Playing politics in war

A pdf of the talk I gave earlier this year at the Society for Military History conference: it's about the deft political strategy that allowed America to turn a military stalemate into an enduring victory in the War of 1812 — and, by contrast, how the British managed the precise opposite. (It helped that we were the underdog; in more recent wars, the United States has far more resembled the muscle-bound superpower of Great Britain in 1812.)