THIS BOOK BEGAN with a question: How does a Great Power with limited military resources manage strategic competition against multiple rivals simultaneously? All states face constraints in their ability to project power; most face threats that, if effectively combined, would overwhelm their capacity for self-defense. But for certain types of state, the gap between threats and resources is especially wide. Great Powers that occupy interstitial geography—that is, states of major military potential inhabiting the space between other large power centers—must anticipate existential threats from more than one direction. Even if their enemies do not actively conspire and combine against them, the mere presence of competitors at opposite points on the compass stretches attention and resources. If war comes, they must assume that unless carefully managed, any conflict could spread to include several theaters. For such powers, exposure to the chaos of geopolitics is greater, reprieves from the strains of war are fewer, and bondage to financial, human, and moral tradeoffs in the quest for an affordable safety is sharper than for states that enjoy more protective geography.
Interstitial powers in history have often had short and turbulent lives. The classical empires between the Mediterranean and Persian seas rose and fell in astonishing rapidity—Babylonians eclipsed Akkadians, and in turn, Assyrians and Persians overtook Babylonians. The rulers of the Achaemenid Empire had to contend with problems on a dizzying array of frontiers, only one of which eventually brought the conquests of Alexander with whom Western audiences are so familiar. The Eastern Roman Empire, from its perch in Constantinople at the crossroads of Europe and Asia Minor, achieved a longer run of success than most, but was plagued by omnidirectional threats in the years leading up to its collapse. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was just one in a long procession of empires that flourished for a season only to founder in the violent soil between the Baltic and Black Seas. And even the powerful German Empire built by Otto von Bismarck (1815–98), buoyed by offensive warfighting qualities par excellence, endured in various forms for less than a century before succumbing to the encircling cauchemars des coalition.
The problem facing interstitial powers is time. Unable to secure all of their frontiers with equal strength, they must choose where to concentrate precious diplomatic and military resources, and in the process, inevitably incur vulnerabilities elsewhere. The modern solution to the problem of time in strategy is offensive technology. The Clausewitzian idée fixe of a decisive battle, harnessed to new technologies propelling lethality across large distances, has seemed to offer the possibility of quickly defeating multiple opponents in turn. The picture of German generals in 1914 using railway timetables to shuffle armies from east to west, and in 1940 using tank armies to neutralize flanking opponents at leisure, is firmly entrenched in the Western imagination, despite the disastrous outcomes of German strategy in both wars. Above all, the American experience in the Second World War, when vast fleets and armies delivered knockout blows to peer competitors in opposite directions from the US mainland, appeared to confirm technology’s triumph over geography. The end of the Cold War only heightened the effect; so confident was the United States of the space-conquering attributes of offensive technology that it envisioned defeating continent-sized rivals in Europe and Asia while handling a third, smaller crisis elsewhere without even mobilizing its full warfighting capabilities.
The pages that follow examine how one Great Power, far less gifted materially than twentieth-century Germany or twenty-first-century United States, dealt with the problem of tous azimuts strategic danger. Few empires in history better exemplify the unforgiving nature of interstitial geography than the Habsburg Monarchy. From its emergence as a stand-alone entity in the early eighteenth century until its collapse after the First World War, the Danubian realm of the Austrian Habsburgs was engaged in uninterrupted military competition across a space extending from the warm waters of the Adriatic to the snowy crests of the Carpathians and from the Balkans to the Alps. This book’s immediate interest lies in the debates that took place among small groups of Habsburg soldiers, rulers, and diplomats whose lives were spread across perhaps six or seven generations, but all of whom were bound together by the shared experience of contemplating strategic statecraft in the vortex of the “lands between.”
A grand strategic account of the Habsburgs is overdue. Such a subject holds intrinsic merit. But it is also worth studying for our own benefit today. In a century that seems well on track to delivering a scale of geopolitical turmoil that no one could have imagined in the heady days after 1989, the experiences of an empire that weathered centuries of change, and in whose soil the strategic issues of our own time are irrevocably intertwined, seem more relevant than ever. Such lessons as can be gleaned from Habsburg Austria’s successes and failures hold, if anything, heightened value at a time when the effects of traditional geopolitical competition are being rendered no less severe by distance, technology, and the passage of time. This book is offered in hopes of managing, though perhaps never fully mastering, these challenges in order to preserve America’s global leadership and extend the genial effects that skillful tenancy of the geographic position between the Eurasian rimlands has brought to humankind over the past seventy years to future generations.
