Since the California Gold Rush of 1849, territorial expansion has been driven by a lust for minerals. And today the case is no different. As has been widely noted by the gob-struck press, Greenland conceals all sorts of big gray rocks underneath its mile-long layer of ice, within which lurk fortunes in gallium, cerium, and lanthanum — essential ingredients for iPhones, jets, and nuclear weapons. Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates have already invested untold sums in KoBold Metals, which will use AI to figure out where all those goodies are hidden. Not to mention the fresh-water riches locked in icebergs — a few of which might have come in handy during the Los Angeles fires. Poland Springs and Evian may soon face stiff competition from those massive chunks of ice, which hold one-fifth of the world’s supply of fresh water.

Yet to be honest, even before the present brouhaha, America was already brandishing its military supremacy in Greenland. For the past 60 years or so, the US has essentially ruled the frozen land from an outpost on the northwest coast, a United States Space Force base called Pituffik (in local Inuit, “the place the dogs are tied”). The natives are too busy staying alive during sunless winters to care about what goes on at the northernmost tip of their island. Just across the North Pole from Russia, Pituffik is home to a large and extended family of squadrons, satellite control networks, and ballistic missile early warning sensors.

The base was established in secret under the code name Operation Blue Jay after the Germans occupied Denmark in 1940. An armada of 120 ships, 12,000 men, and 300,000 tons of cargo was needed to build it, plus a brutal schedule of continuous work through the endless daylight of summer. The project was comparable to the Herculean efforts to construct the Panama Canal half a century before — yet another strip of land presently tempting MAGA.

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The only hiccup in America’s show of snow-globe supremacy came in 1968, when a cabin fire doomed a B-52 bomber with four B28FI nuclear bombs on board, which crashed in Baffin Bay. The conventional explosives onboard detonated the nuclear payload, resulting in widespread radioactive contamination. The good news is that not all of the H-bombs exploded. The bad news is that one still rests at the bottom of the bay.

Not that Americans care much about radioactive fallout near the North Pole. Or popular sovereignty, for that matter. When did Americans ever shed a tear over displaced Algonquins, Comanches, or Iroquois — much less Danes, Norsemen, Paleo-Inuits, or any other Greenlander lost to frost-bitten history? Thankfully, the Trump administration already has a scheme for reparations in mind. When Don Jr showed up in the territory’s capital, Nuuk, right before his dad’s second inauguration, reports came in that the contingent had enticed a crowd of homeless people to the event with the promise of a free lunch and MAGA hats. It is unlikely that the grub was sensitive to native tastes, as Don Jr probably had no interest in suaasat, national dish of Greenland — a delectable stew that can feature seal meat, whale, caribou, or seabirds. But one 11-year-old did apparently come home to show his daddy what the nice Americans had given him as a souvenir — a $100 bill.

Many reasons lie behind such historical hubris. The Greenlandic Inuits dubbed their island “The Land of Great Length”, and it’s an appellation that might apply just as well to America — a country bordering on the Allegheny mountains, the Mississippi River, and the vast swamps of Florida that was so large and diverse that it was impossible in the 18th century to envision it as any sort of union. As a result, maps became essential political tools to forge national identity in the early republic, as the secrets of mathematical surveying were known only to the settlers. Only the settlers had the power to draw those magical lines on paper. And only they, by examining their folded and colored scraps, could define trespass or, for that matter, taxation.

Maps were in particularly high demand in 1784 when Jedidiah Morse, a Yale student in need of a little extra cash, published his first geography textbook for elementary school students — and sold out the print run. His American Geography not only became required reading at his alma mater and in every classroom in America, but a huge best-seller throughout the nation.

Morse was the first enabler of what has become MAGA dogma: “You can’t have a country without borders.” For the would-be imperialist, however, the best country of all would be one without any borders whatsoever — a sentiment that would eventually be turned into the poetic sublime by the great Transcendentalist, Walt Whitman, who famously “contained multitudes”.

Global hegemony was locked into the American mind early, with generations of students consigned to memorizing Morse’s geography textbooks — reprints of which were making him rich. The second edition of his opus was the two-volume American Universal Geography, expanded to 1,250 pages, featuring more than 7,000 articles that included a history of the ancient Israelites, Egyptians, and Greeks, a summary of all the earth’s climates and ethnic groups, various mathematical formulas, and a description of the creation of the universe. Name after name of mountain, town, lake, and sea fell from Morse’s imperial pen, as if he were Adam at the dawn of a new creation, at the center of which lay America.

At Yale, Morse had snagged as his thesis adviser Professor of Theology Jonathan Edwards the Younger, son of the legendary Congregationalist minister Jonathan Edwards, whose sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” had detailed the hair-raising horrors of hell. And it turned out that geography was fertile soil for Calvinist doctrines of pre-destination, as Morse declared that climate not only decided the political but the personal. New England was a “high, hilly, and in some parts mountainous country, formed by nature to be inhabited by a hardy race of free, independent republicans”. Further south, however, the warm weather of Georgia produced “a general relaxation of the nervous system”, which, in combination with slave labor resulted in an “indolence” that was the “parent of disease”. Americans couldn’t get enough of such wisdom. Morse had made it clear: geographical determinism trumped self-determination.

One unfortunate result of this philosophy was that once America’s borders had been established, the worst threat to the country always came from within. It’s a belief that aligns well with the MAGA fear of the Deep State. Thus did Jedidiah Morse rise to a pulpit outside of Boston in 1798 and warn his congregation of those who might seek to “root out and abolish Christianity and overthrow all civil government”. “We have in truth secret enemies,” he declared, “…insinuating its members into all positions of distinction and influence, whether literary, civil, or religious.”

Morse’s nightmare was that his enemy, the “globalist”, would replace America’s national government with a European-style political union, a bloated bureaucracy that nominally honored national borders, but secretly wished for international power. “The future does not belong to globalists,” Trump insisted to the General Assembly of the United Nations. “The future belongs to patriots.” Morse could only have dreamed of a Trump and his serial withdrawals from the World Health Organization, the Paris Climate Agreement, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, UNESCO, and the UN’s Human Rights Council. For Morse, like Trump, possessed a deep-seated skepticism of Europe. Moreover, Morse’s fears of international contagion sparked by the liberal enemy within align perfectly with Trump’s insistence on a deep state, on the dangers of the woke media, and a federal court system dedicated to lawfare.

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By the end of his life, Morse’s investments in stocks had tanked, his land speculations had yielded nothing but debt, and his liberal congregation in the Boston suburbs had fired him. All the more reason for him to remain convinced that there was a plot against the country hatched by a cabal of globalist child-murderers aided and abetted by Satan worshippers, radicals, sexual deviants, and people of color, all of which he believed were the result of the secret workings of the Bavarian Illuminati.

The answer to such pervasive anxieties? More real estate! In long and enthusiastic forewords to ever-growing editions of his life’s work, Morse insisted that the uncharted spaces to the north, south, and west of the early Republic must become part of America. He envisioned a realm larger than all of Europe, “about twice the size of the Chinese Empire, and if we except Russia, … by far the largest territory on earth”. It would be called Fredonia.

And as fate would have it, it was around the time Morse retreated in disgrace from liberal Boston to conservative New Haven that the 1814 Treaty of Kiel was signed — an agreement that languished in obscurity until last week. This was the document that officially stripped Norway of its colonies, thereby allowing the Danish monarch to declare Greenland terra nullius — Latin for “nobody’s land”. Which is precisely how Trump sees Greenland.

“We do not want to be Americans,” lamented Greenland’s Prime Minister, Múte Egede. Nor Fredonians, for that matter. His snow-covered, mineral-rich island bristling with intercontinental missiles may dwarf Mexico, but what is that compared to the moon and Mars? To Americans, who have long suffered from full-blown geographical megalomania, it’s all the same.

Seaside piers brought these visitors still closer to the waves. To step onto one is to experience in purest form the Victorian spirit: idealism plus heavy industry. The otherworld of the pier rests on engineered pilings, steel beams and timber; but it seems to float, as though visitors are walking on the sea itself. Lapped by waves, they are meticulously constructed no-places that hold an interzone of pure play: fried treats, cheap souvenirs, the mass-produced leisure of Britain at the height of its imperial grandeur.

One senses a yearning in these structures, as interwoven with the history of these islands as the stories of kings and abbeys. It’s a spirit that still animates many today: a hankering to be not just by the sea, but on it. And it can occasionally end in tragedy, as in recent news that the British woman Sarah Packwood, 54, and her Canadian husband Brett Clibbery, 70, have been found dead on a liferaft, having washed ashore on Sable Island in Nova Scotia — a sandbar 300 kilometres south-east of Halifax, inhabited mostly by seals, birds and wild horses.

The couple had recently set sail on an attempted Atlantic crossing in Theros, a 42ft sail-and solar-powered yacht. It’s not known what happened to their vessel. But Packwood and Clibbery are far from the first seafarers to fall foul of that area, which is known as the “graveyard of the Atlantic” for its lethal combination of currents, major shipping lanes, and foggy, stormy weather.

My condolences go to their families — and my admiration to the couple themselves. They belong in a long tradition of Anglos who heard the call of the ocean. And in that they aren’t alone: last year, Liverpool-based sailmaker Andrew Bedwell attempted to cross from Newfoundland to Cornwall in Big C, a sailboat the size of a suitcase which he constructed himself.

The sea has long been in our blood: after all, the inhabitants of the British Isles were forged from successive waves of seafaring invaders. And at the most inland point here, you’re still barely 70 miles from the ocean, meaning its whisper is never very far from our ears. So from Captain Cook and Horatio Nelson to Ben Ainslie and Ellen MacArthur, the waves have always sung to us. John Masefield captured that longing in his 1902 poem Sea-Fever:

“I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.”

Masefield’s poem is a hymn to what he calls “the gull’s way and the whale’s way” — an echo of the Old English hronrād, or “whale-riding” — a common simile for the ocean in Anglo-Saxon verse. And if these settlers came to the British Isles from the seas, so they were in turn invaded by new waves of seafarers: first the Vikings across the North Sea, and later the Viking-descended Europeans known as Normans, across the Channel.

Cumulatively, this produced a people that would, in turn, take the hronrād around the globe — sometimes in terrifyingly cramped or unseaworthy vessels, and at times — as in Commodore Anson’s ill-fated 1740 voyage around the world, with a crew drawn from hospitals and asylums. They left descendants and seafaring idiom as far afield as Australia, North America, and Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, whence Clibbert hailed.

They produced travellers and engineers, who built ports and laid railways around the world as well as at home besides the piers around England’s coast. They also produced idealists and explorers, who blended curiosity about the world with desire to tinker that was sometimes so overbearing it could rationalise the takeover of entire overseas territories as being for the benefit of the “natives”.

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Throughout, these rovers were conscious of their restlessness, and keen to trace that back into antiquity. We can see this in the work of Scottish explorer, soldier, amateur archaeologist and “real-life Indiana Jones” Lt Col Laurence Waddell, a typical character from this era. In one somewhat dubious work, Waddell claimed the ancient Britons’ true origin was the Levantine seafarers known today as “Phoenicians”, who, he claimed, settled in Britain following the fall of Troy, and proved the “Aryan” origins of the British people. Waddell’s contemporaries didn’t take him very seriously, while contemporary scholars dispute whether “Phoenicia” ever existed as a nation in the modern sense. But there’s evidence that Levantine traders did visit Britain during the Biblical era, for its deposits of tin: a vital substance for making the bronze alloy from which weapons were forged in antiquity.

Even so, theories such as Waddell’s, of ancient Britain’s “Aryan” prehistory, can carry off-putting ethno-nationalist connotations today. And judging by third-party videos the couple shared on social media, for example excoriating Israel or denouncing Keir Starmer from the Left, Clibbery and Packwood embraced the kind of utopian progressive worldview that would recoil in horror from any suggestion of a link between their outlook and such impulses. In any case, drawing links between Anglophone seafarers past and present is not to speculate on the couple’s own ancestry.

But they did appear to have some affinity for the deep cultural history of the British Isles: Packwood performed English folksong as well as her own compositions. And, as reported by The Guardian in 2020, they celebrated their wedding with a “handfasting” ceremony at Stonehenge. This all suggests they might have felt closer to Britain’s prehistory than her more recent imperialist one. And yet, between them, they also embodied a 21st-century version of the latter’s best qualities: the adventurousness, the technical ingenuity and the idealism.

Per The Guardian, retired engineer Clibbery had travelled to London in 2015 for a purpose that quintessentially mixed altruism with technicity: donating a kidney to his sister. It was this fateful trip that resulted in his chance meeting, at the no. 87 bus stop near Trafalgar Square, with Packwood — who worked in international development, an occupation in direct continuity with the high Victorian spirit of travel and social improvement. Once married, the videos they shared on YouTube and on Facebook again capture the same restless idealism: “Theros Adventures” documented their journeys by sailboat and electric car, in the hope they could inspire others to embrace low-carbon travel.

In this sense, they were very much the modern kind of ocean-going Anglos, who tend to be more peaceful than their colonial forebears. But the legacy of those forebears endures, in a diaspora reaching from the British Isles to Canada, North America, Australia and New Zealand; in a language littered with ocean-going idiom, and a body of common and maritime law that still forms the basis of jurisprudence in multiple countries. Even the wild horses on Sable Island originate with since-departed Anglophone settlers.

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And there remains something indomitable about that spirit. Some of the travellers who went West to the New World simply didn’t stop, until they ran out of West on the California coast. Those who still couldn’t settle then turned to new frontiers either within, via psychonautics, or beyond this world, via dreams of space exploration. And even those still on planet Earth can often find the ocean calling. Andrew Bedwell’s Atlantic micro-yacht crossing failed last year, when Big C filled with water and was damaged. Not to be deterred, Bedwell is planning to try again with a new micro-yacht, made of aluminium this time.

