The eighteenth-century empire of the eastern Habsburgs was a diverse collection of dominions that faced enemies in every direction. Meanwhile, the Habsburgs were a relatively impoverished dynasty. Despite these challenges, Austria endured longer than the more initially impressive Prussia. One explanation for this empire's longevity, despite its offensive weakness and disinclination for wars of conquest, has been that other powers allowed it to survive as a “necessity” to preserve the balance of power in Europe. Meanwhile, historiography has framed its eventual decline as inevitable. In contrast, A. Wess Mitchell argues that Austria's survival was the result of a unique system of strategic choices, and that it was effectively no longer a great power when it made different choices in the middle of the nineteenth century.

Since Montecuccoli and Eugene of Savoy, Austrian grand strategy was traditionally defensive. Because of the complex political geography of their empire, it was difficult for the Habsburgs to mobilize resources to raise troops or predictably fund the army. While the Austrian military was often weaker than those of its rivals, however, the dangers facing it were more numerous. Defensive grand strategy used buffer states, flexible alliances, and strong systems of frontier forts to mitigate the strains of external encirclement and internal weakness. Austrian diplomacy was energetic: it negotiated even with its enemies and managed former enemies by offering them incentives. When conflicts did break out, Austrian decision makers believed that their outcome depended less on a decisive first campaign than on the ability to endure for an extended period. Tactically, the Austrian army avoided pitched battles, and when forced to give battle, picked good terrain and dug in.

Until the mid-nineteenth century, Mitchell argues, this approach worked. Austria managed to avoid multifront wars during the eighteenth century. When it fought on its southeastern frontier it kept wars short and went to great diplomatic efforts to avoid facing multiple threats at once. Although Austria was rarely able to defeat Prussia in the field, its forces used attrition, terrain, guerrilla tactics, and maneuver to wear down, delay, separate, and repel Frederick's armies. Austria came out of the series of eighteenth-century wars with Prussia with a soft hegemony in Central Europe: strong enough to cajole alliances through ancient custom but weak enough that its potential allies did not consider it a threat.

This security system failed catastrophically during the Napoleonic Wars, but the peace that followed was engineered for Austria's benefit. Despite its military weakness the Habsburg monarchy was the most influential European power at the Congress of Vienna (228). Austria presented itself as the protector of the small states of Europe and was too weak for most of its history to attempt to be anything else. From Austria's point of view, this was governance not through conquest but through rules-based compromise. Its moral authority was bolstered by its inherited position. Even after it vanished, the Holy Roman Empire gave luster to the Habsburg dynasty. Austria was capable of performing a unique role as a symbol, and it built a collective security architecture in Europe.

Mitchell sees continuity in the thinking of the military and diplomatic elite that served the Habsburg Empire, if not from Wallenstein to World War I, then certainly from Montecuccoli to Metternich. After Metternich, the Austrian military elite lost track of their grand strategy. Between 1848 and 1866 Austria was defeated in a number of short wars, bringing an end to the Metternich system and paving the way for Austria's decline as a great power. Mitchell argues that this decline was neither the result of economic decay nor the result of the empire's internal diversity and complexity, but because Austria abandoned its traditional tools for managing the challenges it faced (256, 301).

After 1848 Austria overcommitted in northern Italy, while Russia shifted its attention from the Baltic to the south. Austria's diplomatic options narrowed. Austria began to turn away from following military technological development at about the same time. Yet just when it was beginning to lag behind its rivals technologically, the Austrian Army gravitated toward offensive doctrines, abandoning its ancient stress on logistics, attrition, and resilient survival.

In 1853 the Crimean War broke out. Instead of allying with Russia to manipulate and channel its ambitions as it had repeatedly done before, Austria committed to cooperation with Britain and France. Russia had shored up Austria's eastern flank for a hundred years by this point; now, it was decisively anti-Austrian instead. Mitchell sees picking sides in this war as a mistake because neither Britain nor France could provide what Russia could: maintenance of Austria's position in Italy and Germany. Meanwhile, although Austria had antagonized Russia for the sake of France and Britain, these powers now threatened it in Italy—which it probably should not have attempted to make a central part of its dominions to start. Austria was now diplomatically isolated. The battle of Königgrätz in 1866 marked Austria's end as a great power, but the seed of its downfall was in the Crimea.

Mitchell intends this book to be a model for a realistic, unambitious, but engaged foreign policy. He advances the original argument that the United States, insofar as it leads a colloquy of European allies and partners, is the successor to the empire of the eastern Habsburgs. We have risen in the aftermath of its collapse, and we have filled the same place: the lands between France and Russia. The lessons that Mitchell wants the Habsburg monarchy to teach us include “weary resolve,” “a sense of limits,” and a “sense of the transience and fragility of all human accomplishment” (16, 329). Isolation, inflexibility, and militarism offer illusory hopes and in the end destroy a state. Paradoxically, this is reassuring—as is the book's long view: the Habsburg Empire, too, knew capricious leadership by shallow and thoughtless men. What comes next remains to be seen.