War & Peace Quote by Bernhard von Bulow

Bulow’s sentence is a masterclass in imperial-era “peace” talk that’s really about power. It reframes rearmament and alliance-building not as escalation, but as prudence: if England becomes “stronger than her rivals,” then peace supposedly follows as a kind of coerced calm. The verb “force” does the honest work here. Peace isn’t imagined as mutual reassurance; it’s imagined as deterrence backed by dominance, with other powers cast as naturally “hostile” and therefore in need of correction.

The specific intent is double-edged. On one level, Bulow is describing (and quietly critiquing) Joseph Chamberlain’s flirtation with an Anglo-German alignment at the turn of the 20th century, when Britain was weighing how to manage rising competitors and Germany was eager to break out of diplomatic isolation. On another, he’s normalizing Germany’s own strategic logic by describing Britain’s in the same breath: everyone is just “averting threats,” everyone is just securing peace, everyone is making the rational move. That symmetry is useful to a statesman: it blunts moral outrage and recasts rivalry as technocratic necessity.

The subtext is that “peace” is being hollowed out into a rhetorical wrapper for hierarchy. If England’s peace depends on being stronger than “her rivals,” then conflict is baked in as a permanent condition; stability becomes something imposed, not negotiated. Read in the long shadow of pre-1914 Europe, the line also captures the trap of deterrence politics: each actor’s defensive story sounds plausible, yet the aggregate effect is an arms race lubricated by the language of prevention.