But for the experienced seafarer, the hunger for adventure always comes with knowledge that the sea can be cruel. The last video Clibbery posted, shortly after Theros set sail on what would be her final voyage, reports their location, speed, and destination — along with the seasoned sailor’s acknowledgement that the ocean is capricious: “So, let’s see.”

Masefield’s poem ends with a bittersweet yearning both for restlessness and restful companionship:

“I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.”

Perhaps, for the time they had together, that was what Clibbery and Packwood shared. Brought together by chance, from far-flung corners of the Anglosphere, their work, interests and aspirations embodied the ingenuity, the idealism and the indefatigable restlessness that has, for centuries, linked the eternal Anglo to the sea.

At the bus stop near Trafalgar Square, both of them met their laughing fellow-rover. Together, they took the gull’s way and the whale’s way. And in the end, the hronrād claimed them. I wish their roving souls a quiet sleep and sweet dream, now the long trick’s over.

Built in the 18th century near Rotherham, Wentworth Woodhouse’s 300 rooms and five miles of corridors hosted King George VI in 1912. But war, death duties, and the nationalisation of Britain’s coal mines battered the Fitzwilliam wealth, and by 1946 they were powerless to stop Shinwell’s diggers. Formal gardens, lawns, and ancient trees were uprooted for open-cast mining; the act was decried as “vandalism” in Parliament, while James Lees-Milne of the National Trust said the aftermath was worse than “French battlefields after D-day”.

Compared with digging up a Georgian formal garden to extract low-quality coal, smearing jam and porridge over a bust of Queen Victoria ranks fairly low in the vandalism stakes. But this latest attack on the symbols of class hierarchy has the same complicated relationship to fossil fuels — and to the wealth, power, and inequality these bring — as Shinwell’s 1946 assault on the Fitzwilliam family seat.

Both these stories shed light on a quieter but just as pervasive source of national uncertainty: how, in post-imperial Britain, should we relate to the threadbare living remnants of the royal dynasty that presided over its once-glittering elite?

Elizabeth II was the last monarch of the British Empire, and her reign’s defining characteristic was the studied serenity with which she presided over its dismantling. Since her death, the surviving Windsors have come to seem increasingly ailing and withdrawn, not to mention assailed by indiscreet relatives all too eager to exploit their proximity to the guttering flame of royalty. Today, the King faces cancer treatment, while the Sussexes continue in their usual fractious vein; now, as the Princess of Wales recovers from abdominal surgery, her uncle is going to appear on Celebrity Big Brother.

But this tawdry spectacle is unsurprising. For Britain’s period of 19th-century hegemony rested ultimately on a crucial energy source — coal — and a subsequent energy transition played a key role in ending it. Now, as the climate-anxious wage war on the remaining symbols of that era’s high culture, what’s left of its aristocracy is following in the footsteps of Manny Shinwell by strip-mining its own legacy, both literally and metaphorically.

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The group that smeared Victoria’s marble face with jam and porridge last weekend was This Is Rigged. Condemning rising food insecurity, it declared: “We refuse to be dragged back to the Victorian era.” But while they are no doubt referring to the extremes of poverty suffered by some in Victoria’s day, Britain could only be said to be returning to her era now if we disregarded the other pole of economic inequality: wealth.

There is today no imminent prospect of returning to Victorian levels of British wealth and power. That position was inextricable from the imperial project, by then underway for centuries. But it was consolidated by “black diamonds”: Britain’s abundant stocks of coal.

The nation was at the forefront of the Industrial Revolution, exploiting these domestic energy resources to mercantile and expansionist ends. Coal drove the machines that manufactured British goods for overseas export, along with the ships and trains that distributed them, even as it sent British travellers, administrators, soldiers, and other overseas meddlers around the world. And coal enabled Britain to project power. By 1900, the penultimate year of Victoria’s reign, around 85% of globally traded coal came from the British Isles, while Britain governed a quarter of the earth’s surface. In return, unimaginable wealth flowed back to the homeland.

As Queen Victoria governed this immense, triumphal Britain as a kind of national mother, her consort, Prince Albert, gave royal imprimatur to the frenzy of scientific and cultural exploration enabled by imperial wealth: a bounty that coexisted with the kind of grinding poverty referenced by This Is Rigged. For the Victorian aristocracy and upper middle class, though, this world of squalid urban slums, workhouses, child labour, and food riots was an object for their philanthropy — even as the wealth was a gratifying reward for imperial conquest, and evidence of Britain’s racial and cultural superiority.

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But even as, in Modern Egypt (1908), Lord Cromer expressed this view — describing Britain’s moral duty to “control and guide” alien races based on natural superiority — at home the end was nigh for the natural resource that underwrote it all. Clashes between labour and capital grew ever fiercer: the 1893 miners’ strike, then the largest ever, involved 300,000 workers, and a still greater national miners’ strike in 1912 saw over a million men down tools.

There was no sign of such fractures when Victoria’s grandson King George V visited Wentworth Woodhouse the following year. The visit concluded with an audience of 25,000 gathered in its still-pristine grounds for a concert that included a torchlight tattoo performed by local miners. But if labour issues threatened the established class hierarchy, the pivotal change that would eventually strip George V’s grandchild — Elizabeth II — of her empire came through innovation.

Two years after the 1893 miners’ strike, the first internal combustion car arrived in Britain. By 1930 there were a million such vehicles on Britain’s roads. And with them came the slow shift from coal to oil: a change that played a key role in ending the British Empire. England’s coal production peaked the year after King George visited Wentworth Woodhouse. The British Empire did, too, just a few years later. For if coal was Great Britain’s trump card, oil was America’s.

As energy demand began to tilt decisively away from coal, so too did the geopolitical balance. As historian James Barr shows, after 1945 America set about dismantling what remained of Britain’s imperial reach — with special focus on those overseas holdings and alliances that granted Britain control over the world’s ‘black gold’. The subsequent scramble for the Middle East has been much-discussed; suffice to say Britain lost, conclusively, during the reign of Elizabeth II.

The late Queen was thus the last monarch to preside over what was once the greatest empire the world had ever seen. So however ambivalent we are about our imperial legacy today, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised if she also turns out to be the last British monarch to have trailed something of the grandeur that attended that empire. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that my local community centre still hasn’t changed its large framed photo of Elizabeth II for one of our current King.

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There is very little mileage left in that imperial legacy now. At Wentworth Woodhouse, two sets of death duties and the nationalisation of their coalfields threw the Fitzwilliams abruptly onto hard times: a large portion of the Wentworth Woodhouse contents were auctioned in 1948. And our leaders have, since the war, pursued a similar fire-sale strategy at the national scale.

You name it, if it’s British and seems a bit “posh”, someone’s trying to sell it overseas. Grand houses; Old Masters; classic brands; key firms in strategic industries (for example the chip designer Arm in 2020); London’s property market. In its place we have a financial services sector widely denounced as a front for international money laundering, in which grand old Mayfair townhouses once occupied by the old imperial aristocracy now shelter a new kind: hedge funds, traders, and family offices for the world’s oligarchs. Sometimes nothing remains but a Georgian or Victorian façade, behind which the bones of the building have been gutted and replaced by steel girders and suspended ceilings: the most eloquent imaginable metaphor for the hollowing-out that has taken place.

And in this brave new world, what are the descendants of Britain’s erstwhile caste of upper-class Victorian imperial administrators to do? Those who are bright enough go into finance; the rest leverage crisp vowels, social connections, and cultural know-how into careers as concierges and fixers to the genuine new plutocracy. And it’s in this light that we should understand the Sussexes, and perhaps also Gary Goldsmith: without the discretion or nous to thrive as butlers, they simply aim to squeeze what celebrity capital they can out of their royal connections. 

Under Manny Shinwell, as declining energy dominance forced Britain to begin self-cannibalising in earnest, physical mining ripped up a pristine country-house garden. Today, Goldsmith and the Sussexes alike continue in the same vein, with their own metaphorical strip-mining of Britain’s remaining cultural wealth.

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By Mary Harrington

As for the rest of us, we can only hope we’re nearing rock bottom. With the recent “student visas” bombshell barely off the front page, this week a “cash for care” scandal revealed employment agencies are selling British visas under the guise of staffing British care homes. In other words: while our current crop of leaders hasn’t literally put granny up for auction yet, in a bid to keep the lights on a few more days, they’re not far off. 

What would a less defeatist, more future-oriented Britain look like, on the other side of rock bottom? It’s hard to say, though I suspect somehow that Charles remembers the old world too keenly to be the man to represent it. Perhaps his son will drag us out of our doldrums, and set a new tone: it happened with Victoria, after all, after the chaos of the Georgian era.

It’s less clear today what kind of kingdom, if any, they would have. The declinist view is that maybe it doesn’t matter if care workers can’t speak English; we can just fling a few more quid at the emblems of Britain’s former grandeur, and live off leisure, tourism and the “creative industries”, as with the Levelling Up Fund grant now restoring Wentworth Woodhouse. I’m less sure. For while This Is Rigged seem to think we can both end oil extraction and still demand cheap (and oil-intensive) disposable nappies, between competing environmental concerns and new geopolitical tensions our energy future is ever more uncertain.

Meanwhile the industries of the future appear to be AI and biotech, all underwritten by a new “scramble for Africa” focused on the rare earth minerals required for the tech sector and the “green transition”. Thus far, though, Britain’s push to be at the forefront of all these efforts has appeared lukewarm: the £940m recently hailed in UK funding to support green innovation pales into insignificance beside America’s $1.25 trillion.

But even if (and, I hope, when) we find a way through, perhaps under a newly-ascendant William V, I doubt it’ll be to the future imagined by This Is Rigged: a world both free of fossil fuels and still somehow brimful of state welfare and cheap conveniences. The best we can hope for is that some more creative future leader will take us back to the Victorian era not just in a bad way, but also a good one. If we’re to have the poverty and inequality, at least let us also have the grand architecture, the moral seriousness, the scientific innovation, and the unifying leadership. Britain could still have this; we just need to muster the energy.

Different wars with different causes, both Gaza and Ukraine reveal, in their own unique ways, the limitations of American imperial power. Neither would have been launched by either Russia or by Hamas — perhaps with Iran behind it — without the confidence that America’s ability to defend the world it created in its own image was radically weakened. The Pax Americana is already dead: the world is now suffering more wars than at any time since 1945. Worse, a vast gap has opened up between America’s stated commitments to its allies, and its ability to enforce its will: entire nations could be swallowed in the gulf between rhetoric and reality.

To remedy this, we must first cast off the illusions that led us here. In all this recent horror, it has been a salutary experience observing the contrast in reactions summoned up by the punitive air campaigns carried out by America’s geopolitical foes, such as Syria and Russia, and those carried out with America’s military and diplomatic support by its ally Israel. Pundits who rightly condemned Assad’s reckless bombing of hospitals, schools, bakeries and civilian homes now urge us to consider the painful necessity for Israel to bomb the same civilian targets in Gaza. Equally, many of those now loudly outraged by Israel’s air campaign previously welcomed Assad and Russia’s indiscriminate bombing of what they called terrorists in Syria. Objectively, it is difficult to see any significant moral difference between the two campaigns, between their rival sets of supporters, or between the rival great powers enabling them.

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Indeed, in just one month, Israel’s air strikes against Gaza, the heaviest bombing campaign since the Second World War, have caused between a quarter and half the deaths of the entire four-year long bloody siege of the similarly-sized city of Aleppo. But it is misguided to view any of this as a failing of the American-led liberal order: it is the American-led liberal order, working as it was always intended to work. Morality is only cited to punish America’s enemies: when it’s America’s allies whose actions disgust the world, nuances and diplomatic cover can always be found.

Yet for all the political damage it has caused the US, it is doubtful whether Biden’s delicate dance — shielding Israel from international condemnation while washing his hands of the bloody results — is even in Israel’s best interests. A month ago, the sheer unbridled bloodlust displayed in the atrocities carried out by Hamas won Israel a degree of international sympathy unseen in decades. It would have taken political dysfunction of the gravest and most reckless kind to have squandered this sympathy, and incredibly, Israel’s government has managed to do so in just a few weeks. Every day, every smartphone in the world brings forth new horrors from Gaza: whole families extinguished, dead children pulled from the ruins of their homes, entire districts reduced to rubble in an instant. Even those supportive of Israel’s campaign to root out Hamas have been horrified by the methods chosen to do so. By inviting such carnage against the Palestinian people, eroding Israel’s legitimacy, Hamas have already won a dark and twisted victory.

Just last week, following the mass killing of civilians in Jabalia refugee camp in an Israeli attempt to strike one Hamas commander, Biden sent his Secretary of State Antony Blinken to Jerusalem to warn the Israeli government that it must take far greater care to avoid civilian harm, telling the cameras in anguished tones: “I’ve seen images of Palestinian children pulled from wreckage of buildings. When I look into their eyes through the TV screen, I see my own children. How can we not?” But on the same day, just as Blinken girded himself to shore up Arab support for America’s position, Israel bombed ambulances at Gaza’s al-Shifa hospital, killing even more civilians and stoking even more outrage. America can neither deter direct attacks on its closest ally, nor rein in Israel’s excessive response: the greatest power on Earth is a helpless spectator to events directly impacting its own standing.

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By Samuel Rubinstein

Before Gaza City has even fallen, then, the war against Hamas has become a diplomatic disaster of the greatest magnitude for both Israel and the United States. Biden has hitched his political survival and America’s global reputation to an Israeli government wildly unpopular in Israel itself, whose leader Netanyahu is blamed for redistributing military resources towards the illegal settlements of the West Bank, enabling the Hamas incursion. Netanyahu seemingly has no strategy other than remaining in power and out of jail for as long as possible, whatever the consequences for his country or the wider region. There is no plan for what to do with Gaza or its people once Hamas is defeated, and no belief that the US can use the tragedy to finally resolve the conflict. America’s aim of reordering the Middle East into a peaceful equilibrium favourable for Israel and united against Iran is now in tatters. Arab states, long subjected to moral pressure to take the West’s side on Ukraine, can rightfully point to America’s hypocrisy when lecturing on human rights and the need to protect civilians. In Gaza, America’s dwindling moral case for imperial hegemony was finally buried beneath the rubble.

