During recent months, many people have been looking back to the beginning of the 20th century to find parallels with our present circumstances. The position of Britain then-both with respect to its dominance and the first signs of its decline-has been compared to that of the US today; the significance of the rise of Germany then has been compared to the anticipated emergence of China as a genuine world power. And Norman Angell's belief-expressed on the eve of the first world war-that interdependence was rendering war obsolete is seen as the equivalent of the current faith in the pacific effects of globalisation and the spread of democracy.
There is another parallel which deserves mention. Today, a few thoughtful conservatives-among them Robert Conquest and John O'Sullivan-have been making the case for an English-speaking political union. The argument is that the US, Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and some other smaller entities have so much in common in terms of political culture, values and institutions that they should band together and enter into some sort of formal arrangement to act in concert-to create what some are now referring to as a political "Anglosphere."
This line of argument almost exactly replicates one advanced by a group of highly intelligent, well-educated and well-connected young men at the beginning of the last century. The group-known as Milner's Kindergarten after its patron Lord Milner, or sometimes as the Cliveden set because of its connection with the Astors-included among others Philip Kerr (later, as Lord Lothian, Britain's ambassador to the US during the second world war), Lionel Curtis (founder of Chatham House) and Geoffrey Dawson (to be for 25 years editor of The Times, when that newspaper still had great political influence).
The historian Norman Rose has recently written about this group in terms that could be applied, almost word for word, to today's advocates of an English-speaking union: "What they meant by 'doing things in the world' was primarily to sustain the Anglo-Saxon fraternity. Dedicated to an intimate partnership between the dominions and Britain... and a strengthening of the Anglo-American connection, they aimed in this way to preserve Britain's distinctive role in international affairs." The similarity extends also to what they disliked and feared: "For Kerr and his friends, France was the bogeyman of Europe. There was an almost paranoid fear that scheming French politicians would embroil Britain in disputes at variance with its genuine interests."
The ideas propounded by the group reflected both the reality of British imperial power and the fear that, unless girded up, that power was doomed to decline. This view had enough appeal that at the imperial conference of 1911 a proposal was made-it was put by Joseph Ward, prime minister of New Zealand, the most British of the dominions-for an imperial parliament, to be responsible for formulating common foreign and defence policies for the empire.
The proposal was promptly shot down by Canada and South Africa, both of whom had substantial non-English populations that were not susceptible to the charms of Anglo-Saxon tradition. Indeed, while such an arrangement would have served the interests of Britain, as the strongest party, it was inimical to the national sentiments of countries that had only just moved from subservient status to independence.
If the idea of an English-speaking union, based on a common heritage and shared values, was not acceptable in 1911, what are its prospects today? A consideration of that question should begin by considering an episode that occurred almost exactly midway between the imperial conference of 1911 and the present-the Suez crisis of 1956.
This crisis erupted a mere decade after the end of the second world war. Those Americans and Britons who had worked so closely together to win that war were still running things: Eisenhower and his generation in Washington, Eden and his in London. Britain still possessed a vast empire and very substantial armed forces based on compulsory national service. Britain and France were America's principal allies. The cold war was going strong. Within a year the Soviet Union would put Sputnik into space, shaking American confidence.
In that year, 1956, the Egyptian military dictator, Gamal Abdel Nasser, seized the Suez Canal from the company that owned it, (the Suez Canal company, in which the British and the French owned shares) and proceeded to nationalise it. Both the British and French regarded this as an outrageously immoral act, and even worse, they believed it was a serious threat to their strategic interests. The British still had substantial colonial holdings in southeast Asia, close links with New Zealand and Australia, and a vital interest in middle east oil. They regarded the canal as the "jugular vein" of their imperial system, and Nasser's actions as unacceptable.
After some futile negotiation, the British and French, acting in collusion with Israel, decided to seize back the canal from Nasser. They did so in secret -partly in order to maintain military surprise, partly because they believed that the US would be unsympathetic to what they were doing. They acted-very slowly and very ineptly, it has to be said-but before they achieved their goal the US publicly denounced their action and led its condemnation at the UN. Even more decisively, by manipulating the currency and oil markets to create a crisis for Britain and France, and by using the US Sixth Fleet to harass the Anglo-French task force as it approached Port Said, Washington forced the abandonment of the military expedition. The upshot was that these two principal allies of the US, which were also two of the world's leading democracies, were publicly humiliated before the eyes of the world. It was a truly traumatic event, especially for the British, whose pretensions to still being a great global power were never to recover.