In attempting such a task, I have incurred many debts. Eberhard Sandschneider was the first to see merit in the idea of mining Habsburg history for the present. My mentor and former boss Larry Hirsch supported the project from the outset, and urged me to see it through to completion despite the demands of work, family, and life. Nadia Schadlow and Marin Strmecki at the Smith Richardson Foundation provided the grant that allowed me to complete research at the Austrian state archives. Andrew May encouraged me to seek strategic wisdom amid the fragments and ruins of the past. Colin Dueck, Jakub Grygiel, Ingo Peters, Thomas Mahnken, Brian Hook, and Eliot Cohen all provided helpful comments as the manuscript evolved. Eric Crahan at Princeton University Press saw promise, both in the topic of grand strategy as a field and in the Habsburg Monarchy as a neglected chapter in this canon. The Press’s Sara Lerner showed great skill in keeping the book on schedule, and I am grateful to the talented Cindy Milstein and David Luljak for patiently copyediting and reviewing a long text filled with archaic terminology about an illogical empire.
I would be remiss not to acknowledge my former colleagues at the Center for European Policy Analysis, without whose help an undertaking of this scale would not have been possible. Peter Doran and Ilona Teleki stepped in to lead the institute so that I could take a sabbatical in the book’s final phases; Milda Boyce and Marta Sikorski Martin quietly took up the slack to allow me to be out of the office for an extended period. I am especially grateful to Matthew Brown, chief research assistant on the project, who skillfully led a battalion of junior staff in locating and collating large amounts of arcane information, often under difficult circumstances and at short notice. Daniel Richards helped me grasp the complexities of Habsburg finance and brought a discerning eye to chapter drafts. Michal Harmata showed technical versatility and clairvoyance in designing, from scratch, the detailed maps without which large portions of the text would simply not make sense to the reader. Tobias Schneider, Anna Grimminger, and Jessica Niebler helped with deciphering difficult German-language passages. Carsten Schmiedl assisted with nineteenth-century Austrian diplomatic sources and German translations, and spent long hours slogging through documents at the Library of Congress. Tjasa Fejer brought grace and perspective, rooted in family history, to research on the Habsburg Military Border, and together with Maria Benes, supplied helpful translations from Hungarian and Croatian. Piotr Włodkowski and Lidia Gibadlo sifted through documents on the Habsburg kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, and translated Polish-language texts. Sebastiano Dina was an indefatigable resource, not only in collecting and translating Italian-language materials, but in explaining the complex terrain of Lombardy and conducting correspondence with Italian scholars on the technical details of the quadrilateral forts. Eric Jones and Bryan Rosenthal helped with economic statistics, and Stephanie Peng, Marushia Li Gislen, Jackie Mahler, Bart Bachman, Joshua Longaria, Corbett Manders, Jacob Hart, Drake Thomas, and Nick Pope tracked down obscure sources, military figures, and other data.
I am also grateful to the patient staff of the Austrian state archives for helping to locate hard-to-find research material. Stefan Mach provided advice on navigating the Kriegsarchiv, Mag Röhsner and Metin Yilmaz helped me decipher difficult entries at the Haus-, Hof-und Staatsarchiv, and Michael Hochedlinger offered insights in response to e-mail queries about the eighteenth-century Austrian Army. Reinfrid Vergeiner from the Österreichische Gesellschaft für Festungsforschung sent me valuable archival material and sharpened my understanding of Habsburg thinking on fortifications. Czech researchers Roman Gazsi and Petr Capek from Pevnost Terezín aided in my search for material on Bohemian fortresses, and Jaroslav Zajicech assisted in locating Czech historians and material. In the United States, I am indebted to David Morris from the European Division of the Library of Congress for helping me navigate that institution’s substantial German-language and Habsburg resources, and Mark Dincecco at the University of Michigan for assistance in untangling the complicated public revenues of nineteenth-century Austria.
I would especially like to thank my young family, who have watched this book project evolve from conception to completion. For longer than I can remember, my long-suffering wife, Elizabeth, has tolerated the presence of an unseemly host of periwigged and mustachioed dramatis personae in our marriage. She has patiently endured the frustrations and triumphs of chapter drafts, lengthy overseas trips, and early morning writing sessions amid the demands of two jobs and the arrival of two babies. I am grateful to Elizabeth’s grandmother, Diana Kruse (“grandma Duck”), proud descendant of a general from the Croatian Military Border, for permitting me the use of a writer’s cottage in Santa Barbara, California. Finally, I am thankful to my small children, Wesley and Charlotte, whose entire lives to date have occurred within the time frame of this project, and who have spent countless weekend mornings asking why daddy is in his study again, writing about the “housebirds.” It is with their futures in mind that this book was written.
Finally, let me add a word about the timing of this book. Shortly after it was completed, I was offered the opportunity to serve my country as an official at the US Department of State. While the historical topics addressed in this book hold lessons for geopolitical competition in our own day, any observations for the present are offered only in the most general sense, and are not intended as a commentary on specific US policies of the past, present, or future.