At home, Biden’s voter base is bitterly divided: the dramatic scenes of the new pro-Palestinian activist base obscure the broader new consensus among a majority of younger voters — the future Democratic base — against continued American support for Israel. This is itself now the greatest single strategic threat to the Jewish state, creating a far more perilous dynamic than Hamas’s brutalities or Hezbollah’s missile armoury. The root cause of this situation is the Israeli hubris caused by decades of seemingly limitless American support, which allowed the Palestine conflict to smoulder unresolved. With Israel confident that America’s backing was eternal, and America confident that its power could always shield Israel from external threats, the two countries found themselves locked in a dysfunctional embrace. Israel is now dependent on American support as never before, while American support for Israel has never been so domestically contested. Instead of ensuring Israel’s security, decades of American indulgence permitted Netanyahu to lead the country towards disaster.

Soon, according to US officials, international and domestic pressure will force Biden to insist upon a ceasefire. Yet any Israeli halting of hostilities before the total destruction of Hamas will be perceived worldwide as a Hamas victory, and a defeat for both Israel and the United States. A more astute American president — indeed, a truer friend of Israel — would have constrained Netanyahu’s response from the start, pushing the Jewish state to accept higher military casualties as the price of assuaging world opinion. But the current situation, in which America assumes the blame for the civilian casualties of Netanyahu’s punitive campaign while unconvincingly wringing its hands over the bloodshed, was the worst of all responses.

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By Thomas Fazi

As Gaza holds the world’s attention, Ukraine’s leadership is struggling to maintain focus on its own existential conflict. But in its own distinct way, the Ukraine war is another tragic example of the widening gulf between America’s imperial commitments and its dwindling capabilities. On the very first day of the invasion, Russia began the war as a far richer, stronger and more powerful country than Ukraine, and nearly two years later, for all its battlefield reversals since then, that basic equation has not changed. Again, the gap between what Biden promised and what he could deliver has proved fatal. By promising US support of a duration and extent greater than he could deliver, Biden encouraged the Zelenskyy administration to pursue war aims that have now proved beyond Ukraine’s abilities. By allowing Zelenskyy to determine the endpoint of victory, and publicly abstaining from outlining what an acceptable outcome would look like, Biden encouraged Ukrainian planners to broaden their goals from a return to the country’s de facto 2022 borders to a return to its de jure 1991 borders and then improbably onwards to the total defeat and disintegration of the Russian state.

To this end, the combined effort of the United States and Europe turned to arming and training the Ukrainian army for its much-vaunted summer offensive, in the hope of forcing a humbled Putin into peace negotiations. Instead, after months of bloodshed and sacrifice, the Ukrainian army has achieved a tenuous hold on two depopulated hamlets a few kilometres from their starting point. With the Ukrainian offensive stalled, the momentum has now swung back to Russia, incrementally biting into the Ukrainian lines, though with great losses of its own, all across the eastern front. This winter, Ukraine will find itself on the defensive once again. Much of the Ukrainian army’s superiority in morale and technical ability was wasted this summer on the misguided southern offensive and on the fruitless attempts to first hold and then recapture Bakhmut, and the country will find itself entering 2024 in a far worse position than it began 2023.

Within the Ukrainian leadership, the recriminations have already begun. Ukraine’s top general, Zaluzhny, has described the war as a stalemate, and been condemned for his frankness by Zelenskyy’s staff. Ukraine’s fairweather friends in the West, the grifter pundits who talked up every defeat as a victory, helping Western publics view the war as already practically won and Russia’s still untested industrial and military capabilities worthy only of mockery, are now rightfully the target of Ukrainian ire. Outright Ukrainian victory was not impossible, but the work of reordering Western industry necessary to achieve it simply was not done. As US officials leak that Zelenskyy will soon have to face reality and come to the negotiating table, and sources close to Zelenskyy — including his former strategic advisor, Oleksiy Arestovych, now planning a presidential run of his own — brief against him in dramatic terms, Ukrainians will have every right to believe that the initial false promises of unlimited American support given by Biden were, in the end, worse for the country than clearly defined but sustainable support would have been at the beginning of the war.

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In both cases, the gap between the Biden administration’s public professions of unlimited support and its private reservations have led its allies into perilous positions. American leaders are given to claiming that their country is not just a state, but an idea: but that idea is increasingly untethered from objective reality. American political turbulence has made even medium-term strategic planning impossible to pursue: allies whose defence relies on American support should observe this worsening trend with alarm.

For countries such as Britain, helpless chicks under America’s wing, the primary lesson is that we should either increase our ability to defend ourselves alone, or limit our self-insertion into the affairs of stronger rival states. For countries such as Israel or Ukraine, fated by geography to exist at the sabre’s edge, the approach of wisdom will be more painful. Israel has no choice but to destroy Hamas, and Ukraine no option but to continue defending itself: if peace talks with Russia were ever viable, there is no reason for Moscow to pursue them now. In both cases, the likelihood is that the wars will grind on to grim and morally unsatisfactory conclusions. In each case, given the constraints on American political will and capability, perhaps a frozen conflict with the ever-present risk of escalation is the best that can now  be achieved.

There is no anti-imperialist glee to be found in the situation we are in. For all its faults, the world that follows American hegemony will hardly be more peaceful or humane than that we have come to know: if anything, the withering of America’s reach is already shaping up to be bloodier than the fall of the Soviet Union. Faced with such a prospect, the task that remains is to help America manage its own decline in as painless a way possible, preventing the conflicts nibbling at the edge of its empire from coalescing into a single war that will consume us all.

I find this idea ridiculous, but also telling. Telling in that many apparently find the notion that Israeli Jews were deliberately betrayed and allowed to be murdered by their own fiercely nationalist government to be a more readily believable theory than that complex technological systems could possibly fail. This fact speaks to something important about how we moderns have come to misperceive how things work, misplace our faith in systems, and often accidentally make ourselves more rather than less vulnerable to chaos.

Over the last few years, Israel spent more than $1.1 billion to construct a sprawling security barrier along the entirety of its nearly 40-mile border with Gaza. This was, allegedly, to be the fence to end all fences. In addition to 20-foot-high multi-layered wire, steel, and concrete barriers, the “smart fence” integrated a vast network of cameras, motion and other sensors, radars, and remote-controlled weapon systems, all monitored by dozens of towers that served as data hubs and high-tech observation and listening-posts. An underground wall and sensor system, designed to stop infiltration by tunnels, was extended far below the earth along the whole border, at great expense. Meanwhile, Israel’s advanced, exceptionally costly “Iron Dome” missile defence system protected the skies. “The barrier is reality-changing. What happened in the past won’t happen again,” the then-IDF chief of staff Aviv Kohavi declared at a ceremony marking its construction in 2019.

Some former members of the IDF have in recent days testified on social media that the fence really was a technological marvel. Not so much as a stray cat could get anywhere near the border without setting off alarms, they recalled. And the Israeli government and military certainly seem to have believed it was impenetrable, which partly explains why, by the start of this month, they had redeployed most of their regular military forces to guard the West Bank and northern border instead.

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But of course, on 7 October, this great wall of silicon proved almost totally useless, overcome in a matter of minutes by Hamas, which was then left to rampage across southern Israel almost unopposed. At least 1,400 Israelis lost their lives as a result. What happened? Let’s lay aside Israel’s broader strategic intelligence failure — having been falsely convinced that Hamas had been successfully pacified and was no longer interested in attempting attacks — which this certainly was. The border’s defences were expected to detect and repel even an unexpected assault — or at least were billed as such. How and why did they fail?

At the simplest level, we could say the IDF was overconfident in its defences and underestimated its enemy. “The thinning of the forces [stationed near the Gaza border] seemed reasonable because of the construction of the fence and the aura they created around it, as if it were invincible, that nothing would be able to pass it,” recounts Brig. Gen. Israel Ziv, a former head of the IDF’s Operations Division and ground forces commander in the south.

We could also say that the IDF had allowed itself to become strategically rigid and was ill-prepared to adapt flexibly when things went wrong. From the moment the fence was proposed, some military officers warned that pouring resources into it — along with the Iron Dome — was a mistake, because it would ultimately degrade the military’s ability to manoeuvre offensively and pre-emptively neutralise the enemy’s capacity to conduct attacks. Col. Yehuda Vach, commander of the IDF’s Officer Training School, warned in 2019 that “because we don’t cross the fence, the other side has become strategically stronger”, as they’d been handed operational initiative. “The enemy will seek in the next campaign to carry out an operation to kidnap soldiers and harm civilians in the towns near the fence, thus enjoying the first achievement of the campaign,” he ominously predicted. “The fence creates an illusion and gives a false sense of security to both the soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces and the residents near the fence,” he said.

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Israel is no longer Britain's war

By Aris Roussinos

These are both classic military mistakes, warned against repeatedly by strategists from Carl von Clausewitz to Sun Tzu. In this case, however, the even greater mistake may have been that the IDF came to rely far too heavily on technological solutions, methods, and ways of thinking.

One of the most famous sayings of the U.S. Air Force pilot and strategist Col. John Boyd, who helped to develop modern manoeuvre warfare, was: “People, ideas, machines — in that order!” While warfighting devices were and are important, as are doctrines, tactics, and stratagems, these are all less important than the people doing the fighting, planning, and organising — as well as being far less adaptable and reliable. As Boyd would often harangue generals in the Pentagon, usually to no avail: “Machines don’t fight wars… Humans fight wars!”

Boyd had seen for himself the perils of overreliance on Big Brain tech wizardry in Vietnam. The latest generation of US aircraft, designed by geniuses who insisted that the age of aerial gunfights was long over, had been stripped of their guns and manoeuvrability — and built to be flying missile and bomb platforms. But in combat, the missiles proved horrifically unreliable — and the planes were no use at all in a dogfight. When they ran into lightweight North Vietnamese MIGs, they got destroyed: the US air-to-air kill ratio fell from 10:1 in the Korean War to 1:1 in 1967.

While technologies can certainly offer solutions to discrete problems, they are typically not flexible and adaptable enough to function as intended when things go sideways. Moreover, fragile technological solutions can produce entirely new liabilities that did not even exist before. In the current case, the widespread reliance of the IDF’s defences on wireless data transmission became a critical weakness that the enemy was able to exploit to great effect.

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In fact, it seems likely that Israel was actually worse off with all its high-tech border gadgetry than it would have been without it. These over-engineered solutions to guarding the border were not cost-effective, instead representing an opportunity cost that could have been better spent elsewhere — such as on maintaining a far greater number of disciplined, sharp-eyed soldiers with guns. When the tech failed, it was only such men who were able, eventually, to adapt and respond. By reversing Boyd’s admonition and putting machines first and people last, the IDF actively degraded the capability of those people to respond to disaster when it most mattered.

But even this understates the bigger problem exposed by the folly of the “smart fence”. Israel’s smart border defences should be understood as the adoption of a needlessly complex system. “Complexity” here must not be mistaken to just mean “complicated”. Rather, a complex system is a technical term defining a system composed of such a great quantity of component parts, in such intricate relationships of dependency and interaction with each other, that its composite behaviour in response to entropy cannot be predictively modelled.

When things go wrong in a complex system it can’t be easily solved, because each sub-system relies on many other sub-systems, and pulling any one lever to try to solve one problem will produce entirely unexpected effects. This means complex systems are vulnerable to failure cascades, in which the failure of even a single part can set off an unpredictable domino effect of further failures. Even if the original failure is fixed this cannot reverse the cascade, and the whole system may soon face catastrophic collapse.

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By Harald Malmgren and Pippa Malmgren

This is essentially what happened to Israel’s border defence system. The replacement of low-tech solutions with high-tech ones needlessly added additional layers of complexity to the system, making it more, not less, fragile. Under pressure, the system then collapsed more completely and with more devastating consequences than if a simpler, more robust system had been used.

This doesn’t mean, to be clear, that I think technology can never be useful. Obviously, technological change has always played an important role in the realm of war — to my disappointment, no army would be able to win today with the cheerful simplicity of the good ole’ sword and shield. But on close inspection, those technologies that have the most transformative and lasting impact are almost always those that are the most simple, robust, adaptable, and scalable, and which generally work in accord with the human element, rather than attempt to totally replace him with a complex system. The cheap little drones that Hamas used so successfully, and which have already revolutionised warfare in Ukraine and elsewhere, are a perfect example of this.

This is true, too, beyond the world of warfare. In all aspects of life, we have come to worship technology and complexity for its own sake, believing it to be the sorcery that can solve our problems once and for all. Except far too often, it doesn’t — it just creates the illusion of having done so, while our own capacities have diminished and our vulnerabilities to systematic collapse have increased. In this way, technology has become a false idol, squatting in the place of or even preventing genuine human ingenuity, innovation, and adaptability.

Just as complex systems are vulnerable to collapse, so are empires and civilisations. And empires fall the same way most complex systems do: by becoming too complex to bear their own weight. They come to span the globe, and have too many alliances and commitments, too many “vital national interests”, too many IOUs, too many enemies, to ever handle at once. This is what “imperial overstretch” really means: not just that there is too much budgeted for the treasury to pay for, but that overall complexity has reached such a level that the empire has become impossible to manage. Trying to solve one problem only creates another. The empire may still appear strong, but it has become fragile. The potential for even a single point of failure to ignite a catastrophic failure cascade grows more and more acute.

