"There is nothing in the history of our foreign policy to compare with the prolonged and patient way in which Salisbury solved the difficulties of the British position in Egypt, isolating Egypt first from one country and then another, and finally staging the open challenge to France at Fashoda in 1898. Indeed, I would say that Salisbury laid down the lines on which British foreign policy was to develop for many years after his death: he saw that so long as we were quarrelling with France and Russia all over the world...we were dependent on German favour, and he was determined to escape this favour... At the very basis of his thoughts was the fact that has been brought home to us by two great wars: if England and Russia, the two Great Powers on the edge of Europe, fall out, they will have Europe, in the shape of Germany, on their backs. That is why Salisbury, greatest of our foreign secretaries, was the greatest advocate of Anglo-Russian cooperation."
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Prime Ministers of the United KingdomPoliticians from EnglandAnglicans from the United KingdomUniversity of Oxford facultyConservative Party (UK) politicians
Original Language: English
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Sources
A. J. P. Taylor, Essays in English History (1976), pp. 125-126
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Robert_Gascoyne-Cecil%2C_3rd_Marquess_of_Salisbury
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Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury
Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (3 February 1830 – 22 August 1903), styled Lord Robert Cecil before the death of his elder brother in 1865, and Viscount Cranborne from June 1865 until his father died in April 1868, was a three-time Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, during 1885–1886, 1886–1892 and 1895–1902.
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