The distinguished historian Andrew Roberts, writing on the Quillette web site, asks,
How will the United States react domestically should she be dislodged from her role of global top-dog power by China? As well as the obvious economic and strategic ramifications of an end to American imperium, there will be profound emotional and psychological effects on a society that has taken its hegemony for granted for more than three-quarters of a century.
Seizing on a couple of imperfect analogies, Mr. Roberts adopts “the Kübler-Ross Grief Cycle – the five-stage process by which individuals deal with tragedy, bereavement, and a dawning knowledge of imminent demise” as his framework and the decline of the British Empire, beginning with the abandonment of India in 1947, as a comparable descent from superpower to run-of-the-mill nation state.
President Biden’s boastful reaction to the disaster in Afghanistan calls to the historian’s mind Prime Minister Attlee’s insistence “that India would remain part of the British Commonwealth (as it was still then designated) and attached to the Western anti-Communist bloc”, except that Biden was further detached from reality:
“Last night in Kabul,” Biden announced in the White House State Dining Room on August 31st, “the United States ended 20 years of war in Afghanistan – the longest war in American history. We completed one of the biggest airlifts in history, with more than 120,000 people evacuated to safety. … No nation has ever done anything like it in all of history. Only the United States had the capacity and the will and the ability to do it, and we did it today.”
In fact, plenty of nations have the capacity, will, and ability to lose wars, but the United States had not done it since Vietnam. And as Biden’s speeches and actions have subsequently shown, his administration is in denial about the message that defeat at the hands of the Taliban sends to vacillating allies and jubilant antagonists alike.
Britain then proceeded to “Anger”, the next Kübler-Ross stage, “manifested in the fury that greeted Anthony Eden over his invasion of – and subsequent withdrawal from – the [Suez] Canal Zone” in 1956 but “symptomatic of a deeper anger about Britain’s dwindling position on the world stage”. Mr. Roberts thinks that the “mid-term elections in November 2022 may see at least some outpouring of anger over American loss of hegemony”. It seems to me more likely that the multifarious domestic failures of the Biden Administration will overshadow its fecklessness abroad. Afghanistan wasn’t quite parallel to Suez. The American withdrawal was generally perceived as the product of the incumbent Administration’s ineptitude rather than of American weakness. By contrast, Britain was ordered by the United States to retreat from Suez and had no choice but to obey. There was no way to deny that it was no longer a first-class power on the world stage.
Still, something like Suez could shake our national confidence before Mr. Biden shuffles off the coil of office. Russia and China are each poised to invade and conquer an American ally, while the Biden crew has proved unable to arrest Iran’s rise in the Middle East. Any of those events would render any notion of “American hegemony” dubious, if not altogether fanciful.
Historical Britain and hypothetical America diverge further in the next stage, “Negotiation”. Britain negotiated with America to become its loyal, though not subservient, junior partner. America will not (one hopes!) offer itself as a junior partner to the Xi Dynasty, and it is doubtful, as Mr. Roberts says with distinct understatement, “that the United States can negotiate with her opponents and rivals successfully in an effort to defend a rules-based world order once she is eclipsed as the world’s pre-eminent superpower”. The only plausible “Negotiations” will conducted with ourselves, devising ways to re-bolster national self-esteem through imaginary achievements.
The British “Depression” stage is easy to recognize: the “total bipartisan commitment to national decline” that marked the 1970’s. America’s similar stage will predictably make our present troubles look picayune:
When the United States recognizes that it no longer matters in the world as it once did, that key allies are distancing themselves and flirting with China, that the global organizations erected by Bretton Woods and Dumbarton Oaks no longer guarantee her primacy, and that there is little she can do about it, then depression will hit America. It will leave her confused, morose, and liable to turn in on herself politically. It will be an ugly time.
Which brings us to the fifth and final stage, “Acceptance”. That Britain emerged from “Depression” –
was almost entirely down to one person, Margaret Thatcher. The Falklands War seemed to arrest the lamentable drift and surrender since Suez, and the spectacular victory in the Cold War, in part due to her close alliance with Ronald Reagan, finally provided closure after the loss of Empire. Although she could never again be top-dog power, Britain’s replacement by her close ally was palatable because the Special Relationship had been shown to work well for both countries and also for the wider world in ridding the world of Soviet Communism.
But that is an impossible outcome in a world dominated by a totalitarian Red China, unless America is transformed into an unrecognizable place. Mr. Roberts hopes that “the United States can grasp the leadership of the West once more instead of wallowing in self-destructive and profoundly decadent obsessions with its own faults, real and imagined”. That is a feeble hope when the most powerful forces in our culture regard “wallowing in self-destructive and profoundly decadent obsessions” as the essence of virtue.
Nothing in history is inevitable. In many ways, the outlook for America appeared similarly grim and gloomy in 1979, the year epitomized by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Iranian hostage crisis. Yet from that nadir our land rose again, both shaking off stagflation and defeating the most serious totalitarian threat in human history without a catastrophic war. Perhaps Bismarck will once again be proven right about God’s “special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America”. We may pray and hope.
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