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By Kat Rosenfield

Today, as the United States and its allies rush with increasingly visible panic to try to put out one fire after another around the world, I’m afraid that a global failure cascade may be exactly what we’re witnessing. The number of lights blinking red is growing faster and faster as more dominos fall. If this is the case, then just solving existing problems will never be enough: every effort to fight one fire may just set off new fires. Might America, by embroiling itself in two regional wars at once, prompt China to invade Taiwan when it otherwise wouldn’t have dared, for example? It seems like a possibility. But then we can’t know for sure: growing unpredictability is now the defining feature of the system.

There are many people who, witnessing this chaos play out, will predictably argue that the empire needs to redouble its efforts, to yield no ground anywhere, and to show everyone the power of its “global leadership”. The encroaching jungle must be forced back everywhere because to retreat would be to demonstrate weakness and invite calamity. Needless to say, doing more will only add more complexity to the system, and thus more vulnerabilities. It won’t do anything to prevent or stop a failure cascade — only increase its ultimate scope, momentum, and unpredictability.

Naturally, a wiser method would be to simplify: to deliberately pare back commitments and overextended positions, concentrating on conserving strength and defending only the most critical nodes of the system, until the balance of capabilities and commitments can reach a stable new equilibrium. But reform of this kind is extremely difficult, as untangling the imperial Gordian Knot one thread at a time often proves to be impossible. Historically, this type of impasse is typically only ever resolved, and simplicity restored, with one decisive stroke: by systemic collapse.

***

This essay is an extract from a longer piece on The Upheaval.

In response, around 600 people, almost all Armenians, gathered outside Downing Street to call for support for Armenia. Their faltering effort stood in sharp contrast to the pro-Palestine protests that erupted over the weekend. Across the UK, tens of thousands marched. In London alone, their presence prompted the deployment of more than 1,000 police officers to keep the peace. As dusk fell, a large crowd milled about outside the Israeli embassy, brandishing Palestinian flags and chanting “We are all Palestinian”.

Who are these people? It seems unlikely that they’re all literally Palestinian, when the total estimated Palestinian-origin population of the UK is around 3,000. Rather they seem to come from four broad groups: genuine Palestinians, those who support Palestine through ethnic affinity, those who support Palestine through religious affinity, and those on the Left who support Palestine for ideological reasons.

All of these groups wave away the core reason given by Jewish people for desiring a safe homeland: their historic persecution, up to the Nazi project of industrialised murder that cost the lives of six million Jewish men, women and children. I don’t blame the survivors for wanting somewhere safe to live. But the crowd on London’s streets disagreed. Forget some putative “two-state solution”. They chanted: “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” A glance at a map should make the implication clear: the elimination of Israel.

It’s easy to understand why Palestinians competing with Israelis for the same homeland might desire this. It’s also relatively easy to see why Islamists and other Arab demographics might align with their cause. The head-scratcher here isn’t the age-old tribalism of race or religion, however incomprehensible these may be to liberals. It’s the monolithic affiliation of European Leftists with Palestine — including, as ever, former Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn.

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In some cases, the result is a coalition of pantomime-horse absurdity. The most comical instance of this phenomenon is surely “Queers for Palestine”, a movement which has been likened to “Chickens for KFC”. But there are a great many more. For the sake of brevity, let’s call this far-Left caucus “Greater Corbynism”: a kaleidoscope of fringe groups comprising everything from the placard-waving SWP, through assorted subtypes of Communist pamphleteer, to the balaclava-clad antifa. Even representatives of other seemingly unrelated Leftist causes, such as environmental “direct action” and animal liberation, regularly nail their red, green and white colours to the mast.

And elsewhere, among the far larger population of Brits who lean Left, but without sliding into the abyss of Greater Corbynism, many more are content to think harder and more empathically about the suffering of Palestinians than of Jews. This asymmetry is omnipresent: for example, on the Sunday after the Hamas attacks, the well-meaning but conventionally woke vicar at my local Anglican church managed a nod to Israel, amid a list of other international conflicts, during prayers of intercession. The following week, with Israel poised for a counterstrike, we got a mournful sermon about how terrible both sides are, and every one of the prayers for intercession was for Gazan civilians. So, too, with the BBC: an organisation that has studiously refused to employ the adjective “terrorist” in connection with Hamas, despite it being internationally designated as such.

If this was impelled by a general commitment to protecting those at risk of ethnic cleansing, these groups would have also been protesting the mass displacement of Armenians from Nagorno-Karabakh. But they weren’t. Is the simple and depressing explanation for this just that a lot of people really hate Jews? In some cases, perhaps. But my vicar, for one, is not an antisemite. Something else appears to be going on.

It is more, perhaps, that like many other well-meaning leftists, he has a blind spot. And the size and ubiquity of this blind spot on the Left is best explained not by hatred of Jews (or not only by such hatred), but by the outsized symbolic role Israel plays as a proxy for American geopolitical hegemony. For this association has some basis in fact, in the sense that Israel really is a creation of American imperial power.

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Following the First World War, the surviving European empires divided the Middle East in a thicket of great-power bargaining, in the course of which the British secured a mandate to rule Palestine. This mandate both obliged Britain to balance the needs of Jews and Arabs, and also — under the Balfour Declaration that helped them to secure it — to create a Jewish national home.

As historian James Barr notes, Britain’s motive for issuing the Balfour Declaration was more strategic than compassionate. The hope was, as Barr puts it, to create “what it called ‘a buffer Jewish state’ to guard the eastern approaches to the Suez Canal and keep the French at bay”. But this strategic aim, and Britain’s obligations under the mandate, were already in tension before the Second World War broke out.

First, the Balfour Declaration prompted a swift rise in Jewish immigration to Palestine, which triggered an Arab uprising in 1936. Fearing all-out Arab revolt, the British responded by imposing a strict cap on Jewish immigration in 1939. But as stories of Nazi atrocities began to percolate from German-occupied Europe, this cap swiftly came to seem intolerably cold-hearted. Among those moved to understandable outrage were members of America’s growing, prosperous and increasingly influential Jewish population, many of whom were already engaged in campaigning for an independent Jewish homeland. These activists decried British immigration policy in Palestine, not without reason, as “cruel and indefensible” in the context of the Holocaust.

Their campaigning drew the attention of politicians. The statesman and presidential candidate Wendell Willkie, steeped in America’s national story of self-determination in the Declaration of Independence, was both moved by Jewish suffering and perhaps, as Barr suggests, also mindful of the presence of large Jewish voting minorities in key swing states required for his planned 1944 presidential campaign. He became a key figure in pursuing an end to the immigration cap, and, as time went on, in shaping American perceptions that British control of Palestine was less a buffer between hostile ethnic groups than the main obstacle to these groups’ reconciliation.

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Albert Einstein was one of many who encouraged this view. According to one American diplomat, in 1946 the theoretical physicist assured a joint British-American committee exploring Jewish refugee resettlement that all Palestine needed was “really honest government for the people there which would get the Arabs and Jews together”. Two years later, with Britain exhausted and dependent on American funds and goodwill, the US set out to make such a government a reality. The rest, as they say, is history.

None of this is to impute some special status or cunning to a “Zionist lobby”, as conspiracy-mongers are wont to do. Modern America is a nation of immigrants, and it’s common for expats to retain an interest in the old country. In 1918, for example, with the Habsburg Empire on the brink of disintegration, a delegation of Central European diplomats met in Pittsburgh seeking international recognition for a proposed Czechoslovakian breakaway state. A.J.P. Taylor also describes how emigrants were instrumental in securing American recognition for this new nation — even before the monarchy that nominally still governed those territories was formally dissolved. Similarly, the painful history of Northern Ireland’s Troubles includes a distinctive and sometimes controversial American contribution, impelled by that country’s Irish-heritage diaspora.

And if an expat-inflected international politics is characteristically American, so too is the governing theme of many of its overseas interventions: a sometimes painfully idealistic effort to reconfigure foreign cultures and political landscapes in line with the American melting-pot ideal. Indeed, if your everyday reference-point is the relative cultural “blank canvas” of modern America, and you’ve decided not to think about the Native Americans, perhaps this looks as possible as it sounded from the lips of Albert Einstein.

Amid Europe’s centuries (or the Holy Land’s millennia) of history and grievance, such a policy seems optimistic to say the least. Accordingly, many such efforts to foster America’s “self-determination” have had, at best, mixed results. Among the failures, perhaps the least disastrous was Czechoslovakia: it didn’t succeed as a post-Habsburg state, but at least managed to divide peacefully in the 1992 “Velvet Divorce”. There have been many others since — some impelled by expat activism within America; others, as for example the “nation-building” catastrophes of Iraq and Afghanistan, seemingly by sheer conviction.

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And when the attempt to remake the world in America’s image tilts the international landscape towards American interests, so much the better for America. When Britain’s strategic Middle East foothold, the Palestine mandate, was replaced in 1948, for example, the loss signalled the beginning of the end for British control of oil in the region — and the beginning of its relative domination by America.

This double game enrages many. Charitably, we might read at least some of the resulting hatred of the American hegemon as a kind of furious disappointment at how often the high words about freedom and democracy operate in practice as delivery mechanisms for the far grubbier pursuit of power and money. Regardless, the states created in the process stand for America’s strange cocktail of high idealism, reach and ruthlessness — and its ability to reshape the world in its own image and ignore the casualties. Of these, none is a more potent symbol of than Israel: the state that offered sanctuary to Europe’s brutalised Jews, scuppered a key geopolitical rival, and has endured ever since despite near-total encirclement by hostile powers largely thanks to American support.

When the crowd bellows “From the river to the sea”, then, relatively few are saying this because they have a material interest in obliterating the real Israel. I dare say many more have no particular animus toward Jewish people. They just don’t care about them. Rather, most are moved by a desire to weaken what Israel symbolises: Pax Americana. Whenever the denizens of greater Corbynism denounce “settler colonialism”, “capitalism”, “white supremacy”, or some other formulation meaning “the reigning order, which I don’t like”, this is what they’re referring to. A defeat for Israel is a defeat for America; and implicitly, a great many Jews may be sacrificed in pursuit of that noble goal. By contrast, there’s no obvious way to turn the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict into a bloody nose for the American empire. So no one gives a stuff.

But only a fool would take these bleak realities as licence to equivocate about the conflict now unfolding. “Both-sides-ing” is itself a peacetime luxury, made possible by Pax Americana. The American empire may be amoral, extractive, asymmetrical and at times infuriatingly hypocritical. But every empire, throughout recorded history, has had feet of clay as well as high ideals. And with all its faults, America remains the principal guarantor of relative peace and order across a colossal sphere of influence that spans half the planet and includes my own nation.

Just today, Biden will step up to that project again with a visit to Tel Aviv. Do we want him to succeed or not? Those who dream of America’s downfall, literally or by symbolic proxy, offer no better alternative, and a great many worse ones. In reality, there are no blank-slate beginnings, and no happy endings either. We can only ever pick a place, and take a stand. I stand with peace and order, however flawed. I stand with Israel.

The Loom of Time is Robert’s Kaplan latest, characteristically magisterial book, and this opening anecdote holds the key to his enduring importance. He goes on to describe how back in the mid-Nineties an editor had described his interest in the Uyghurs as “testing the limits of obscurantism”. But Kaplan knew different — especially since he understood, when he went again in 2015, that the backdrop for this repression was China’s $1 trillion Belt and Road Initiative: “a postmodern transportation network of highways, railways, and energy pipelines linking China by land and sea with Europe across the Greater Middle East”.

Kaplan’s thinking is grounded in geography. Whether it is how the state of Iraq is so geographically incoherent that its descent into chaos was almost inevitable or the conservative influence of mountains on society, the truth is always to be found not in textbooks or the corridors of government, but out in the field, traversing the veins and capillaries that comprise our world: the alleyways and the slums and the bogs — the terrain.

His trip to Xinjiang illustrates his process in miniature. One, understand the map; two, get to the places that others won’t go; and three, from there, better understand the human activities (such as the Belt and Road) that act upon it. This is the beginning of political knowledge.

The book is about the Greater Middle East, loosely speaking the Islamic world “stretching from Morocco in the western Mediterranean to East Turkestan, abutting the arable cradle of China”. A region that absolutely cannot be understood without knowledge of its desert and plains and mountains and bazaars, and without its perennial curse: foreign meddling.

Historically, this has taken the form of avowed empires, which in their 19th-century Western form at least, are dead. Kaplan correctly observes that “in a globalised world one culture cannot simply appropriate and subjugate other cultures for its own ends”. Empires are now not only morally wrong but déclassé.

The imperial mindset, though, persists. If the Greater Middle East was once in the sights of the imperial West — whose afterlife continued with “humanitarian interventions” of Afghanistan and Iraq — it is now the fight zone for what Kaplan calls “ghost empires”: China, which seeks to link its budding commercial outposts in Europe with those in East Asia; but also Turkey and Iran, two former empires which also revere their imperial pasts. As Kaplan observes: “Western imperialism may be looked down upon, but not so the record of indigenous empires.”

Where once the British East India Company advanced eastward from Europe across the Middle East to China, China now advances westward, with similar commercial and strategic motives. It has built a large military base in Djibouti at the mouth of the Red Sea, and is contemplating others further north along the Red Sea at Port Sudan and at Jiwani by the Pakistan-Iran border near Gwadar. It is indeed “a great age in history to be a Chinese civil engineer”.

Geography for Kaplan also serves a wider purpose: it both informs and explains a particular view of history — the long view. What Fernand Braudel, the mid-20th-century French geographer and historian of the Mediterranean, calls la longue durée. If geography is, more or less, immutable, its effects on history are most apparent when you consider it not over months or years, as we have a tendency to do, but over centuries and even millennia. Like Braudel, Kaplan is interested in “the slow, imperceptible changes, like the sluggish movements of the ocean at its deepest depths, which invisibly determine the fast-moving, transitory ripples at the surface, upon which the media remain focused”.

