20 Times Powerful Countries Had To Scrap “The Plan”

The Japanese navy attacked the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on December 7, 1941. More than 2,400 were killed, and 19 ships sank or were damaged. President Franklin D. Roosevelt had kept the nation out of the conflict even as he sent arms to the Allies. The U.S. had remained neutral for two years while the war raged. On the following day, Congress declared war on Japan. A long era of non-intervention was over in one morning.

In 1588, King Philip II of Spain dispatched a large armada of over 130 ships to invade Protestant England and overthrow Queen Elizabeth I. The English ships, commanded by Lord Howard and Sir Francis Drake, harassed the armada and used fireships to scatter it. However, the heaviest losses came afterward, when Atlantic storms wrecked more than 60 Spanish ships as they fled around Scotland and Ireland. Afterward, Philip abandoned the invasion and focused on the defense of the Spanish Empire rather than expansion.

In 1812, Napoleon Bonaparte invaded Russia to compel Tsar Alexander I to blockade British commerce. Arriving in Moscow in September, he anticipated a capitulation. The governor of Moscow, Count Fyodor Rostopchin, had most of the city burned along with the winter supplies Napoleon needed, and Alexander still refused to negotiate. Napoleon withdrew in October, and his forces of about 600,000 men were reduced to fewer than 100,000 by starvation, exposure, and Cossack attacks.

Britain and Venezuela were at loggerheads over the border of British Guiana in South America. In 1895, U.S. Secretary of State Richard Olney invoked the Monroe Doctrine, asserting that Washington had a right to arbitrate any dispute anywhere in the Americas. With tensions mounting over Germany and problems in South Africa, Prime Minister Lord Salisbury dropped Britain’s refusal to include the U.S., and American arbitration was accepted in 1897. But the true change here was Britain’s capitulation to American diplomatic authority.

Napoleon Bonaparte dispatched tens of thousands of troops to quell the revolution in Haiti, led by the general Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and to reinstitute slavery on the island. He wanted Louisiana to feed and supply Haiti, which he saw as the sugar-producing engine of a new French Caribbean empire. Yellow fever and an insurgency wiped out tens of thousands of French troops and their commander. Months before the war was over, Napoleon ended up selling Louisiana to the U.S. for $15 million.

While Tsar Nicholas II of Russia was fighting Japan over control of Manchuria and Korea, a Japanese admiral, Togo Heihachiro, led his navy to smash Russia’s Baltic Fleet at Tsushima in May 1905, sinking or capturing 21 of its 24 major warships. Already facing strikes and revolts at home, with no navy left to fight, Nicholas ended the war through American-mediated negotiations. He then issued the October Manifesto, which created Russia’s first elected parliament, the Duma, although he would take most of its power back.

When the German parliament building, the Reichstag, burned on February 27, 1933, a Dutch communist named Marinus van der Lubbe was found there. Most modern historians think he was acting alone, but Nazi leaders charged that Communists were behind the fire. The following day, President Paul von Hindenburg signed an emergency decree that suspended freedom of speech, assembly, and privacy and allowed people to be arrested without charge. This emergency decree provided the legal basis that Adolf Hitler, the chancellor at the time, used to build his dictatorship.

China’s Empress Dowager Cixi, the actual ruler of China’s Qing dynasty, initially attempted to quash the Boxers, a ferocious anti-foreign, anti-Christian sect, but ultimately backed them and declared war on foreign countries in 1900. The Boxer Rebellion was quashed by an alliance of eight nations that exacted an enormous financial penalty from China. To avoid the collapse of her regime, however, Cixi then did a complete about-face, abolishing the 1,300-year-old imperial examination process and creating modern schools and a modern army.

In January 1917, the German Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmermann secretly offered to help Mexico win back Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona if it would join the fight against the United States. The British intercepted and decoded the proposal, which they made public in March. Along with the news that Germany had resumed its unrestricted submarine warfare, the Zimmermann Telegram ended three years of official American neutrality. Mexico declined, but the president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, petitioned Congress for a declaration of war on April 2, 1917.

In October 1777, American troops cornered British general John Burgoyne’s 5,800-strong army at Saratoga, New York, forcing him to surrender. That victory encouraged King Louis XVI to stop supplying the colonists under the table and officially sign a treaty of alliance in February 1778. This marked France’s entrance into the conflict, bringing open war with Britain.

