat.
To predict the outcome of the current Crimean War would be imprudent. But the belligerents and their enablers should be conscious of the likelihood of unanticipated outcomes. One possibility is that both sides end up as losers, with one or more Prussian-like sleepers triumphing. The leading candidate globally is China. In the European-Middle Eastern sphere, it is Erdogan’s Turkey, which increasingly claims the mantle of the Ottoman Caliphate in word and deed. This highly militarized power is oddly absent from the U.S. intelligence community’s threat assessment for 2024, despite having troops stationed in Cyprus, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Azerbaijan, and an extensive network of politicized mosques and associations in Germany and the Balkans. This may be yet another intelligence oversight we will come to regret in the coming years. Europeans must not lose sight of Turkey and its neo-Ottoman aspirations as Washington and Moscow get bogged down and exhausted in the mire of the Second Crimean War.
Our Perilous Historical Amnesia
The Thin Red Line (1881), a 108 x 216 cm oil on canvas by Robert Gibb (1845-1932), located at National War Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh
Scarcely a day goes by when Crimea is not in the news. The Crimean Peninsula, the home of Russia’s Black Sea fleet, is the focal point of an escalating global power struggle. Yet the Crimean War (1853-1856) is rarely, if ever, mentioned by Western statesmen and media outlets. The silence is particularly striking given its many parallels with the still nameless war now being fought in the same region and for similar reasons. Posterity might have other ideas, but we might call the current conflict the “Second Crimean War” for the sake of convenience.
As Crimean War II rages, a strange historical amnesia blots its predecessor from Western consciousness. The 19th-century conflict pitted the British and French Empires, the Ottoman Caliphate, and Sardinia against the Russian Empire. It shattered the rules-based European order established by the post-Waterloo settlement of 1815 and claimed over half a million lives in the process.
Awareness of the Crimean War may have been lost in the West, but not in Russia. Putin reminds his public that it was an “invasion by foreign hordes” in which “every inch of that soil was soaked with the blood of Russian … soldiers.” He goes further by placing it in the historical context of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 and Hitler’s in 1941-42. When CIA Director William Burns threatens “deep penetration strikes in Crimea” to “cement a strategic loss for Vladimir Putin’s Russia,” recollections of the Crimean War come to life and resonate deeply with a patriotic Russian public.
Putin, of course, suffers from his own self-serving, selective historical amnesia. He forgets to acknowledge that Russia’s “Holy Land”, as he calls Crimea, had been the center of a Muslim Tartar Khanate under Ottoman Turkish suzerainty before it was conquered and annexed by Russia’s Catherine the Great in 1783. The Khanate incorporated most of the Black Sea coastal regions of what is now Ukraine. The indigenous Muslim Tartars were largely displaced during waves of violence and were replaced by Russian colonists. This rarely acknowledged past continues to haunt a Russian leadership that is acutely aware of the spirit of Islamic revanchism that continues to permeate the political culture of contemporary neo-Ottoman Turkey.
History never repeats itself exactly. But “what’s past is prologue.” To ignore the Bard’s wisdom would be foolhardy. So, let’s start recovering from historical amnesia by reminding ourselves that the Crimean War was a mid-19th century clash of two imperial world systems. One was led by Britain, then the preeminent global superpower, the hub of a complex, unprecedented network of allies, formally ruled colonial possessions, and informally dominated spheres of influence. The other was the socially and economically underdeveloped but militarily powerful Russian Empire, spanning three continents from Poland in the West to Alaska in the East.
The interests of these two empires collided in the Black Sea and eastern Mediterranean regions of the decomposing Ottoman Caliphate, once the scourge of Christian Europe. Russia’s southward expansion at the expense of the Caliphate had been steady since the rule of Peter the Great (1669-1739). Russia’s strategic goals were to acquire political ascendancy in Constantinople, have unhindered access to the Mediterranean, and function on the world’s stage as the “Third Rome.” This Russian version of “Manifest Destiny” appeared within reach when the Caliphate became a de facto Russian protectorate following defeat in the Russo-Turkish War of 1828-9.
Meanwhile, as Britain’s imperial reach rapidly expanded following victory in the Napoleonic Wars, London came to see securing a shorter route to the Orient as a vital interest: at the time, reaching India from Britain by ship still required a long trip around the Cape of Good Hope. The two leading candidates—the Gulf of Suez and the Euphrates River—passed through Ottoman territory. Reversing Russia’s advances and drawing the Caliphate into Britain’s world system as a sphere of influence through a combination of economic and military leverage, became an imperative for empire builders in Westminster and the City.
The Anglo-Russian competition for mastery in the Ottoman Caliphate was militarized in the summer of 1853. The British fleet was dispatched to the Dardanelles and Russian troops were ‘temporarily’ deployed in the Caliphate’s Danubian tributary states of Moldavia and Wallachia in a special military operation. Britain’s conservative Prime Minister Lord Aberdeen was alarmed. He sensed his country was “drifting into war” contrary to his wishes. He was right. When it came to questions of war or peace, Aberdeen’s broad coalition Cabinet was led not by the prime minister, but by his longstanding foreign policy rival the Home Secretary Lord Palmerston.
The differences between these two experienced former foreign secretaries were profound. Aberdeen strove to contain Russia using, if possible, traditional “Concert of Europe” diplomacy. Palmerston’s “beau idéal,” as he branded his war goals, was tantamount to Russia’s strategic defeat, or its “annihilation” as a Great Power, to use the unambiguous language of historian Herman Wentker. The beau idéal involved stripping Russia of Crimea, Circassia, and Trans-Caucasia (Georgia and Armenia). They were to be given to the Ottoman Caliphate. An independent Kingdom of Poland was to be reestablished. The Russian-occupied Danubian Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia were designated for Austrian ownership. Fulfillment would reduce Russia in Europe to a size approximating the medieval Grand Duchy of Moscow.
