Mark Steyn - After America

A number of readers, disputing the relevance of this comparison, sent me mocking letters pointing out Britain’s balance of payments and other deteriorating economic indicators from the early twentieth century on.

True. Great powers do not decline for identical reasons and one would not expect Britain’s imperial overstretch to lead to the same consequences as America’s imperial understretch. Nonetheless, my correspondents are perhaps too sophisticated and nuanced to grasp the somewhat more basic point I was making. Perched on his uncle’s shoulders that day was a young lad who grew up to become the historian Arnold Toynbee. He recalled the mood of Her Majesty’s jubilee as follows: “There is, of course, a thing called history, but history is something unpleasant that happens to other people. We are comfortably outside all of that I am sure.” 1

The end of history, 1897 version.

Permanence is always an illusion. Mighty nations can be entirely transformed mighty fast, especially when history comes a-calling. The “something unpleasant” doesn’t have to be especially so: national decline is at least partly psychological—and therefore what matters is accepting the psychology of decline. Within two generations, for example, the German people became just as obnoxiously pacifist as they once were bloodily militarist, and as militantly “European” as they once were menacingly nationalist.

Well, who can blame ’em? You’d hardly be receptive to pitches for national greatness after half a century of Kaiser Bill, Weimar, the Third Reich, and the Holocaust.

Yet what are we to make of the British? They were on the right side of all the great conflicts of the last century; and they have been, in the scales of history, a force for good in the world—perhaps the single greatest force for good. In the second half of the twentieth century, even as their colonies advanced to independence, dozens of newborn nation-states retained the English language, English parliamentary structures, English legal system, English notions of liberty, not to mention cricket and all manner of other cultural ties. Insofar as the world functions at all, one can easily make the case that it’s due largely to the Britannic inheritance. Today, from South Africa to India to Australia, the regional heavyweights across the map are of British descent, as are three-sevenths of the G7, and two-fifths of the permanent members of the UN Security Council—and in a just world it would be three-fifths. The usual rap against the Security Council is that it’s the Second World War victory parade preserved in aspic, but, if that were so, Canada would have a greater claim to a permanent seat than either France or China. The reason Ottawa didn’t make the cut is because a third anglophone nation and a second realm of King George VI would have made too obvious a simple truth—that, when it mattered, the Anglosphere was the all but lone defender of civilization and of liberty.

And then there’s the hyperpower. The transition from Pax Britannica to Pax Americana, from the old lion to its transatlantic progeny, was one of the smoothest transfers of power in history—and the practical, demonstrable reality of what Winston Churchill called the “English-speaking peoples,” a Britannic family with America as the prodigal son, but a son nevertheless and the greatest of all. In his sequel to Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples , Andrew Roberts writes:

Just as we do not today differentiate between the Roman Republic and the imperial period of the Julio-Claudians when we think of the Roman Empire, so in the future no one will bother to make a distinction between the British Empire-led and the American Republic-led periods of English-speaking dominance between the late-eighteenth and the twenty-first centuries. It will be recognized that in the majestic sweep of history they had so much in common—and enough that separated them from everyone else—that they ought to be regarded as a single historical entity, which only scholars and pedants will try to describe separately.

As to what “separated them from everyone else,” there has always been a distinction between the “English-speaking peoples” and the rest of “the West,” and at hinge moments in human history that distinction has proved critical. Continental Europe has given us plenty of nice paintings and mellifluous symphonies, French wine and Italian actresses, but, for all our fetishization of multiculturalism, you can’t help noticing that when it comes to the notion of a political West—with a sustained commitment to individual liberty and representative government—the historical record looks a lot more unicultural and indeed (given that most of these liberal democracies other than America share the same head of state) uniregal.

Many Continental nations have constitutions dating all the way back to the disco era: the United States Constitution is not only older than the French, German, Italian, and Spanish constitutions, it’s older than all of them put together. The entire political class of Portugal, Spain, and Greece spent their childhoods living under dictatorships. So did Jacques Chirac and Angela Merkel. We forget how rare in this world is sustained peaceful constitutional evolution, and rarer still outside the Anglosphere. “The English-speaking peoples did not invent the ideas that nonetheless made them great,” writes Roberts. “The Romans invented the concept of Law, the Greeks one-freeman-one-vote democracy, the Dutch modern capitalism….” But it is the English world that has managed to make these blessings seemingly permanent features of the landscape. Take England out of the picture and there are not just a lot of holes in the map—but the absence of most of the modern world.

As always, Britain’s decline started with the money. When Europe fell into war in 1939, FDR was willing to help London fight it, but he was determined to exact a price: not just a bit of quid pro quo (American base rights in British colonies) but a serious financial and geopolitical squeeze. The U.S. “Lend-Lease” program to the United Kingdom ended in September 1946.

London paid off the final installment of its debt in December 2006, and the Economic Secretary, Ed Balls, sent with the check a faintly surreal accompanying note thanking Washington for its support during a war fast fading from living memory. 2Look at how Britain shrank during those six decades.

In 1942, Winston Churchill told the House of Commons, “I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.” 3But in the end he had no choice. The money drained to Washington, and power and influence followed.

In terms of global order, the Anglo-American transition was so adroitly managed that most of us aren’t quite sure when it took place.

Some scholars like to pinpoint it to the middle of 1943. One month, the British had more men under arms than the Americans. The next, the Americans had more men under arms than the British. The baton of global leadership had been passed. And, if it didn’t seem that way at the time, that’s because it was as near a seamless transition as could be devised—although it was hardly “devised” at all, at least not by London.

Yet we live with the benefits of that transition to this day: to take a minor but not inconsequential example, one of the critical links in the post-9/11 Afghan campaign was the British Indian Ocean Territory. As its name would suggest, that’s a British dependency, but it has a U.S. military base—just one of many pinpricks on the map where the Royal Navy’s Pax Britannica evolved into Washington’s Pax Americana with nary a thought: from U.S. naval bases in Bermuda to the Anzus alliance Down Under to Canadian officers at Norad in Cheyenne Mountain, London’s military ties with its empire were assumed by the United States, and life and global order went on.