Reminds Me Of The Congress of Vienna 1815

The Board of Peace and a Regional Reset;

Dr. Bruce Smith ——Bio and Archives--March 7, 2026

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In my undergraduate days and for a few years afterward I was a big fan of Henry Kissinger. It was the time of shuttle diplomacy in the Middle East in which Kissinger acted as the globetrotting negotiator for President Nixon’s strategic visions. To learn more, I did some research. Kissinger completed his doctoral work at Harvard in 1954 with a dissertation on the primary figures at the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Kissinger’s dissertation was published in 1957 under the title A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh, and the Problems of Peace 1812-1822.

The Redrawing of the map of Europe after the Napoleonic Wars

His study focused on the diplomatic efforts of Castlereagh, the foreign secretary of Great Britain and Metternich, the foreign minister of Austria. These two, along with Talleyrand of France and Karl, Prince von Hardenberg of Prussia, redrew the map of Europe after the tumultuous career of Napoleon Bonaparte ended at Waterloo, in Belgium, in 1815. So in the aftermath of the rubble and political turmoil of the French Revolution and Napoleon’s First Empire it was Castlereagh and Metternich who emerged as the great power brokers of the post-Napoleonic era that lay ahead. They put together a system that kept the peace in Europe, for the most part, for nearly a hundred years.

In the rubble and political turmoil left over from the Second World War a new system emerged based on the realities and hopes of the postwar world. With Germany and Japan defeated, the United States and her allies on one side faced the Soviet Union and its satellite states on the other in a Cold War that lasted........

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