Britain’s post-imperial delusion We can no longer rely on our American Cousins

I only salvaged a few objects from my late dad’s home when it was cleared. But these included two that could be said to bookend his era of British history. The first was a barometer, presented to a Harrington ancestor “by his colleagues at HM Customs Harwich” in 1903. The second was a 1969 edition of the collected political speeches of Enoch Powell.

The barometer stands for Britain’s seafaring heyday, at which time most vessels would have carried one. Even for a bureaucrat such as my forebear, documenting the fruits of that seaborne trade in the Customs House in Harwich, this object would have been richly symbolic of the peculiar mix of risk-taking and scientific pedantry that characterised our island’s maritime tradition.

The Powell, meanwhile, captures a blizzard of contradictory feelings, from a Britain that had only very recently lost the empire this seafaring tradition founded. It is a confusion due, in part, to the way the loss happened: partly through overstretch and decadence; but with the death-blow dealt by one of Britain’s former colonies: America.

In turn, this close kinship allowed the impression to flourish of this being less a parricide than a passing of the baton. Together, so the hope went, the Anglophone “West” would leave imperialism as such behind, and foster a peaceful, prosperous world for all mankind. But will this comforting fantasy still hold, if 21st-century America abandons this neutrality and turns imperialist herself?

This seems to be where we are, all of a sudden: with the de facto global hegemony that America long exercised obliquely, through a web of purportedly neutral international rules and obligations, giving way to a more naked spirit of expansionism. This isn’t just about the spirit of “endless frontier federalism” extolled in Heritage Foundation director Kevin Roberts’ manifesto for the New Right, or Elon Musk’s ambition to colonise Mars. It appears to have earthly territorial implications too: recently, President-elect Donald Trump has refused to rule out using American economic or even military force to expand US territory into areas of perceived geopolitical interest. Potential targets reportedly include Greenland, Canada, and the Panama Canal.

Trump’s apparent willingness to comprehensively jettison America’s longstanding role as “world policeman”, in favour of active participation in great-power competition, has caused shockwaves around the world, with the Financial Times recently warning that he “risks turning America into a rogue state”. But leaving aside the question of whether “rogue states” are even conceptually possible, without a “global policeman” enforcing the rules, the prospect of America engaging openly in great-power competition raises deep-seated cultural and political questions for Britain in particular.

Beyond our seafaring history, my dad’s heirloom barometer might more romantically be said to stand for a peculiarly Anglo combination of home-loving and wanderlust, which together provide a common cultural stem for both Brits and Americans. It’s surely true that those historic Englishmen who left to settle the New World possessed these qualities in different proportion to those who roved but — like Bilbo Baggins — always assumed they’d return to the Shire eventually. Even so, whether Australian, Canadian, Brits or Americans, Anglo diaspora peoples tend to recognise this restless, roving streak in our national character.

By contrast, my dad’s Powell anthology captures crucial developments in the specific post-war political history of Britain, as distinct from those of the wider Anglo diaspora. In particular, Powell was excoriating on the self-soothing behaviour characteristic of Britain’s ruling class since the sun set on the empire: a bundle of delusions enabled in practice by the fantasy of diaspora “Anglosphere” continuity.

For when it came, the blow of Britain’s dethroning as Top Nation, by our own former colony, was softened by this sense of kinship. As the historian Nigel Ashton notes, Britain’s Prime Minister Harold Macmillan famously analogised the handover in classical terms, telling his colleague Richard Crossman while the war was still ongoing that the British “are the Greeks in this American empire” and should run the Allied Forces Headquarters “as the Greek slaves ran the operations of the Emperor Claudius”.

This quality of extended-family connection mixed with rivalry is vividly depicted in the literature of the immediate post-war period, such as John le Carré’s classic spy novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Against an early-Seventies backdrop of chilly air, clipped sentences, and penny-pinching, the novel’s British secret service agents refer to their American associates as “the Cousins”. It’s an ambivalent term, often used with mingled resentment and disdain: “Why tell the Cousins everything?”.

Nor was this wholly unwarranted. For while Macmillan may have been — initially at least — optimistic about Britain enjoying an influential post-imperial position, as favoured flunkeys to the new hegemon, others, including Powell, were more cold-eyed about the dynamic. As noted by James Barr in his history of British and American rivalry in the post-war Middle East, former British Prime Minister Anthony Eden reminisced that, in the late Forties, Powell warned him that “in the Middle East our great enemies are the Americans”. Eden admitted that it was only much later that he understood what Powell had already grasped: that cousins can be competitors as well as kin.

Nor was this Powell’s only moment of foresight. By the time the anthology I found on my dad’s shelves was published in 1969, he was already persona non grata, following a backlash to his notorious 1968 speech on Commonwealth immigration. But what strikes in Freedom and Reality is less Powell’s views on migration than his clear-eyed and prescient assessment of British ruling-class inability to adapt psychologically to the country’s shrunken reach and standing.

