ARE WE WITNESSING the going down of the sun on the global hegemony of the English-speaking peoples?
Ever since Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth destroyed the naval power of England’s principal commercial rivals, the Dutch, in the early 1650s, the English-speaking peoples have maintained a more-or-less unbroken upward trajectory towards world domination.
When an exhausted United Kingdom finally passed the torch to the Americans at the end of World War II, that hegemony became, for all practical purposes, unchallengeable. Certainly, the Soviets could threaten the USA, but they could not carry out their threats without destroying themselves in the process. In the end, the effort required to remain militarily competitive with United States destroyed the Soviet Union. Victory in the Cold War left the USA as the world’s sole superpower. Was there ever a conquest so complete?
It is difficult for the English-speaking peoples to grasp the true extent of their global dominance. Both the United Kingdom and the United States have always presented themselves as accidental imperialists. Neither nation would ever own up to being a rapacious, all-conquering power on the model of Napoleonic France or Nazi Germany. The English like to tell the world that their empire just sort of happened. “One damn thing led to another, and before we knew what was happening all the world’s oceans and a quarter of its land surface had somehow become our responsibility!” The Americans are even worse. The USA, they insist, is not, and never has been, an empire. “The only influence the United States has ever lifted its hand to extend is that of Lady Liberty!” By and large, the citizens of both imperial powers have swallowed these ‘anti-imperial’ imperial myths hook, line and sinker.
From the historical perspectives of the French, the Germans, the Japanese, and now the Chinese, however, the English-speaking peoples’ enormous power (not to mention their hypocrisy) has been intolerable.
Not even France’s complete mastery of the European continent was sufficient to defeat the intrigues of “Perfidious Albion”. Napoleon’s disastrous invasion of Russia was undertaken in response to the Russian Tsar’s refusal to abide by the French Emperor’s “Continental System” – essentially an economic assault on the British economy. Both proved spectacularly unsuccessful. Britain was wealthy enough to sponsor an endless succession of wars against Napoleon’s empire.
Germany’s fear of the British navy, which led to the naval arms race that did so much to sour relations between the two powers was, as subsequent events were to demonstrate, entirely justified. Against all international expectations and prohibitions, the British Navy mounted a complete blockade of Germany from the outbreak of World War I in 1914 until the signing of the Versailles Treaty in 1919. Not only munitions, but also food, fuel and pharmaceuticals were prevented from reaching the civilian population. Hundreds of thousands of Germans died as a direct consequence of the British blockade – most of them either very old, or very young. That this deliberate starvation of civilians continued even after the November 1918 armistice contributed mightily to German revanchism.
We tend to regard the Nazis’ lust for world domination as absurdly ambitious. But try to see the global situation in the 1920s and 30s from the point of view of the losers.
The prime geo-political beneficiaries of World War I were the British. Not only did they swallow-up Germany’s colonial territories in Africa, but they also made sure that the strategically vital energy resources of the Middle East were theirs to exploit and control. The Americans, meanwhile, had become the world’s creditors. Everyone owed them money – the victors as well as the vanquished – and the American bankers insisted on every debt being repaid to the last cent. What Hitler subsequently attempted to do in the Russian lands was no more than the British had succeeded in doing in India and Africa; or the Americans in the West, the Caribbean and the Philippines.
The Japanese Empire experienced exactly the same frustrations in East Asia and the Pacific. If their imperial ambitions were ever to be fulfilled, it would first be necessary to dislodge the English-speaking powers. That no alternative courses of action were possible was driven home to the Japanese first by their defeat at the hands of the Soviet General, Zhukov, whose Siberian Army prevented their northward expansion; and then by the imposition of a crippling oil embargo by the Americans in response to Japanese military successes in China. The devastating impact of that embargo on Japan’s military effectiveness made the attack on Pearl Harbour inevitable.
In the Twenty-First Century it is the turn of the Chinese to experience the chafing effects of the “Five Eyes” brotherhood of English-speaking nations. Having assumed all the political risk of transforming its peasant farmers into the world’s proletariat, it finds itself prohibited by the Americans from reaping the rewards.
American and British finance, having over-reached themselves in the first decade of the Twenty-First Century, now find themselves hamstrung by the socially crippling legacies of their expatriation of industrial jobs to China and other cheap labour countries. The angry remnants of their once proud working- and middle-classes have become, at once, indispensable and profoundly hostile to the politics of post-industrial Britain and America. Their militant nostalgia for the era in which they were permitted to share in the fruits of their respective nation’s imperial success can be exploited electorally in the short term, but only at the long term cost of deranging their political systems irremediably.
Before the astonished eyes of the world, the two great English-speaking powers, the United States and the United Kingdom, are being undone. Victims, not of external enemies, but of the bitter disappointments of their own citizens.
Earlier this week, the American President, Donald Trump, told the General Assembly of the United Nations that the world belongs not to globalists, but to patriots. But, a country that has made itself the master of the world cannot be anything other than a globalist. To settle for mere patriotism is to settle for imperialism in one country. Hegemons cannot do that. In all the history of the world, no hegemonic nation, or bloc, has ever succeeded in making itself great “again”.
What else is Boris Johnson but living proof that the imperial souffle doesn’t rise twice.