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Taking the long view of history frees you from the varying conceptual and ideological preoccupations of differing periods. And being immutable, geography does not yield to ideology. This means you can start to look at monarchy and empire and autocracy and even democracy — which “according to the long arc of time, remains but a bold experiment” in the Greater Middle East — not exclusively in terms of their morality but their efficacy.

It is an unfashionable approach, but unlike the ad hominem polemics of the column or tweet thread, it shows genuine intellectual bravery. Kaplan writes: “Thus, to define the Arab world in particular as a contest between democracy and authoritarianism — as so many people do — is to impose simulated categories upon it, specific to America’s own historical experience, not to the historical experience of the region in question.” This tendency to view the world as an extension of the United States is simple, and simplistic. Go to a region and decide: who are the victims? Who are the oppressors? Who is black, who is white? Often, the categories are not only irrelevant but unhelpful, and even dangerous. And there is a name for this: imperialism, albeit of the cultural kind.

This is also, in the end, a deeply moral approach, because, as we saw in Iraq, what does not work in the Greater Middle East almost always ends in horror. This is a book about the region, but it is also a book about our reaction to it, which has in turn helped to mould it. Kaplan understands how disastrous this reaction has been, not least through the importation of the “fatal idea” of modern nationalism that, among other things, brought genocide to communities of Turks, Greeks and Armenians who had once coexisted under the Ottoman Empire. This is a place where “the assault of the West, from urbanisation to imperialism to modern nationalism to weapons technology, created complex and hybrid cultural orders throughout the developing world, where chaos took on a magnified and deadly quality”.

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This is the binary that has so obsessed Kaplan throughout his career: the dialectic between chaos and order. In February 1994, he wrote a now-famous piece in The Atlantic called “The Coming Anarchy”. While think-tankers and politicians pondered the role democracy would play in the coming years, Kaplan, out in the field, argued that it was tribal and ethnic divides, dwindling resources, and desertification and drought — which is to say climate change — that would shape the future.

He was right. In 2023, it’s not Cold War fears of nuclear Armageddon or industrialised state war that loom but the spectre of anarchy. The conflict in Ukraine wasn’t officially a war when it began, often fought by local “separatists” — Russian proxies — and with mercenaries and organised criminal gangs all seeking a piece of the action. Meanwhile, opposing combatants often share a “nationality” sundered by ethnicity and language, while foreign fighters flow in on both sides. Head south and see conflict washing across the Sahel as Jihadists groups exploit the desperation wrought by dwindling water and exploding populations. We are living in Robert Kaplan’s world, not the value-freighted one that existed only in the imaginations of Tony Blair and Barack Obama.

Towards the end of the book, Kaplan quotes from War and Peace. Count Rostopchin, a general and statesman, “had known for a long time that Moscow would be abandoned, but had known it only with his reason, while with all his soul he had not believed it”. The homily here is a simple one. Rostopchin knew Moscow would fall to Napoleon, but he could not bring himself to believe it so, when it happened, he was helpless to act.

The prerequisite to effective action is to first accept reality as it is — not in the lecture room or government department, but on the ground. This is the leitmotif that runs throughout Kaplan’s work. It is what has kept him at the cutting edge of geopolitical thought for decades, and it is what we must internalise, or else we will continue to act ineffectively, or worse, with great harm.

In each of these coups, the military officers involved cited the same reasons for seizing power: mounting concerns about a surge in terrorism and chronic social and economic underdevelopment. Despite being one of the world’s richest regions in terms of natural resources, including oil, gold and uranium, the Sahel is also one of the poorest financially. Niger is a striking example: it is one of the world’s leading exporters of uranium, yet consistently ranks towards the bottom of the Human Development Index.

In the eyes of these countries’ new leaders and their supporters, much of the responsibility for this lies with one villain in particular: France. They are, after all, all former French colonies, part of what used to be known as Françafrique. And more than any other imperial power, France has continued to exercise a huge influence over its former outposts, replacing outright colonial rule with more subtle forms of neocolonial control — first and foremost with currency.

Before Africa’s decolonisation in the Fifties and Sixties, it was common among Western powers to impose forms of monetary subservience on their respective colonies. The latter were generally forced to use currencies issued and controlled by the imperial centres, to ensure the European countries’ economic control and financial benefit. France was no exception; rather, what set France apart from other imperial powers was the fact that its monetary empire survived decolonisation. While most African colonies, upon becoming independent, adopted national currencies, France managed to cajole most of its former outposts in Central and Western Africa into maintaining the colonial currency: the CFA franc.

In the decades that followed, various countries tried to abandon the CFA system, but very few succeeded. As the Senegalese economist Ndongo Samba Sylla and the French journalist Fanny Pigeaud write in their book Africa’s Last Colonial Currency (which I translated), France did everything it could to discourage countries from leaving the CFA: “Intimidations, destabilisation campaigns and even assassinations and coups d’état marked this period, testifying to the permanent and unequal power relations on which the relationship between France and its ‘partners’ in Africa was based — and is still based today.”

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The CFA franc, as a result, continues to be used by 14 countries, mostly former French colonies, throughout Central and Western Africa — including Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. Together, they form the so-called “franc zone”, with France still playing a central role. Despite the formal “Africanisation” of this group, which involved transferring the headquarters of the CFA franc’s two central banks to the African continent, France continues to enjoy far-reaching control over the system — and the countries that employ it.

“More than simply a currency,” Sylla and Pigeaud write, “the CFA franc allows France to manage its economic, monetary, financial and political relations with some of its former colonies according to a logic functional to its interests.” They contend that the CFA franc represents a form of “monetary imperialism”, which hinders the development of African economies and keeps them subservient to France.

Consider Niger: the country is France’s biggest source of uranium (providing around 20% of its supply), which is needed to fuel the nuclear plants which provide roughly 70% of the country’s electricity. Yet, only one in seven Nigeriens (and just 4% of rural residents) have access to modern electricity services, while more than 40% of the population live in extreme poverty. Just as strikingly, 85% of the company that operates Niger’s uranium industry is owned by France’s Atomic Energy Commission and two French companies; only 15% is owned by Niger’s government.

The CFA system, and the lack of monetary and economic sovereignty it entails, is central to this systematic plundering of resources — in Niger and elsewhere in the Sahel. Of the 10 countries with the world’s lowest Human Development Index, five are part of the franc zone, including the three that have experienced recent coups.

Nor is France’s control over the franc zone limited to economic tools. Niger is also France’s main Sahelian military base, hosting around 1,500 French soldiers. To further complicate matters, the country is also home to around 1,000 US soldiers, one of the largest contingents of American troops on the African continent, operating under the umbrella of the United States Africa Command (Africom). Since 2013, the US has also been carrying out drone missions from several bases in Niger — including a recently constructed $110-million installation. For both France and the US, the purported objective is to fight Islamic terrorism; the reality, however, is that despite this massive foreign military presence, security in Niger and other countries has deteriorated over the years — as have their economic prospects.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised, then, that Africa’s newest military juntas have singled out France as the main target of their ire. In Mali, the current military leader Assimi Goïta expelled the French army, cut diplomatic ties and even banned French as an official language. In Burkina Faso, the young revolutionary leader Ibrahim Traoré also expelled French troops and banned several exports.

For Sylla, this amounts to nothing less than “a second national liberation movement, which aims to bring to completion the decolonisation process which began in the Fifties and Sixties in Francophone Africa”. While the first stage of this process was about obtaining political independence from the West, this latest stage is about obtaining economic sovereignty and independence. This is why, as a recent United Nations report noted, popular support for these new military governments can be understood as being “symptomatic of a new wave of democratic aspiration that is expanding across the continent”. As Sylla told me: “In many of these countries, the militaries are seen as leaders upholding their nations’ sovereignty and independence, as opposed to elected governments, which tend to be puppets of the West and have done nothing to challenge the neocolonial order throughout the years.”

But what does this mean for Niger? For now, the country appears to be moving in the same direction as Mali and Burkina Faso. While the new government has stopped short (for now) of telling foreign troops to leave the country, it has revoked a raft of military cooperation agreements with France, closed the country’s airspace — effectively bringing to a halt US drone operations — and announced it is suspending the export of uranium to France. In response, thousands of people have taken to the streets to show their support, burning French flags and even attacking the French embassy. “Since childhood, I’ve been opposed to France,” a local businessman told the BBC. “They’ve exploited all the riches of my country such as uranium, petrol and gold. The poorest Nigeriens are unable to eat three times a day because of France.”

As if to prove his point, the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas) — a political and economic union of 15 countries located in West Africa which has the support of the West — immediately placed sanctions on Niger, suspending all commercial and financial transactions between Niger and Ecowas countries and, even more ominously, freezing Niger’s assets deposited in the central and commercial banks of Ecowas. The reason they can do this is precisely because Ecowas contains the West African Economic and Monetary Union, which issues the currency used by Niger, and is largely under France’s control. This allows France to weaponise the CFA franc against any government that poses a problem for it within the franc zone. The EU has also reacted punitively, suspending aid and cooperation with Niger despite it being one of the poorest countries in the world.

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More worryingly, the West African bloc said it would “take all measures necessary”, including the use of force, if the elected government was not reinstated within a week. That deadline expired on Sunday and no action was taken, but the threat has not been retracted. They are due to meet on Thursday to decide what happens next. Meanwhile, France, the EU and the US have all offered “unflagging” support to the ousted leader, and have backed Ecowas’s stance. This follows a decade of France using military force to defend its interests in Francophone Africa, intervening in the Ivory Coast, Mali and Chad.

But this is more than just a story about France’s waning hegemony and US military presence in the region. The Nigerien coup also threatens a $13-billion dollar project to build a gas pipeline connecting gas fields in Nigeria to Europe, which would pass straight through Niger. Following the EU’s decision to wean itself off Russian gas last year, this venture is arguably more urgent than ever.

The Nigerien military regime, for its part, has warned that any foreign military intervention in the country would result in a “massacre”, while Mali and Burkina Faso have both come out in support of the new government. Any military intervention, they warned in a joint statement, “would be tantamount to a declaration of war against Burkina Faso and Mali”, and “could destabilise the entire region”. Moreover, given Russia’s strong ties with the putschist governments, a Western-backed attack on Niger could easily mutate into what Colin P. Clarke has described as “a regional proxy war”, with Russia and the Wagner Group supporting Niger (and Burkina Faso and Mali), and Western countries supporting Ecowas.

All of which feeds into fears that we are on the verge of a new scramble for Africa, with Russia, China and the West vying for influence over this immensely resource-rich, young continent predicted to be the next frontier of growth. If this logic prevails, however, it will be a disaster for Africa. For as hard as it may be to fathom, Western countries — and France in particular — should accept that this anti-Western trend has much less to do with recent foreign influence than with historical grievances against long-running neocolonial practices. Any attempt to counter it with the same old recipe — financial blackmail and military force — will only strengthen the rebels’ resolve.

At the end of every week, Tony Blair receives his “box” to review over the weekend. It is no longer the tatty, old red briefcase of a Prime Minister, but a virtual one accessible from his laptop wherever he is in the world. Yet, the process remains much the same as when he was in Downing Street. Those who work for him must submit their papers before the box is closed for the weekend. Blair will then review the documents and add comments before meeting his team the following week. Only those really close to the former PM can email him papers directly.

Such is the life of Blair in “retirement”. Aged 70, he works with the zeal of a man with something still to prove; something to build; something perhaps to redeem. Constantly travelling, Blair spends as much as 70% of his time abroad: raising funds, attending conferences, giving speeches and networking with world leaders, plutocrats, corporate executives and “thought leaders”. He flies on private jets and is escorted in armed cars with security always close by. This is Blair today: no longer Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, but Prime Minister of Tony Blair Inc.

Formally, he is “executive chairman” of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, known to all as the TBI. The institute was born in 2017 and now employs more than 800 people worldwide, some with salaries as high as $504,000 (though Blair does not take one). He has offices in London, New York, San Francisco, Abu Dhabi, Singapore and Accra, and enough money to stage the slickest political conference in Britain. He has a media team to manage his media “grid”, a policy team to shape national debate, and a delivery team to project-manage his priorities across the world.

Working directly for him, Blair has a chief executive who used to work in No. 10, Catherine Rimmer, a global managing director who once worked for Justin Trudeau, Michael McNair, and an executive vice president who sits on the board of Oracle, one of the world’s biggest tech companies, Awo Ablo. His policy unit, meanwhile, is the only think tank in Britain with American levels of funding and a direct line into both the Government and Opposition, not to mention the Commissioners in Brussels and tech titans in San Francisco.

It is this arm of the TBI which has produced policy papers on everything from Brexit to AI to Covid. Its influence is such that cabinet ministers and even prime ministers — including Boris Johnson and Liz Truss — are regularly in touch. Starmer’s agenda as Labour leader now so closely resembles the policy prescriptions put forward by the TBI, whether on the need for a closer relationship with Europe or a new planning regime, that there is talk throughout Westminster of a Blairite reconquista. He has openly offered his institute to help Starmer if he becomes prime minister.

And yet, it is not the policy unit that is the TBI’s driving force, but its consultancy operation. Today, the “government advisory work” is responsible for almost all of its revenue, bringing in $79.4 million of its $81 million turnover in 2021, according to the latest accounts. In a recent round of internal restructuring, this side of the organisation was prioritised, resulting in a number of policy specialists leaving, including the policy unit’s leading man, Ian Mulheirn. (When we approached the TBI a spokesman insisted policy making had not been “de-prioritised” and remained one of the three pillars of the institute’s work, alongside “strategy and delivery”.)

The consultancy arm, meanwhile, is expanding rapidly, offering advice to governments around the world on the art of “delivery”. Look at the TBI’s recruitment page and there is an extraordinary array of jobs available: four in Abu Dhabi, three in Eastern Europe, two in each of the Philippines, Rwanda, Athens and Côte d’Ivoire, and one each in Israel, Indonesia, Kenya, New York, Nigeria, Senegal, Ghana and Miami. Meanwhile, its offices in London, Singapore and Delhi are all expanding.