Why did the US act as it did? From a mixture of motives. First, there was a long-standing distaste for and suspicion of European imperialism, of which this crisis was seen as a clear example. Second, there was a cold war concern not to alienate the Arab countries and drive them into Moscow's arms. Third, there was a realpolitik concern to displace the British and French as the main influence over the oil-producing countries. Fourth, because of the complicating factor of the Hungarian rising, which coincided with the Suez crisis. And finally and not least, the whole thing happened in the middle of an American presidential campaign, which made it necessary for the Eisenhower administration to appear whiter than white in terms of high principle. (Not long after the event, Selwyn Lloyd, the British foreign minister, was left gasping in astonishment when John Foster Dulles, the then US secretary of state, blandly asked him, "Selwyn, why did you stop? Why didn't you go through with it and get Nasser down?" A real case of adding insult to injury, one might think.)
Suez bears on my theme in two illuminating respects. First, it happened at a time when the political and cultural ties between America and Britain were much stronger than they are presently. Only a little more than a decade earlier, Britain had hosted over 1m American troops on its soil for an extended period; British troops had fought under US generals and Americans under British generals, in what was an extraordinarily intimate arrangement. As well as all that, in 1956 the US still had what it no longer has: a Wasp establishment, with all that meant in terms of tastes and values and affinities. There was no such thing as multiculturalism to cloud the issue; no doubt concerning the superiority of that cultural tradition which the two countries had in common.
The point is that even in those exceptional circumstances, cultural affinities and shared traditions were not enough to ensure common foreign policy goals, to override hard calculations of national interests. Indeed, that should have become apparent to the British several years earlier, when Truman had cut off Lend-Lease to Britain almost as soon as the war ended, and when the US had driven a hard bargain with Keynes concerning a loan to prevent Britain, bled white by the war, from going bankrupt.
Now if that were true nearly half a century ago, it must be much truer today, when the common culture that is being appealed to as the basis of unity is so much more attenuated-by massive immigration on both sides of the Atlantic; by a strident and aggressive multiculturalism that insists that the Anglo-Saxon culture and tradition are no better than any other culture and tradition; and by educational establishments that do not regard the transmission of a cultural heritage as one of their responsibilities.
In these circumstances, it is surely a serious error to believe that a traditional culture is capable of providing the foundation for a worldwide English-speaking union. After all, in the face of the policies of Tony Blair-whom I have characterised elsewhere as the British Gorbachev, in that he believes that statesmanship consists of taking flying leaps into the future without any clear idea of where one will land-that tradition and that political culture are proving incapable of keeping even Britain united. Already the term "British" has a diminished application.
In pointing these things out I am in no way criticising the US. I do so only to try to contest the argument that cultural compatibility can and should form the basis of a common foreign policy. It cannot. Was it Nietzsche or was it De Gaulle who described states as "cold monsters"? In any case it was Britain's own Lord Palmerston who insisted that "we have no eternal allies and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow."
That unsentimental formulation is well known. What is perhaps less well known is that Palmerston was doing no more than paraphrasing something said several generations earlier by George Washington in his Farewell Address of 1796: "The nation which indulges toward another an habitual hatred or an habitual fondness is in some degree a slave. It is a slave to its animosity or to its affection, either of which is sufficient to lead it astray from its duty and its interest." Any case for a foreign policy union or association of English-speaking peoples will have to be made in terms, not of culture, but of the national interests of the parties involved, and those interests will have to be continually reinterpreted and recalculated as circumstances change.
The second point to make about the Suez crisis is that, immediately after it, the French and the British did make such a recalculation-and drew diametrically different conclusions from the experience. The French conclusion was that never again should they depend on the Americans. There thus began the pattern of-from an American point of view-infuriating French behaviour as a prickly, independent, ungrateful, undependable, critical associate of the US, always concerned with creating arrangements that would lessen its dependence on American power.
The conclusion drawn by the British was utterly different. It was that never again must they get on the wrong side of the Americans; that the idea of trying to act as an independent force, or with partners other than the Americans, was not a good one. In his inquest on Suez, prepared in 1957 for the chiefs of staff, General Keightley, the commander of the Anglo-French Force, concluded that "it was the action of the US which really defeated us... This situation with the US must at all costs be prevented from arising again." All subsequent prime ministers have concurred with this.
Theorists of international relations have coined the term "bandwagoning" to describe the policy of states attaching themselves to a dominant power, accepting its leadership and adopting its policies in the hope of sharing the benefits accruing from its dominance. Ever since Suez, Britain has been the biggest practitioner of bandwagoning in our time-though it has gone to great trouble to disguise the fact and to preserve its dignity by much talk about Greeks and Romans, and a special relationship.
In fairness, it should be said that as long as the cold war was a going concern, this policy was a sensible one, since the US and Britain agreed on the overriding goal of frustrating and, if possible, defeating the evil empire. Any differences were confined to second and third-order questions. But since the end of the cold war and the emergence of the US as the sole superpower, things have become more complicated.
Bandwagoning with one superpower to thwart another (and much less attractive) superpower was one thing; bandwagoning with the sole superpower, the undisputed hegemon, is quite another. It goes against the long-established British tradition of attempting to balance-either alone or by the creation of a coalition-any power that is, or threatens to be, dominant. This has been the central tenet of British policy for the last four centuries.
