European rulers watched aghast as the former English colony assumed colossal new proportions

A book review in the New York Times.  From That Time Europe Tried to Bring Monarchy Back to Mexico by Natasha Wheatley.  The subheading is In “Habsburgs on the Rio Grande,” Raymond Jonas’s story of French-backed nation building in Mexico foreshadows the proxy battles of the Cold War. 

The seeds of freedom and republicanism and Age of Enlightenment ideals have never quite taken root in Mexico, a land of fantastic potential.  Hapsburgs on the Rio Grande covers part of that story.  

When Mexico first cast off Spanish rule, the country established its own independent monarchy — the First Mexican Empire — and then, in 1824, a republic. Two decades of turbulent constitutional change and civil strife followed. In 1845, the United States annexed Texas from Mexico. It then launched a war of aggression that would strip Mexico of half of its territory. U.S. ambitions appeared unlimited, its appetite for territory insatiable, and many Mexicans feared their young republic would succumb entirely.

They were not alone in their alarm. Across the Atlantic, as Mexico ceded California to end its war with the United States, European autocrats were busy stamping out liberal revolutions, many of which had drawn up constitutions inspired by the American one.

But it wasn’t just the existence of a stubbornly persistent democracy that made the United States a threat: European rulers watched aghast as the former English colony assumed colossal new proportions, stretching from coast to coast and dwarfing their own states in size. “In the space of two generations,” Jonas writes, “the American republic had transformed itself from a postcolonial backwater — distant and easily ignored — into an insolent continental powerhouse and an existential threat to Europe and European hegemony.”

They needed a strategy of containment. When the Civil War erupted, absorbing American energy and attention, European rulers, led by the French autocrat Napoleon III, seized the opportunity to check the rising hegemon. They joined forces with conservatives and traditionalists chafing at republican rule in Mexico to launch a wildly ambitious plan to restore monarchy and defend Mexico against the “Yankee imperialism” of the “Robber Republic” to the north.

On the pretext of collecting debt and protecting “persons and property,” British, Spanish and French forces formed a coalition of the willing and invaded Mexico in 1861. Cracks emerged quickly in this motley alliance. Facing military defeats, yellow fever and skeptical opinion at home, Britain and Spain soon fell away, leaving Napoleon III to wage his increasingly bloody “war of liberation” alone.

Looks like a great read and I suspect provides a rich context for the relevance of the Zimmerman Telegram in World War I, and foreshadowing some of the dynamics of the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s.