The TBI has become, in the words of one figure who knows the institute well, a “McKinsey for world leaders” — a global consultancy business which advises governments on how to govern, while also acting as a middle man between the world’s political and business elites. Astride it all, of course, is Blair himself, the man who decides what the organisation should focus on, who it should help and where it should expand. Like a senior partner in a law firm, Blair brings in the clients, using his connections with the rich and powerful.

It is important to stop for a moment to appreciate just how mould-breaking Blair’s post-premiership life really is for a British politician. When Margaret Thatcher resigned as prime minister, she joined the House of Lords. When John Major left office, he became chairman of a cricket club. Gordon Brown became a UN special envoy, David Cameron took on various chairmanship roles, Theresa May and Liz Truss remained in parliament and Boris Johnson returned to his old life writing newspaper columns. None of them tried to build anything on the scale of Blair’s globe-spanning TBI, a British “Clinton Foundation” combining philanthropy, business and political influence. Blair has assembled something so big, in fact, that according to one figure close to another former prime minister, he has approached at least one of those who succeeded him in No. 10 to see if they might be interested in working with him.

But the question I keep coming back to is: why?

II

At Blair’s Future of Britain conference in July, I watched as he weaved through a packed drinks reception, glass of water in hand, posing for selfies, imparting his wisdom. I hoped to grab a word. But such was the scrum of acolytes and security, I could not get close.

As Blair worked the room, hugging old friends and granting quick audiences to starstruck Labour MPs, it felt like being back in the early 2000s. For many of my generation, Blair will always be a defining politician. For me this is doubly so; I grew up in Sedgefield, his constituency, and knew him, tangentially, through my parents who were both Labour activists. I knew all those who worked for him and, indeed, spent time in his constituency office myself as a wide-eyed work experience kid. Back then, Blair seemed almost the ur-politician, the archetype others copied to win power. To this day, seeing him still feels a little bit like journeying back in time.

I am not the only one who thinks this. One person who worked at TBI, and has since left, compared life inside the institute to the movie Goodbye Lenin  — in which a woman who fell into a coma before the fall of the Berlin Wall is shielded from the truth by her protective son. Blair’s new life, according to some former colleagues, feels like one long prime ministerial cosplay in which everybody must play their part. There is the media grid, the box, the police protection officers, armoured cars, private jets and constant meetings with world leaders and VIPs. Spend a day in the TBI offices in central London and you might see anyone popping in: a leading Indian politician one day, Bill Clinton greeting his old friend with a bear hug the next.

Yet there are plenty of giveaways that time has not stood still: the grey hair; the suede Chelsea boots which are a shade too informal for frontline politics; the Apple Watch poking out from under his jacket. The truth is that Blair is only just emerging from a period of his life when public animosity meant that he rarely ventured out in London and, indeed, felt more comfortable not just out of the city but out of the country itself. Looking back, it is astonishing how quickly his reputation fell after leaving office.

Blair resigned as prime minister in 2007 with high hopes for his new life. He was given a standing ovation as he left the House of Commons for the last time and was immediately confirmed as the new “Middle East envoy” representing the UN, EU, US and Russia. There was hope he could do for Israel-Palestine what he had done for Northern Ireland. The tides of history, however, were no longer with him. By the time he left the envoy job in 2015, peace in the Middle East was further away than ever.

During this period, the world Blair had tried to build as prime minister seemed to collapse all around him. Soon after the financial crisis, which immediately followed his resignation, Blair lost his bid to become the first permanent president of the European Council, the stain from Iraq just too great. And then his old rival Gordon Brown ordered an independent inquiry into the Iraq War — a trial Blair could neither win nor escape.

This was when he set up the basic structure of his life today, creating a number of charities in the areas of policy he was most interested in: the Tony Blair Sports Foundation in the North East of England; the Tony Blair Faith Foundation which worked across the world; the Tony Blair Africa Governance Initiative focused on development. He also set up “Tony Blair Associates”, his consultancy business. To begin with, each of these organisations were nominally separate, which meant most of the attention went on the business wing, leaving the impression that he was simply hawking his services among a range of unsavoury governments — from the Kuwaitis to the Kazakhs —  to the highest bidder, his post-premiership life one primarily driven by money-making.

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Fair or not, the fact that Blair was evidently making a lot of money did not sit well with a public who had been thrust into a world of austerity immediately after he left office. He had swiftly taken a well-paid seat on the board of JPMorgan Chase and joined the lucrative speaking circuit. This work brought in enough money to allow him to swap his old constituency home Sedgefield for two multi-million pound properties: one in London and another in the Home Counties. It did not go unnoticed that he seemed to be recreating the life he had in No. 10, only now freed from having to care about public opinion. His Georgian townhouse in London looked just like Downing Street and his country retreat was not only near Chequers, but had the same air of Chilterns grandeur.

Taken together, the money-making nature of his post-Downing Street life almost destroyed Blair’s public image. Even his decision to give away the entire £4.6 million advance for his memoir, A Journey, was dismissed as a publicity stunt.

But then came Jeremy Corbyn, Brexit and Donald Trump — the populist revolt. This was the moment his resurrection really began. Brexit, in particular, replaced Iraq in the public consciousness as the defining political event, with a new set of political villains whom the public could boo and whistle.

This period of political turmoil, according to many I spoke to, shocked Blair into becoming more involved in politics again. Blair took an important step towards rebuilding his public image by merging all his business and charitable interests into one organisation — the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. From this point on, instead of having a consultancy business and several charities, Blair presided over one giant not-for-profit organisation.

In 2017, he set up a unit called “renewing the centre”, recruiting a team of smart, young Anglo-Americans to come up with ideas to save the liberal order, as they saw it. From the beginning, though, there were tensions in the team. Some believed that given Blair’s background as Labour leader, “renewing the centre” meant, in effect, renewing the centre-left, finding new policies that would rebuild the coalition of progressives he had once so successfully amassed. Others, though, saw it differently. For them, “renewing the centre” meant renewing both the centre-left and the centre-right, and even forming an alliance where necessary to defeat their existential enemy: the “populists” who must never be appeased. I was told Blair was firmly in the latter camp.

For some, he was drawing exactly the wrong conclusion, confirming the populist narrative that there was no difference between the traditional parties, and that neither of which would allow any real change to the system. Over the years that followed, some of Blair’s more Left-leaning recruits departed in frustration, believing, as one person put it, that Blair was not really any different from George Osborne when it came to austerity. Others said the tensions in the project ran even deeper.

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“It was really fraught,” said one. “We were trying to save democracy — but from Mayfair.” Could the TBI really learn lessons this way? Another simply said: “It was a failure.” At this time, Blair was devoting much of his energy to campaigning for a second referendum — a fight he would eventually lose in December 2019, when Boris Johnson comfortably defeated Corbyn’s Labour with the promise to “Get Brexit Done”. The centre was collapsing.

And yet, from this point of political impotence, Blair’s reputation and influence has recovered. As the pandemic began to spread across Europe the following year, Blair put his policy unit to work. As cases escalated, the TBI released paper after paper on everything from face masks to mass testing and even international vaccine passports, always seemingly one step ahead of the Government. When the country was desperate to be vaccinated, Blair released a paper calling for a delay between the first and second doses to improve efficiency. The Government quickly announced the same plan.

Finally, Blair seemed to be back in touch with the zeitgeist. The pandemic was an ultimate test in apolitical “delivery” — that what matters is what works. He was back. His institute was flying and donations were beginning to pour in from around the world. But under the surface, all was not well.

III

In his memoir, A Journey, published in 2010, Blair describes how he helps developing countries. First, he hires teams of “highly qualified young people” from “Governments, the World Bank, McKinsey or private banks”. Then, after hiring these bright young things, he sends them out into the world to “build capacity, so that in time the locals can do it”.

Over the past few years, Blair has rapidly expanded his team of consultants. In Africa alone, the TBI is active in Rwanda, Senegal, Nigeria, Mozambique, Togo, Ivory Coast, Malawi, Burkina Faso, Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Teams of TBI experts sit at the heart of foreign governments, advising on everything from how to improve crop yields to the creation of “presidential delivery units”.

A quick look at the description for its “Country Director Eastern Europe” job gives an indication of the kind of work the institute does. “The Country Director will lead a TBI team embedded in country at the highest level of Government,” the advert reads. One of its key responsibilities is to “build and maintain a relationship of trust with your counterpart (typically President or Prime Minister level)”. In doing so, the candidate must be able to “suggest and convince your counterpart on key development priorities that TBI could be supporting”. What would be the reaction if this was the other way round: if, say, the Clinton Foundation, advertised for a team of people to be embedded in the British government or simply to “suggest and convince” the British prime minister to follow their advice?

Yet the TBI is proud of what its teams have been able to achieve . “In Nigeria, our energy advisor worked on the design and implementation of a mass solar-connection programme called Solar Power Naija that aims to provide electricity access to 25 million Nigerians,” the report states. In another example, the TBI said it “supported the government of Burkina Faso to improve the country’s agriculture and agri-business outcomes”. In doing so, the TBI claims, they helped increase the country’s “fertiliser-blending capacity”.

To the TBI’s critics, this is just the gloss of “deliverology”, the belief that what is really holding a country back is not so much deep structural challenges such as corruption, economic exploitation or colonialism — but bad governance. And this can be fixed. The problem, in other words, is largely technocratic, not political.

Another criticism levelled at Blair is that what he is really doing is advising on how to build a version of the Downing Street he created 20 years ago — right at the very moment the British state has shown itself to be so woefully dysfunctional (something, ironically, Blair also believes).

But it’s not just cynical Brits who are questioning the effectiveness of the TBI. There are also plenty of raised eyebrows in Africa. In June, Nigeria’s Guardian newspaper published an op-ed by an academic which dismissed Blair as a “self-serving lobbyist… projecting dubious altruistic inclinations”. Nigeria, it said, must not “willingly [offer] itself as a cheap financial rehabilitation home for retired British Prime Ministers”.

In Malawi, there is similar public disquiet. The TBI first arrived in the country in 2012 soon after the former president Joyce Banda came to power. However, after Banda’s government was overwhelmed by an extraordinary corruption scandal known as “Cashgate” — in which it emerged that as much as $250 million had been looted from public funds after a junior civil servant was found with $300,000 in cash in the boot of his car — the TBI left.

It returned to the country, though, in 2020, after Lazarus Chakwera, its new president, took over and asked for help to “strengthen its delivery and implementation mechanisms”. Not everyone in Malawi was happy about it. Charles Kajoloweka, executive director of the human rights and governance watchdog Youth and Society, said it was almost impossible to to find out exactly what TBI was doing. William Kambwandira, executive director at the Centre for Social Accountability and Transparency in Malawi, agreed. “Our greatest concern is that government dealings with the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change have been kept under wraps.” In a statement, the TBI said the “sole purpose” of its work was “to ensure the government is delivering on its commitments to improve the public services it provides to its people.”

Such criticisms get to the heart of why some are sceptical about the TBI’s modus operandi. The TBI offers technocratic support based on a technocratic assessment of development, but it does so to political leaders often based on personal relationships with Blair himself.

The former Malawian president Banda explained how her relationship with Blair worked. “When I ascended to power, he and his wife Cherie flew over to Malawi within one week of my presidency,” she told UnHerd. “When he came over, during a state banquet hosted in his honour, I had a conversation with him where I personally requested [support] and he offered to send over three of his staffers to help me, due to the fact that I had assumed the presidency abruptly. I remember that is when he told me about his global programme and offered to lend me a hand. I remember what he said: ‘I have several people working in the region and I will shift them around.’” As Banda put it: “There was no formal agreement or big ceremony because he was just helping a friend.”

IV

In April 2022, Blair needed someone to manage the TBI’s vast, global consultancy. He hired Mike McNair from McKinsey, a Canadian who had worked for years as Justin Trudeau’s policy chief in Ottawa. Since arriving, McNair has overseen a rapid expansion of the organisation.

The nature of this expansion, however, raises questions about the TBI’s future and how it is funded. There has been a push from the TBI to access philanthropic donations and to create partnerships with business. One relationship in particular jumps out from the TBI accounts: that with the tech billionaire, Larry Ellison, and his company Oracle.

Ellison, 78, is currently thought to be the world’s fourth richest man, with an estimated fortune of $140 billion. Like many tech billionaires, he has cultivated a reputation as something of an iconoclastic sage, a workaholic visionary who can see the future more clearly than others — and, importantly, deliver it. Like his friend Elon Musk, Ellison is known for his almost impish impatience, his mind moving from one grand projet to the next, often making grand claims about their revolutionary potential only to move on to something else soon after. “I am a sprinter,” Ellison once remarked. “I rest, I sprint, I rest, I sprint again.”

It should not have been a great surprise, then, when in 2020 Ellison announced that he was suddenly disbanding his entire team at the Larry Ellison Foundation in London. The unit was led by Matthew Symonds, the former Economist journalist (and father of Carrie Johnson) who wrote an “intimate” authorised biography of Ellison, published in 2003. When I rang Symonds, he immediately hung up.

Ellison’s decision to close his London operation came at the height of the pandemic, announcing that he wanted to focus all his charitable energies on “medical philanthropy”. In many ways, this made perfect sense. Ellison bankrolls the Ellison Institute for Transformative Medicine, focused on trying to find cures for cancer.

At around the same time, Ellison began deepening his relationship with Blair. In partnership with the TBI, Ellison’s Institute for Transformative Medicine created a “Global Health Security Consortium” with scientists at Oxford University to provide “support for leaders around the world to help them prepare for the health-security challenges of tomorrow”. Ellison also began giving more and more money to the TBI. In 2019, the Larry Ellison Foundation gave the TBI $10 million with a further $20 million committed. By 2021, this had risen to $33 million, with plans for future donations of a further $49 million.

