The National Interest
Spring 2002

Disraeli's Secret

by Harvey Sicherman

 

Queen Victoria's favorite prime minister, Benjamin Disraeli (1803–81), seems at first glance impossibly far removed from our experience. Novelist, wit, orator, arguably the founder of Britain's modern Conservative Party, Disraeli was an exotic to his contemporaries and remains an endless fascination to those who study his life. There were none like him in his time, and not in our time either.

Still, there is good reason to revisit Disraeli's career. He grappled with problems astonishingly similar to those facing the United States today, and in some of the same places, notably the Balkans. Among his legacies was a settlement that conferred peace for thirty years in that tortured region without the posting of a single British soldier. And Disraeli achieved that feat despite a highly popular agitation for a humanitarian intervention that offended his skepticism about moral crusades and that, in his view, would have seriously injured the national interest. This success he owed in no small part to a keenly held concept of that interest. He also possessed rare traits of statesmanship: he knew what he wanted to do, and he persisted in his purpose. To these qualities Disraeli joined a dramatic imagination. His instructive and entertaining career holds relevant lessons even for the dilemmas we face after September 11. . . .