Why has Britain now abandoned the balance of power principle in the case of American hegemony? Several reasons suggest themselves. One is the sheer force of habit acquired over the decades of the second world war and the cold war (and the importance of habit in politics is often underestimated). A second is the complicating factor, already discussed, of a shared political culture and language, which encourages ways of thinking about the relationship that are different from the realism of power politics. A third is Britain's European dilemma-in? out? halfway in?-which makes the US connection especially attractive, in that it can be taken to extend the range of available options, and get Britain off the hook of opting for either complete immersion in Europe or isolation on its fringe. And then there is the comforting belief that while non-democratic hegemons are nasty brutes, democratic ones are benign and non-threatening (at least as far as other democracies are concerned) and therefore do not need to be balanced.
No doubt all these factors have played a part. The crucial question is: Will the policy of giving an overriding precedence to the US connection serve British interests? The answer, I'm afraid, is: it all depends. If Britain tries to make culture and values do the work that only national interests can do, it will fail for the reasons I have outlined. Again, if Britain assumes an identity of interests between itself and the US, it will be disappointed. The interests of the US are truly global, those of Britain regional. For Britain, its relationship with the US is paramount; for the US, its relationship with Britain is only one among many, and, necessarily given Britain's comparative weight, less important than some others. In the next few decades it is almost certain that east Asia-China, Japan, the Koreas-is going to loom larger in US calculations than any other part of the world. Britain will play no significant part in that unfolding drama.
Even in the case of Europe, where both countries have serious interests, the problems for Britain and the US are different. For the former, the question of how to relate to the changes occurring in Europe is urgent and sharply divisive domestically. How it is answered could result in political exclusion from a region in which Britain has been intimately involved ever since it came into existence-or, on the other hand, in its inclusion in a political entity run on lines largely incompatible with its own political culture and obnoxious to many in Britain.
None of this applies to the US. Washington may or may not have been right to encourage European unity over the last five decades, but the emergence of a united Europe is not going to constitute a life-threatening problem for it. Given its terrible demographics and the problems inherent in keeping a necessarily fragile unity intact, Europe is not going to be a serious power rival to the US. And given its dirigiste, welfare-oriented, protectionist inclinations, it is unlikely to constitute an economic threat that a market-oriented US cannot handle.
Indeed, it should be acknowledged that, from an American point of view, the worst outcome of the European venture might well be its catastrophic failure. For it has been an elite-run project, carried on in the face of popular hostility or indifference, and if it collapses, the current political elites of Europe would be utterly discredited. As Henry Kissinger has observed, this in turn would open the door to extremists of both the left and right, who would be unpleasant-though again not life-threatening-for America to live with. Already, many in Europe see the US as a domineering, interfering hyperpower, endangering not only the interests but the identity of Europe. How much stronger would these sentiments be in an atmosphere poisoned by a sense of failure and impotence?
Britain has declined to act in its traditional role of balance maintainer with respect to the US. Could that change? Traditionally, such balancing was done by the creation of coalitions; but there is no way that Britain is going to join with France (or Europe) and China against the US. I would like to suggest, however, that there is another way in which Britain could act as a balancer: a balancer from within the camp of the dominant power. Or, to change the metaphor, if it is going to stay on the bandwagon it could perform the valuable function of urging the need for careful steering and a judicious use of the brakes.
The British should reflect on the experience of their own country as the only hegemon that did not attract a hostile coalition against itself. It avoided that fate by showing great restraint, prudence and discrimination in the use of its power-by generally standing aloof and restricting itself to the role of balancer of last resort. In doing so it was heeding the warning given it by Edmund Burke, just as its era of supremacy was beginning: "I must fairly say, I dread our own power and our own ambition; I dread our being too much dreaded... We may say that we shall not abuse this astonishing and hitherto unheard of power. But every other nation will think we shall abuse it. It is impossible but that, sooner or later, this state of things must produce a combination against us which may end in our ruin."
I believe that the US is in dire need of such a warning. A decade ago, Margaret Thatcher admirably urged a hesitant President Bush to take decisive action in the Gulf. It was the right thing to do, given the vital importance of the Gulf, the uncertainty accompanying the ending of the cold war, and, perhaps, the character of George Bush. But in the years since then the problem has been different. What we have seen is a pattern of indiscriminate and irresolute-but unrelenting-busyness, of interfering and lecturing, of a promiscuous though largely ineffectual use of force and of sanctions. It is a pattern of behaviour that is alienating an increasing number of states and will ultimately be dangerous for the US.
I believe that the most useful role that Britain can sensibly play as a friend and ally of the US is to urge discrimination, prudence and restraint on it. For it is those qualities-not a faith in American exceptionalism-that will in the long run enable the US to avoid the usual fate of assertive hegemons.