At some point, Blair was evidently able to convince Ellison that the TBI’s methods were a more effective way to make the world a better place than his previous efforts. And the partnership between the two does have a certain logic. Blair believes that “the power of technology” must be harnessed by bringing together politicians and “innovators”. This, then, is one of the central purposes of the TBI as Blair sees it: to act as a matchmaker for plutocrats such as Ellison and political figures such as himself. But it is an approach that raises awkward questions about power and transparency.

Alongside the Global Health Security Consortium, the two of them have also created a “Tech for Development” programme. The idea is to help developing countries build “comprehensive digital infrastructure”. Together, Blair and Ellison have rolled this out in Ghana, Rwanda and Senegal for free, with a view to building electronic health records so that governments know who is vaccinated and who isn’t.

Not everyone, however, looks so kindly upon the partnership. Ellison, after all, is a divisive figure. To some, he is an intense visionary in the same mould as Musk, with the same intense desire to conquer all in business. As Symonds writes in his biography, Ellison has an “unquenchable optimism and almost messianic self belief”. And he is not shy about it. During the pandemic, Ellison offered his medical research facilities to President Trump free of charge. He has bought an island in Hawaii which he uses as both an ultra-exclusive resort for the rich and a living agricultural experiment, part of his grand plan to secure global food supplies. Even as he approaches his 80th birthday, he is still dreaming of his next great breakthrough as well as his legacy. Perhaps that’s why, last year, he made one of the biggest gambles of his career.

In June 2022, Ellison bought the electronic health record company Cerner for almost $30 billion. It was the largest buy-out of his life. Almost immediately after the purchase, Ellison announced that it would help him realise his aim of building a single national database for health records. The plan was endorsed by Blair. His hope is that, using Oracle technology, every American will be able to store their medical data online. It is a visionary move, which, if it pays off, would make Oracle the Amazon of health records. To some, the partnership with the TBI makes good philanthropic and commercial sense: if Oracle can show that digital health records work in Africa, why not elsewhere? And by partnering with the TBI, Oracle gains access to parts of the world it might not have been able to reach before.

The problem is that such a scheme to create a single national health record database is not only incredibly complex and hard to deliver, but extremely contentious. In fact, the main objection is not technocratic, but political — even moral. Do we want every health record to be stored on a cloud run by one corporation? Oracle is already facing a lawsuit in the US over claims it has unlawfully collected information on 5 billion people.

Whether you see the partnership between Blair and Ellison charitably or otherwise, it reveals an important reality about today’s world and the way power works in practice. Blair and Ellison operate in a sphere of hyper-connected individuals (one board member, for instance, is Baroness Rona Fairhead, Boris Johnson’s former minister for trade and export promotion). They talk and meet each other regularly, making important decisions that affect the lives of many people, in ways which are far harder to scrutinise than those taken by governments and political leaders.

Others I spoke to said it is not possible to judge Blair’s enthusiasm for this technology without acknowledging the fact that his institute is partially dependent on donations from a tech billionaire. Some of those who have previously worked closely with Blair went further, arguing that the conflicts of interests within Blair’s new life go even deeper, extending into the heart of the organisation itself. One arm of the TBI might be writing papers on how to protect the international liberal order, for instance, while the consulting arm is embedded with illiberal governments who pose a challenge to that very same order.

Rather than hide this, the TBI actively advertises its partnerships with business, arguing that the “partnerships” it has built up, alongside the donations it receives, allow it to do “the great bulk” of its consultancy work at no cost to governments. When it comes to tricky questions such as patient privacy, Blair is adamant that they do not undermine the transformative potential of technology. In Malawi, for example, the TBI boasts of its partnership with Musk’s “Starlink” internet service, which helped hundreds of thousands of people left homeless by a cyclone. Blair’s entire vision today is for governments to become more effective by linking the kind of strategy, delivery and policy units he had in No. 10 with the kind of technology that was not available to him. Just as he wanted to introduce ID cards back then, he now supports digital ID cards today, as well as vaccine passports and vast new health databases to tackle the spread of disease. As Blair sees it, his partnership with Oracle is just pragmatic policymaking.

But like Ellison, Blair is something of a utopian futurist. He believes, almost as a faith, in the power of technology. Blair is a good boss, according to many I spoke to, because he is always so upbeat and energetic, but when it comes to technology he is a little too “naive” about its possibilities. Another former employee suggests he is “fatalist” about technology in the same way he was fatalist about globalisation — not thinking critically enough about its risks and political consequences. The greatest irony, though, is that such wide-eyed belief in technology now feels almost old-fashioned. To a younger generation who grew up in a world dominated by Big Tech and Big Pharma, the dominance of giant corporations run by tech plutocrats feels less utopian than dystopian.

V

When Blair left office, he consoled himself with the thought that his life was not over. As he wrote in A Journey, he’d always had a bigger passion than politics: religion. Religion gave him purpose. “There is so much frailty still to overcome,” he concluded in his memoir. “But in overcoming it lies the meaning of life.”

But what are these frailties Blair must overcome? According to Catholic teaching, “sins of frailty” are minor acts committed through “indecision, weakness, lack of vigilance or courage”. Those who have previously worked closely with him see a bit of all these in Blair. Some believe he too often shies away from conflict, even today. In No. 10, he outsourced being the bad guy to Alastair Campbell and did not confront and demote Gordon Brown soon enough, which undermined his premiership. Some believe Blair is now shying away from confronting Starmer, a man he believes will become prime minister, but, according to a number of people I spoke to, not a sufficiently reforming one. Even as Blair battled to save centrism, he was careful not to burn bridges with the Trump or Johnson governments, or indeed any of the illiberal governments he works with.

Is this is a sign of indecisiveness? It is striking that even those who most like and respect him are unclear what exactly he wants from the TBI. Does he really want it to be the McKinsey for world leaders? Or a think tank? And for what purpose exactly? To Blair, this type of thinking is overly reductive. To have a political impact you must have policies and the ability to implement them. But it is also for this reason that there is what one former employee described as a certain whimsy to the TBI — an organisation less committed to the service of an abstract goal than to the aspirations of Blair himself. If Tony wants something, it happens; if he wants to help someone he helps them.

The more I studied him, the more I wondered whether his biggest frailty of all is simply the desire to remain relevant, the frailty that J.D. Salinger once described as, “not having the courage to be an absolute nobody”. Blair was a somebody once and it is very difficult to give that up. He had power to do things and he still wants to do things — and so he needs power. But to get power you need money and connections and ideas and people. And he now has all those things in droves.

This is the reason he continues to work as hard as he does, taking his box home at weekends, raising money, flying around the world, attending conferences. Maintaining the network becomes an intrinsic goal in itself. This helps explain why Blair takes meetings with world leaders and works for countries many would avoid. He has what one person described as a deep, primal need to be “connected”.

Today, Blair lives the life of a prime minister, but with the freedom to shake off the petty realities of government, working on campaigns to help American governors one moment, flying in to help embattled African leaders the next; all while working on grand plans to change the world with exciting, utopian tech bros in California.

But how much of this is actually real? “Do governments really want his strategic advice,” one person who knows Blair put it to me, “or his phone number?” Do those companies he has partnered with really have only altruistic intentions? And do political leaders really only work with him to make their governments more effective? The truth, I suspect, lies somewhere in the ambiguous soup of human motivation; in the flawed, frail characters of ordinary human beings with conflicting aspirations, trying to do good in the world and for themselves.

​​Blair today is more influential than any other former prime minister: he has built an empire that connects business to power and himself to everyone. In the 15 years since he left office, Blair has created a world in which he might not be prime minister but he remains powerful. And that is the point. The power is the point.

Additional reporting: Jack McBrams

The European Union plays a particular role in this dominant narrative. The bloc is usually seen as one of the good guys: it stands up for democracy and liberalism, two values which are threatened by Russia, a country on the side of authoritarianism and illiberalism. The EU is also viewed as the embodiment of cosmopolitanism, the opposite of the nationalism of Russia and its Eurosceptic “populist” supporters.

In reality, however, the EU occupies a much more complex space within the binaries that dominate our political thinking. As an examination of its history shows, it stands for liberalism rather than democracy, while replicating some of the features of nationalism on a larger, continental scale. Crucially, rather than limiting these tendencies, the war in Ukraine may actually be strengthening them.

The history of the European project is more problematic than the idea of it as a symbol of democracy suggests. Few “pro-Europeans” know that it began as a colonial project — what might be called its original sin. As Peo Hansen and Stefan Jonsson have shown, the first phase of European integration in the Fifties was partly intended to consolidate Belgian and French colonies in central and west Africa, which needed an injection of West German capital. Many in West Germany, on other hand, saw it as a chance to get back into the colonial game from which they had been excluded since the end of the First World War.

From the Sixties, however, when Belgium and France lost their remaining colonies in Africa, the six countries that had created the European Coal and Steel Community and the European Economic Community turned inwards and forgot its colonial origins. Thus the narrative that emerged around what became the EU centred on the internal lessons of European history (that is, the centuries of conflict between European countries, culminating in the Second World War and the Holocaust), rather than the external lessons of European history (in particular European colonialism). Europe was increasingly imagined as a “closed system”.

The EU, as it became with the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, increasingly saw itself as a vehicle through which authoritarian states could make democratic transitions. It was seen as crucial to the democratic transitions of Italy and West Germany in the early phase of European integration, and then again with Greece, Spain and Portugal, which joined in the Eighties. In reality, what the EU actually did was to constrain popular sovereignty in its member states.

Yet in the post-Cold War period, the founding story of an EU that stood for democracy continued to strengthen as the bloc enlarged to include central and eastern European countries. The post-1989 revolutions in the countries of the Warsaw Pact were seen, above all, as democratic revolutions. But as Branko Milanović has recently reminded us, they were also nationalist revolutions that aimed to create ethnically homogenous nation states. Joining the EU meant that the national and popular sovereignty of these countries was immediately constrained. In the medium term, this produced a backlash against the EU, the effects of which we now see in Hungary and Poland.

Moreover, the inclusion of central and eastern European countries strengthened the identity of the EU as a white bloc. New members viewed the accession process as a “return to Europe”. But if the “Europe” they were joining was simply the post-war integration project, it was not a “return”, because they had never been part of it before. The “Europe” they thought they were “returning” to was a much older idea of Europe — a civilisational one. The EU, for its part, saw it as completely natural that central and eastern European countries should join it — once, that is, they had carried out reforms. Morocco, on the other hand, applied to join the European Community, as it then was, in 1987, but was told it could not do so, regardless of what reforms it carried out, because it was not a European country.

During the 2010s, as the EU faced a series of cascading crises, it came to feel much more threatened and, as a result, became more defensive, which led to a revival of the concept of a “geopolitical” Europe that first emerged in the Twenties. That idea was a response to a sense of European decline after the First World War — namely, a fear that Europe was losing power relative to the Soviet Union and United States. The pan-European movement — the inspiration for the post-war “European project” — urged Europeans to unite to become a “third force” in international politics and maintain their position of power in the world. Central to this thinking was the idea of Africa as Europe’s “plantation”.

The context in the 2010s was obviously quite different. But after the euro crisis and the cascade of other crises that followed, the EU increasingly saw itself as being surrounded by threats — an “arc of instability” stretching from the east to the south of Europe. Against this background, “pro-Europeans” such as French President Emmanuel Macron imagined, in a remarkably similar way as in the Twenties, that Europeans could unite to become a third “pole” in international politics, albeit with China having replaced the Soviet Union as the second pole. This was the background for the frenetic discussion among foreign policy think tanks about concepts such as “European sovereignty” and “strategic autonomy”.

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“Pro-Europeans” had traditionally rejected the concept of sovereignty, which they saw as outdated. In fact, especially in the optimistic two decades since the end of the Cold War, many imagined that European integration would overcome not just national sovereignty but sovereignty in general as the EU became a kind of blueprint for global governance. But as they became more defensive, “pro-Europeans” now embraced the idea of sovereignty — at least at the European level. For instance, whereas previously they imagined that the removal of borders within the EU was the first step towards a borderless world, they now came to see that it actually necessitated a hard external border.

Moreover, following the refugee crisis in 2015, the threats to Europe were increasingly imagined in civilisational terms. The far-Right was rising and the centre-right began to converge with it, especially on questions of identity, immigration and Islam. The policy area where this convergence between the centre-right and the far-Right played out most clearly, and with the most horrific consequences, is immigration. Since 2014, 27,000 people have died in the Mediterranean as they desperately tried to get to Europe in boats. As Human Rights Watch put it recently, the EU’s policy can be summed up in three words: “let them die.”

Meanwhile, the “geopolitical” threats to Europe were also increasingly imagined in civilisational terms. Thus while the far-Right focused on the threat to European civilisation from immigrants, especially Muslim ones, centrist politicians such as Macron spoke more in terms of the threat to European civilisation from other powers — notably China, Russia and even the United States (hence the need for “strategic autonomy”, which implies independence from the United States in security terms). Thus when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, it was inevitably seen as a civilisational Other against which Europe must defend itself.

The EU’s response to the war in Ukraine was quite different from its response to other conflicts in its “neighbourhood”. Even as it continued to brutally push back migrants in the Mediterranean, it opened its borders to those fleeing from Ukraine and provided them with extraordinary support. The EU saw Ukraine as defending “European values” — which, to listen to European leaders, now apparently included territorial integrity and state sovereignty. Poland, led by a “populist” government and Ukraine’s leading supporter in the EU, was now suddenly seen as standing for the same values — including democracy — that it had previously been seen as rejecting.