For more than a century, Powell points out, the British had been used to “Britain” also meaning India, and had thus, as he puts it, “got into the habit of thinking in what are sometimes called ‘global terms’”. In Powell’s view, having lost that real-world geographic reach, Britain should have refocused on Western Europe. But instead, unable to relinquish their habitual global perspective, the British elite conjured two ideas from the rubble of empire and war: firstly, the “Commonwealth”, and secondly the “special relationship” in which we were to be Greece to America’s Rome, in the joint pursuit of universal peace.

As Powell saw it, this represented a colossal self-delusion, in which “the vanishing last vestiges […] of Britain’s once vast Indian Empire have transformed themselves into a peacekeeping role on which the sun never sets, whereby […] in partnership with the United States we keep the peace of the world”. To him, this was a confection whose lack of basis in logic or reality was only outstripped by fantasies about the Commonwealth, an organisation he saw as riddled with contradiction and whose demands often ran counter to British national interest.

The half-century since Powell’s heyday doesn’t seem to have cured British elites of such fond dreams. Rather, it has compounded them by adding a third: the pan-European post-imperial project of mutual colonisation usually referred to as the EU. (Powell opposed this as well, also presciently, on the grounds that it would harm Parliamentary sovereignty.) And though Brexit went some way, for better or worse, to reversing Britain’s entanglement in that project, we still possess the same Hyacinth Bucket-like fixation with “Britain’s standing” on “the world stage”.

Nor have we shed the slavish commitment to showing “leadership” by outdoing even America in pursuit of US foreign policy priorities. Meanwhile, not even increasingly strident demands for “reparations” from supposed friends and allies in the “Commonwealth” seem capable of shifting the entrenched British ruling-class conviction that this entity is in some fundamental way a good and necessary thing for our country.

But one of the crucial pillars on which Britain’s post-war, post-imperial cope rested was always American geopolitical neutrality. The idea was that we needn’t mourn the empire, which was bad anyway, because Anglophone cultural and economic leadership would persist — it would just shift its capital, wealth, and geopolitical interests several thousand miles west. But it would still be “the West”, still the English-speaking world, and still, however tenuously, the same cousinly spirit.

But the idea that Britain is a “leader” alongside America in keeping global peace relies on America both doing the defence legwork, and also making at least a nominal effort to look neutral. Where does that leave Britain, then, if the former is on the chopping-block and the latter risks being jettisoned for a new Arctic “Great Game”? In the genuinely post-liberal geopolitics this would produce, Britain is unlikely to be able to go on sitting in the current three-way intersection between Europe, the “Commonwealth”, and the Cousins.

This juggling act surely only lasted as long as it did because America’s self-appointed “global policeman” role prevented any of this trifecta’s more delusional implications from biting too deeply. But swap out global-policeman America for expansionist America and things quickly get messy. Should Trump actually annex Canada, for example, a Commonwealth state of which King Charles remains (however nominally) head of state, how should Britain respond? Similarly, should he make moves on the currently self-governing Danish territory of Greenland, should Britain come down on the side of our European neighbours, or the “Cousins”?

At least some in Britain clearly feel closer kinship with English-speakers across the pond than our neighbours across the Channel. There have, for example, been recent calls both in Britain and the US for a much more special relationship; even for Britain’s annexation by the Cousins. Especially for those younger, more tech-optimistic “Right-wing Progressive” Brits with portable careers and an eye on the Elon Musk phenomenon, absorption by the USA would likely read more as a formality than a significant change — and in any case as a more advantageous proposition than cosying up to a stagnant and censorship-happy EU.

In terms both of Europe’s resurgent Right-wing ethnopolitics and Britain’s specific history, it would in fact make perfect Right-wing sense. Having sailed our barometers around the world, leaving diaspora communities worldwide, it follows logically that a putative ethnopolitics of Englishness would look beyond as well as within the British Isles, toward that diaspora as well. (Whether such a diaspora would want anything to do with modern Britain is, of course, a separate question.)

For those still committed to European-style social democracy, meanwhile, our immediate neighbours might seem more ideologically congenial than the New World, not to mention more geographically relevant. And Britain’s now-considerable Commonwealth-heritage population, meanwhile, has far fewer direct historic links to the USA. For such groups, “Cousins” is unlikely to conjure a picture of mid-century WASPs.

It is too early to tell which way Britain will jump, though Starmer’s reverse ferret this week on the Chagos handover may be a sign of things to come. But we are leaving the inshore waters of the long 20th century — and, as the seafarers used to say, the glass is falling. For, to extend Macmillan’s classical analogy, the Cousins seem on a trajectory from republic to empire. And if this is so, Britain’s long era of self-delusion will soon be at an end, and with it the deferral of hard choices. What matters more to us: our legacy of empire, our near abroad, or our historic diaspora? I’m not sure I want to find out. But Britain has no prospect of charting a new course until we are willing to face these questions.

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