Daily Times

2015 is indeed an event filled year that could help put some of the “great” back into Great Britain. June 15 marked the 800th anniversary of the signing of the Magna Carta or Great Charter. Today, Britain celebrates the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, in which the combined armies under the Duke of Wellington finally defeated Napoleon, who would be permanently exiled to St Helena in the eastern Atlantic Ocean. October 25 will mark the 600th year since the Battle of Agincourt, in which King Henry V’s relatively tiny “band of brothers” vanquished a numerically superior French army possibly 10 times larger.

The story of the Magna Carta is well known. Forced on King John of England on June 15, 1215, at Runnymede near Windsor, the document made peace between the unpopular king and a group of rebel barons and lords of the realm. The agreement promised to protect Church rights, keep barons from illegal imprisonment and guarantee access to swift justice with trials by jury. The implementation was to be carried out by a council of some two dozen barons.

However, neither side honoured their commitments. Pope Innocent III annulled the document and the short First Baron’s War followed. At the end of the war in 1217, King John’s son Henry III reissued the pact, which was called Magna Carta. Magna Carta has since taken on great historical stature as the first relatively modern document to specify rights and safeguards for certain lords at the expense of the ruling sovereign.

Waterloo marked the end of Napoleon’s dominance in Europe. After returning from exile in March 1815, Napoleon formed an army and, two days before the battle at Waterloo, defeated the Prussian Army under Field Marshal Gebhard von Blucher at Ligny. Hence, Blucher had to reform his army and move it to Waterloo. While both sets of combatants had roughly equal numbers of about 70,000 each, Britain only mustered up just over a third of the coalition, causing a former British Chief of the Defence Staff to say, not long ago, that this was the first example of a NATO-like military alliance in which the allies did much of the fighting. The battle raged all day. Wellington was to remark that the battle was “the nearest run thing you ever saw”. Fortunately, the coalition line held long enough for Blucher to engage and it was au revoir Bonaparte!

Aside from Shakespeare’s dramatisation of Agincourt on St Crispin’s day and Henry V’s famous oration, that battle is less well known than Magna Carta or Waterloo. Henry’s army probably numbered between 5,000 to 10,000 and was closer to the smaller figure. The battle was fought on a relatively small field that had been sodden by the rain.

While actual accounts differ, the heavily armoured French knights and foot soldiers became trapped in the muddy quagmire. And the thousands of English archers were armed with longbows and arrows that penetrated protective armour. As the cavalry was contending with the largely impassable ground, flights of arrows mowed down horses and riders alike. French knights drowned in standing water. More were slaughtered by English foot soldiers as they lay helpless in the mud, trapped in heavy armour, rendering them immobile.

Aside from the coincidence of each of the above events occurring in the 15th year of a new century, are there any other takeaways? Certainly, several from Agincourt come to mind. As new dangers and threats emerge, particularly radical groups energised by the most perverted distortions of Islam to justify horrific practices, countering them has proved difficult.

The longbow and impassable battlefield allowed England to win a major victory against seemingly overwhelming numbers in 1415 and we need to determine what the modern equivalent of the longbow is, to fire against these merchants of death. And more importantly, we need to learn how to turn future geostrategic battlefields into quagmires that trap our enemies and not us. These require a new mindset for the 21st century that takes into account not only the possibility of state versus state conflict like Waterloo, but defeating groups such as the Islamic State with political visions of building a new Caliphate based on their perverted interpretations of Islam. A new Magna Carta is needed for the civilised world, which declares these radical terrorist organisations enemies of civilisation and Islam and rallies the rest of world in a campaign to defeat these agents of death. And we better get started now.

The writer is chairman of the Killowen Group that advises leaders of government and business and senior advisor at Washington DC’s Atlantic Council. His latest book, due out this fall, is A Handful of Bullets: How the Murder of an Archduke a Century Ago Still Menaces Peace Today