Eugene Rostow’s A Breakfast for Bonaparte Resonates 30 Years Later – The American

Thirty years ago, Eugene Rostow (1913-2002), the former Dean of Yale Law School who served in foreign policy positions in both the Johnson and Reagan administrations, wrote A Breakfast for Bonaparte: U.S. National Security Interests From the Heights of Abraham to the Nuclear Age, which was published by the National Defense University (NDU) Press. Rostow wrote much of the book while teaching at NDU. The book’s title was inspired by a letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote to a correspondent in January 1814, which warned: “Surely none of us wish to see Bonaparte conquer Russia, and lay thus at his feet the whole continent of Europe. This done, England would be but a breakfast … [P]ut all Europe into his hands, and he might spare such a force to be sent in British ships, as I would as leave not have to encounter … It cannot be to our interest that all Europe should be reduced to a single monarchy.”(READ MORE: Indo-Pacific Commander Channels Mackinder and Spykman)

Jefferson’s letter manifested a shrewd understanding of global geopolitics, especially from an American perspective. Rostow’s book begins with that letter and explained how it encompassed in a few sentences the fundamental aspects of American national security policy from colonial times to the end of the Cold War. And it remains relevant to 21st century geopolitics. Jefferson’s warning about the threat to America from a Europe dominated by Napoleon would have applied to later threats to U.S. security posed by Imperial and Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, and to today’s threat from China. 

Rostow divided A Breakfast for Bonaparte into four parts: a geopolitical framework informed by the writings of Sir Halford Mackinder, Nicholas Spykman, and other great strategic thinkers; U.S. diplomacy between 1776 and the Second World War; the geopolitics of the Cold War; and U.S. foreign policy in a post-Cold War world. Rostow wrote that the Mackinder-Spykman geopolitical map — which divided the globe into Heartland, Rimland, World Island, and insular maritime powers “remains an indispensable tool of analysis.” Mackinder and Spykman, though they differed on details, viewed history through the prism of continental vs. maritime powers struggling for predominance on the Eurasian landmass. Both warned, as Jefferson did in his letter, that a great continental power that gained control of the resources of Eurasia could become a great maritime power and thereby threaten the insular powers, including Britain and the United States. Rostow updated their analyses, when he wrote: “Given modern technology in transportation, communications, and war, the military potential of the Eurasian-African land mass [which Mackinder called the World-Island] is even more overwhelming than it was in the past, provided it is brought under the control of a single power bent on conquest.” (READ More: Sino-Russian Geopolitics With Stephen Kotkin and Orville Schell)

Rostow noted that despite its troubles, Russia remained formidable, China was modernizing, and India would soon become a great power. “For the United States,” Rostow wrote, “ … the first problem of national security is … to help prevent the emergence of a decisive aggregation of power in Europe, Asia, or the Middle East.” It was the growing imbalance of power, not democratic ideals, that caused the United States to enter both world wars of the twentieth century and to anchor an alliance that won the Cold War. And today Rostow would surely agree that the economic and military rise of China and its emerging strategic partnership with a revived Russia poses a global threat similar to the threat that Jefferson perceived from Bonaparte in 1814, and the threats the U.S. faced during the world wars and the Cold War. 

The bulk of Rostow’s book examines how the United States began as a sliver of territory on the eastern part of North America and grew to continental dimensions by pursuing its “Manifest Destiny” all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Then, in Alfred Thayer Mahan’s words, began to “look outward” and acquired an overseas empire and interests in the Far East, reluctantly intervened in the First World War to prevent German hegemony in Europe, again reluctantly intervened in the Second World War to prevent Hitler’s domination of Europe and Japan’s quest for a Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere in East Asia and the Western Pacific, and then forged and anchored an alliance of nations to prevent Soviet hegemony on the Eurasian landmass. In each instance, U.S. foreign policy adhered to the fundamental geopolitical precepts of Jefferson’s letter about a breakfast for Bonaparte. 

Rostow concluded his book with a warning against the naive belief that the end of the Cold War meant the end of great power competition. As he noted, empires like the Soviet Union had collapsed before, but they were inevitably followed by new challengers to the status quo. Rostow speculated that China may pose such a challenge. He noted that the United States had inherited the role of Great Britain as the “holder” of the world balance of power because “[t]here is no other power which can discharge those obligations.” 

It would behoove our statesmen and policymakers to read A Breakfast for Bonaparte, or else some modern-day Jefferson might have to warn his or her correspondent about a breakfast for Xi.   

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