“Wrap the World in Flames” - The US-Russian Alliance that Saved the Union

The following essay is written by Webster Tarpley, telling the largely untold alliance between President Abraham Lincoln and Russian Tsar Alexander II, which by many accounts was they key to the North winning the U.S. Civil War, which began 150 years ago yesterday.

"One hundred fifty years after the attack on Fort Sumter, the international strategic dimension of the American Civil War represents a much-neglected aspect of Civil War studies. In offering a survey of some of the main issues involved, one feels required to justify the importance of the topic. It is indeed true that, as things turned out, the international strategic dimension of the 1861-65 conflict was of secondary importance. However, it was an aspect that repeatedly threatened to thrust itself into the center of the war, transforming the entire nature of the conflict and indeed threatening to overturn the entire existing world system. The big issue was always a British-French attack on the United States to preserve the Confederate States of America. This is certainly how Union and Confederate leaders viewed the matter, and how some important people in London, St. Petersburg, Paris, and Berlin did as well.

The result is that today, the international dimension is consistently underestimated: even a writer as sophisticated as Richard Franklin Bensel can repeatedly insist in his recent Yankee Leviathan that the US development over the decade before the Civil War was “acted out in a vacuum,” while asserting that “the relative isolation of the United States on the North American continent contributed to the comparative unimportance of nationalism in American life prior to secession.”² Reports of American isolation, however, were already exaggerated in the era of a British fleet that could summer in the Baltic and winter in the Caribbean.

Read more at Tarpley.net