World Order

by Henry Kissinger

The conflict had begun not over the Crimea—which Russia had conquered from an Ottoman vassal in the eighteenth century—but over competing French and Russian claims to advance the rights of favored Christian communities in Jerusalem, then within Ottoman jurisdiction. During a dispute over which denomination, Catholic or Orthodox, would have principal access to holy sites, Czar Nicholas I demanded recognition of his right to act as “protector” of all Orthodox subjects of the Ottoman Empire, a significant population stretching across strategic territories. The demand—which amounted to a right of intervention in the affairs of a foreign state—was couched in the terms of universal moral principles but cut to the heart of Ottoman sovereignty. Ottoman refusal prompted a Russian military advance into the Balkans and naval hostilities in the Black Sea. After six months Britain and France, fearing the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and with it the European balance, entered the war on the Ottoman side.