On the face of it, the war between Austria and the allied forces of Piedmont and France in the summer of 1859, and the ensuing struggles that culminated in the unification of most of Italy under King Victor Emanuel, would seem to have little to do with the evolution of Russian foreign policy. Russia took care not to be drawn into the fighting and greeted the unification process with loud disapprobation. Yet that war could not have been fought as a limited war without Russian collusion. Napoleon III required – besides the tacit approval of England (where public opinion supported ‘Italy for the Italians’) – the aid of another nation in order to be what Bismarck later called ’à trois’ in a Europe of five great powers. For Russia to provide that aid obliged her to abandon the responsibilities shouldered by Alexander I and Nicholas I, ‘the gendarme of Europe’, champion of Europe's conservative instincts and guarantor of its treaties.
The Wind at His Back: American Public Opinion and Theodore Roosevelt’s Foreign Policy -
John M Thompson. Great Power Rising: Theodore Roosevelt and the Politics of U.S. Foreign Policy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. x + 270 pp. $36.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-19-085995-4.