Palmerston’s scheme was, of course, contrary to the rules-based international order established by the Congress of Vienna in 1815—an order that Aberdeen wished to preserve. But when tensions mounted between the Russian Empire and the Ottomans in the 1850s, Palmerston seized what he saw as an opportunity to enhance the might of Britain’s empire. War, as he privately admitted, was required for the realization of the beau idéal. He found an invaluable, but ultimately unreliable, ally in the new Emperor of France, the glory-seeking adventurer Napoleon III, who also had an interest in shaking up the established order.
Palmerston’s beau idéal was never revealed to the public. Instead, Palmerston and his Cabinet hawks projected the Crimean War as a defensive one to secure the “independence and integrity” of the Ottoman Caliphate. It was a necessity, they argued, for the protection of Europe, the British Empire (especially India) and civilization itself. Defeat, they claimed, would result in the descent of the British Empire to the status of a “second rate” European power. In other words, it was presented as an historical inflection point with existential implications.
The British public had been well primed for conflict with Russia during the two decades preceding the outbreak of hostilities. During his first term as foreign secretary, Palmerston identified Russia as Britain’s principal, “barbaric” enemy. Throughout his career, he mobilized his political agents to undertake a massive anti-Russia propaganda campaign whenever he wanted to pressure the czar, as he usually did. Never before had the press been used so effectively to shape public opinion against a foreign power as a precursor to war. The efforts are well documented in Kingsley Martin’s classic, The Triumph of Lord Palmerston, published exactly one hundred years ago.
The Crimean War did not end in the six-week victory expected by Palmerston. As the war dragged on, the costs mounted. Palmerston replaced Aberdeen as Prime Minister. The new premier failed in his attempts to strengthen the anti-Russia coalition with the addition of Austria and Prussia, mercenary foreign legions made up of impoverished adventurers and ultranationalist revolutionaries, and Circassian jihadists. After two years of tough combat, Britain’s war fever dissipated. France had also had enough. The eventual conquest of Russia’s naval base at Sevastopol provided an opportunity to end the war on an honorable note. Palmerston’s beau idéal remained a costly pipe dream.
The Treaty of Paris of 1856 obliged Russia to evacuate the Danubian Principalities, return a sliver of Bessarabia to Turkey, and accept the neutralization of the Black Sea and the internationalization of the Danube. But the evil consequences of the war were far greater than suggested by the mild terms of the settlement. Russia had been weakened. While Britain was far more resilient, the painful expenditure of blood and treasure for such meager results caused Britain’s mood to swing from cocksure continental interventionism to cautious non-interventionism. Meanwhile, the pre-Crimean balance of power between Britain and Russia had been destroyed. Conditions had been created for the unexpected.
Within fifteen years of the Crimean War’s end, Prussia launched and won wars against Austria and France. This smallest of Europe’s five Great Powers, junior to Austria in the German Confederation, thereby became the driving force of a new, ambitious, and militarily aggressive German Empire. War-weary Britain and Russia did not act to hinder this geopolitical revolution. The catastrophic long-term consequences for Europe and the world are known to all.
As Britain entered the Crimean War, Aberdeen observed that while Britain had “abstract justice” on its side, entry as a belligerent would prove to be “impolitic and unwise.” He furthermore upbraided himself for not exercising a “little more energy and vigour” in his efforts to avoid it. The war’s outcome only confirmed his view that it had been a “most unwise and unnecessary” enterprise, as he confided to a friend.
Four decades after the Crimean War’s end, Lord Salisbury—then prime minister and doyen of Britain’s foreign policy establishment—assessed his country’s role in that conflict in the House of Lords. As he spoke, imperial Germany was flexing its muscles, the collapsing Ottoman Caliphate had already massacred hundreds of thousands of Armenian Christians in a precursor of the subsequent Genocide (1915-1923), and the ailing Russian Empire was showing signs of the internal decay that would ultimately lead to the Bolshevik Revolution. Salisbury curtly admitted, “We backed the wrong horse.” Indeed! It would have been better, the prime minister added, for Britain to have accepted conditions for peace offered by the czar on the eve of hostilities, as Aberdeen wanted.
What Salisbury did not say, however, was that no British government could have come to terms with the czar in 1853 and survived. By then, media-driven war hysteria in Britain had reached the point of no return. Parliament and the public alike would have viewed such an act as cowardly appeasement of a brutal autocrat.
To predict the outcome of the current Crimean War would be imprudent. But the belligerents and their enablers should be conscious of the likelihood of unanticipated outcomes. One possibility is that both sides end up as losers, with one or more Prussian-like sleepers triumphing. The leading candidate globally is China. In the European-Middle Eastern sphere, it is Erdogan’s Turkey, which increasingly claims the mantle of the Ottoman Caliphate in word and deed. This highly militarized power is oddly absent from the U.S. intelligence community’s threat assessment for 2024, despite having troops stationed in Cyprus, Syria, Iraq, Libya, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Azerbaijan, and an extensive network of politicized mosques and associations in Germany and the Balkans. This may be yet another intelligence oversight we will come to regret in the coming years. Europeans must not lose sight of Turkey and its neo-Ottoman aspirations as Washington and Moscow get bogged down and exhausted in the mire of the Second Crimean War.
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