The Germans had announced that the seas around Britain were a war zone, in which German submarines could attack without warning. A German submarine sank the British passenger ship Lusitania off the coast of Ireland, and almost 1,200 people died, 128 of them Americans. The ship’s cargo list included ammunition. President Woodrow Wilson’s angry protests caused Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg to halt the unrestricted submarine campaign later that year. It was still about two years before the US would enter the war.

In late 1861, U.S. Navy captain Charles Wilkes kidnapped two Confederate diplomats, James Mason and John Slidell, from a neutral British liner, the RMS Trent. Britain claimed this was a breach of international law and mobilized thousands of troops in Canada. It also demanded the immediate return of the prisoners. Secretary of State William Seward promptly released the two diplomats, stating that Captain Wilkes had acted on his own initiative. There was no formal apology, but the incident passed.

Joseph Stalin had signed a nonaggression pact with Adolf Hitler, providing the Germans with oil and grain while the Soviet Union remained outside the war. Then Hitler violated the pact, sending more than three million troops across an 1,800-mile front line into Russia. For a day or two, Stalin withdrew from view. He then returned to his post as commander-in-chief, declared the start of the Great Patriotic War, as Soviets referred to the conflict, and put the Soviet Union on the side of Britain and the United States.

The 1755 earthquake leveled Lisbon, and then a tsunami and the resulting fires wiped out much of the city and killed tens of thousands. King Joseph I of Portugal and his first minister, Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, who was later given the title Marquês de Pombal, halted spending on foreign adventures and used the crown’s funds to rebuild the capital. For several years, Portugal’s ambitions turned inward.

The Roman army had been slowly expanding eastward, beyond the Rhine River and towards the Elbe River, in 9 CE, when Arminius, a Germanic leader trained in the Roman army, turned against his former allies. Arminius’s forces lured the governor of the region, Publius Quinctilius Varus, and his three legions of 15,000 to 20,000 men into a thickly forested area, where they were massacred over four days. The emperor Augustus gave up the idea of conquering and annexing Germany for good. But successive emperors continued to launch punitive attacks across the Rhine.

In July 1870, France’s diplomats asked Prussia’s king, Wilhelm I, to swear that he’d never let any of his kinsmen become King of Spain. Wilhelm diplomatically said no. He telegraphed the encounter to his chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, who changed the actual wording of the message to give the impression that each side had slighted the other, and released it to the press. France’s emperor, Napoleon III, was furious. On July 19, he declared war on Prussia, a conflict France was ill-equipped for and had little support abroad.

France had spent eight years trying to hang on to its Indochinese colonies when it made a last stand at the isolated valley of Dien Bien Phu, anticipating a head-on confrontation with the Viet Minh army. But General Vo Nguyen Giap managed to carry huge guns over the mountain ridges around Dien Bien Phu, then laid siege to the French fortress for 56 days. On May 7, 1954, more than 11,000 French soldiers were captured. France quit Indochina in July that year and signed the Geneva Accords.

For over a hundred years, the East India Company had been a private company that owned an army and ruled much of India. In May 1857, the Company’s sepoys (Indian soldiers) mutinied in the city of Meerut over religiously offensive rifle cartridges. The mutiny turned into a rebellion against Company rule and land expropriation, and after a year of warfare, the Parliament stripped the Company of its political authority in 1858 and gave control of India to the Crown. India became the British Raj.

The Corn Laws, which protected British farmers through import tariffs on grain, had been in place since 1815. But when a fungal infection wiped out Ireland’s potato crop in the fall of 1845 and led to mass starvation, the prime minister, Sir Robert Peel, concluded that it was no longer defensible to impose tariffs on grain at a time of widespread hunger. After facing heavy opposition from his own Tory Party, he managed to push the repeal of the corn tariffs through Parliament in June 1846.

In 1956, after Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, the UK, France, and Israel plotted a covert military intervention: Israel would invade the Sinai, and then the British and French would use that as an excuse to march into the canal area. Their armies were on the ground and ready to fight. But U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower was furious at this unauthorized attack. He threatened to sell off American holdings of British currency and block emergency loans, risking a collapse of the pound. So Britain’s prime minister, Anthony Eden, ordered a ceasefire and pulled out.

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