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Perhaps the most peculiar feature of the European response, though, is the way that “pro-Europeans” have suddenly embraced a nationalist movement — as the ubiquitousness of Ukrainian flags illustrates. Traditionally, “pro-Europeans” did not distinguish between ethnic-cultural and civic versions of nationalism, but saw all nationalism as a dangerous force. “Nationalism is war,” as President Francois Mitterrand said in his last speech to the European Parliament. This undifferentiated rejection informed the response of “pro-Europeans” to Brexit: they saw the United Kingdom as hopelessly out of touch with the real world.

What makes the sudden “pro-European” identification with Ukrainian nationalism even stranger, however, is that it is not just any nationalism. Rather, it has a long history of anti-Semitism which extends from its 16th-century Cossack leader Bohdan Khmelnytsky to Stepan Bandera during the Second World War — both of whom are still venerated in Ukraine. Moreover, after 2014, much of the fighting in the Donbas was done by the Azov Battalion, a neo-Nazi militia that was integrated into the Ukrainian National Guard. Supporters of Ukraine claim that these neo-Nazi elements were later removed. But at least two of the five Azov commanders who Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky recently brought back to Ukraine as heroes are neo-Nazis who go back to the founding of Azov.

Just as it was seen as natural that central and eastern European countries should join the EU after the end of the Cold War, it is now seen as natural that Ukraine should also join. In fact, the question of Ukrainian accession is now the biggest preoccupation for “pro-Europeans”. In a typically technocratic way, they are focused on how to manage the process. But there are much bigger questions, such as whether, once in the EU, Ukraine would become a larger version of Hungary and Poland.

Meanwhile, the danger is that the war, and Ukrainian accession, will increase the EU’s tendency to see itself as the embodiment of a threatened European civilisation — and further strengthen its identity as white bloc.

The Anglican Communion is the product of empire. As the map of the world came to be covered in red, missionaries from the Church of England piggybacked upon the whole imperial project to convert indigenous peoples to the joys of the Book of Common Prayer. And they were remarkably successful at it: Cranmer proved surprisingly popular in Kigali. Not only that, but the worldwide Anglican Church — especially in Africa — continues to grow at an incredible rate. As churchgoing collapses in the UK, and in the West more generally, in other places it is rapidly expanding. In 1970, there were 7.7 million Anglicans in Africa. By 2015, that figure had risen to 57 million and continues to grow. In numerical terms, Anglicanism is thriving — it is currently the third largest group of Christians in the world. Never before have there been so many people in the pews. Mostly, they are in their thirties, female, black, and conservative.

It may be no surprise, therefore, that the Archbishop of Canterbury has proposed that the worldwide Anglican Communion ought to have a greater say in choosing his successor. It used to be that the global communion supplied just one of the 17-member group that passed a name to the Queen. Last month, it was agreed that it should be five — with local representation from Canterbury being halved. The Church of England was formed on the basis that “the Bishop of Rome hath no jurisdiction in this realm of England”. Yet in the years to come, the Bishops of Nigeria will play a decisive role in choosing the most senior member of the British establishment outside the royal family, and ex officio member of the House of Lords. Which is why it is likely that the next Archbishop will be even more conservative on matters of sexuality than his — and yes, it will inevitably be a him — predecessor. The fabric of the Communion will continue to tear, with the shrinking liberal West at continual ideological war with the burgeoning Global South, the hot button issue remaining that of homosexuality.

The organisers of this year’s Lambeth Conference were especially keen that the world’s bishops would not get derailed by more endless arguments over gay sex. But however hard they tried, the question could not be managed away. Somehow, a text that claimed “it is the mind of the Anglican Communion as a whole that same-gender marriage is not permissible” found its way into the official papers. Given that a number of the bishops are themselves in same-sex marriages (their spouses were not invited), this was slightly tricky. Late on Monday night, just hours before all the purple shirts were due to gather, Justin Welby intervened to allow liberal bishops to express their disagreement with this statement. But the damage was already done. The Conference was preceded with lots of talk of reconciliation. Planners had been “cooing in our ears about fellowship”, said the Bishop of Los Angeles. But all that feels a very long way away now. The Anglican Communion has long been a recipe for perpetual rancour. And the only way to take all the acrimony from the debate is to stop Canterbury being the focus of the global Church.

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How a small and rather uneventful town in Kent became the centre of a worldwide religious community is a story that develops from the earliest conversion of England, through its popularity as a pilgrimage site because of the martyrdom of Thomas Becket, to the rapid expansion of the British Empire. These days there is no reason for Canterbury, or its Bishop, to be so important. But bishops don’t vote to make themselves less important. And the inclusion of worldwide representation for choosing the next Archbishop, while ushered in under the banner of greater inclusion, is actually a way of making the Archbishop into a kind of Anglican Pope. Motions at the Lambeth Conference that speak of the “mind of the Communion” only reinforce the deeply un-Anglican but increasingly common idea that the Church is some top-down structure where people are told what to believe by a gathering of (mostly) men in pointy hats. Parishes are bleeding their power to dioceses; local national churches are being told what to think by meetings in Canterbury. Power is centripetal.

Unfortunately, Christianity has this thing about centralisation. Perhaps it’s the whole “one God” thing that creates a desire for “may they all be one as your heavenly father is one”. This thirst for oneness is an excellent thing when understood spiritually as the universal coming together of human beings, our fundamental solidarity under God; but organisationally it is a recipe for domination and bitterness. The idea that the latter can force the former is a terrible idea. The more power that gets located at the centre, the more there is to fight over.

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The Church bangs on about decolonisation when it comes to things like statues. But when it comes to power, the central Church keeps on accruing more to itself. It would not be constantly derailed by pointless arguments over gay sex if there wasn’t any theological or administrative power to claim. I would be perfectly happy for the world’s bishops to have a jolly to Kent every ten years: they could meet for lunch, go to the pub, worship in the Cathedral. They could meet other bishops, share a bit of gentle ecclesiastical gossip, sometimes have difficult chats about their differences. But they absolutely shouldn’t sit in meetings and pass motions. And there mustn’t be some chief wizard whose favour they are all seeking to curry.

The Anglican Community needs to become a much looser federation of churches where theological difference is not able to derail a sense of common endeavour. Only a powerless centre can become a focus of unity.

Then, as if acting as warm-up man for the coming entreaclement of Luton Airport’s runway, the UK’s former energy and climate change minister, Sir John Hayes, went on Radio 4 to argue that all this fuss over a heatwave showed that “we’ve lost our sense of what’s normal”. (“I can remember the summer of 1975,” he declared, puzzling anyone who could remember the summer of 1976.) Three days later, his home county sent a four-wheeled gritter named Spreaddie Mercury to discharge itself over Lincolnshire roads liquefying at a record-breaking 56.3°C.

Then, just as I was about to finish this piece, Esquire magazine revealed that Chris Evans — the Knives Out one not the TFI Friday one — had been detected trying to “normalise” something. When you hear about things being normalised, it’s usually in reference to lying or racism or toxic masculinity, but thankfully Evans had just decided to go to the premiere of The Gray Man wearing a white vest under his suit jacket. “The normalisation of sexy, sexy menswear,” the mag confirmed, “has been coming for some time.”

At our moment in history, is the word “normal” exhausted beyond use? Is it time to retire it? We expect it to do so much. The normality of Sally Rooney’s Normal People, for example, resides in its characters’ struggles with mental illness; the novel argues for the ordinariness and ubiquity of experiences that fiction might once have treated as exceptional. It’s not the same normal as Planet Normal, the Daily Telegraph podcast that offers views on Covid policy that are not broadly shared by either the public or the scientific community. So what, if anything, does it now mean?

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These are questions for Sarah Chaney, research fellow at the Queen Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions, which in recent years has produced exciting work on British weeping, shame in early modern Spain, and Busman’s stomach (a psychosomatic disorder that troubled double-decker drivers around the time of the 1937 Coronation). Chaney’s new book, Am I Normal? takes a single term and, like a long, chatty entry from Raymond Williams’s classic Keywords (1976), traces its sources and explores the different uses to which it has been put.

Her first lesson about “normal” as we understand it today is that its history is short. In essence, her book is an account of an escape. In 1800, “normal” was a mathematical term designating a straight line perpendicular to the tangent. But in 1840, along came Adolphe Quetelet, a Belgian astronomer and statistician who loosed the term into the space of a new discipline he called “social physics”. (Auguste Comte had thought of it first, but coined another word — “sociology” — to ensure nobody confused their work.) Taking data on the chest measurements of 5,738 Scottish soldiers from a two-decades-old copy of the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, Quetelet plotted these numbers on a graph to produce an average chest size, rather as astronomers used multiple readings to establish the length of a planetary orbit. As revolution brought chaos and disruption to Belgium, Quetelet found that on paper, all measurable human qualities — from height and weight to propensity for suicide — fell into the quiet and simple order of the bell curve. We still call this “normal distribution”.

Quetelet knew that his calculations were not offering a simple description of reality. The average soldier who emerged from his numbers did not exist. Not all who followed in his footsteps were so clear-sighted. As Todd Rose relates in The End of Average, the spectral figure of the average man led US Air Force designers to produce a generation of jet planes with cockpits that fitted nobody. (It’s also why nuclear families are easier to find in adverts than censuses.)

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There’s another story here that’s just as big. Chaney spells out the problem with the data itself: it shows an enormous bias towards white middle-class individuals, who comprise less than 12% of the world’s population, but make up 80% of subjects in medical studies and 96% of subjects in psychological ones. The normal isn’t just a phantom; it’s one raised from the experience of a minority. Yet it is used to create standards for a world in which everyone must live.

Quetelet’s work generated a universe of good and ghastly work based on averages — the Body Mass Index, typologies of criminals, Florence Nightingale’s hospital reforms, John Snow’s discovery of the waterborne nature of cholera, the IQ test, the Kinsey Report into the sex habits of Americans, eugenic projects from Francis Galton to the Nazis.

Amazingly, Am I Normal? suggests that the data didn’t even have to be real in order to have an impact. For instance, statistics about the poor physical state of British recruits to the Anglo-Boer War are often credited for starting the process that gave us the 1904 Committee on Physical Deterioration, free school milk and — eventually — the National Health Service. The numbers are scary. 8,000 of the 11,000 men who volunteered in Manchester, it was said, were unfit to serve. Chaney uses a 2008 paper by the medical historian Vanessa Heggie to show that this figure has no source but the rambling polemics of Arnold White, a failed Liberal parliamentary candidate with a thing for antisemitic conspiracy theories. (“When we survey other nations,” he wrote in Efficiency and Empire (1901), we “perceive how weakness, self-indulgence, want of foresight, self-respect, culture and industry are enabling astute, industrious, or unscrupulous Jews to destroy the power of whole classes.”) A culture convinced of its own declining state did not ask for White’s receipts. It had a picture of itself that matched its prejudices.

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But Chaney’s work also yields a warning about making the same kind of mistake about the past. In one of her chapters, she uses the brutal practice of the clitoridectomy to illustrate how 19th-century medicine attempted to regulate female sexuality. The operation, she argues, was “a cure for sexual desire” that “acquired a dubious reputation after the discrediting of its main advocate, gynaecologist Isaac Baker Brown, in 1867”. She is not the first to use Brown to tell a story about normality imposed by a surgical blade — but I’m not sure whether the facts really serve her thesis.

Scandal erupted around Brown when it was revealed that he had been operating on patients without consent. The subsequent inquiry also allowed his peers to pass judgement on the procedure itself. They used words such as “barbarous”, “quackery” and “terrorism”. I can find only one example of an English doctor other than Baker who ever carried out it out. It was the opposite of normal. It was shockingly extreme.

Moreover, the case that brought Brown down was not the one that we might naturally imagine – a Victorian wife punished for her desires. The central figure in the affair, Mary Hancock, suffered from severe bouts of mental illness. She saved pus from her blisters in a gallipot, believed that she was turning into a crystal, imagined that she was Princess Charlotte of Wales, who had died in childbirth in 1817. Her doctors were concerned about what they perceived as a manic sexual energy, but marriage, not mutilation, seems to have been their preferred cure.

All this became a matter for the courts only when her husband, Robert Peaty, fought, unsuccessfully, to save her from the machinations of her family, who wanted to annul the marriage for financial gain. As the astonished press coverage indicates, there was nothing normal about any of this (except, perhaps, the punishment meted out to the doctor who cut Mary Hancock with steel scissors of his own design). A misplaced scholarly tradition of seeing the clitoridectomy as an exemplar of Victorian cruelty may be the only reason that Chaney implies otherwise.

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Ironically, Am I Normal? is just the sort of book that might save a researcher from error. Its pages are full of implied warnings against the unquestioning use of data, particularly when it fits preconceived ideas too neatly. But as Raymond Williams reminds us, this is hazardous work. Many of the entries in Keywords begin by saying that the term under discussion is “one of the most difficult words in the language”. “Normal” is not on his list. But, as Chaney demonstrates, it merits the same careful handling. It’s a word that imposes a false picture of the world and may sometimes cause us much pain. But it’s one for which we’re grateful when we’re trying to work out how many Paracetamol to take, or how to read a red hot weather forecast.

A few weeks ago, a clip of the scruffy CBBC personality Hacker T. Dog went viral. It was a short moment from a 2016 TV show in which he made a strange emphatic statement to his co-presenter, Lauren Layfield. “We’re normal men!” he declared. “We’re just innocent men.” Layfield, her face close to his snout, dissolved into incapable laughter.

Hacker is a little glove puppet with button eyes, but this was probably a more intelligent and sensible deployment of the word “normal” than the examples at the beginning of this piece. It demonstrated its meaninglessness and its power. It showed how a young and promiscuous concept has exerted such a powerful influence on our lives — despite being fragile to the point of absurdity.

Wholly forgotten amid the Jubilee celebrations was the fact that, when the Queen acceded to the throne, she became sovereign not only of the UK, but also of a Muslim nation from which a million Britons like myself hail. The caption, for those who don’t read Urdu, translates as: “Elizabeth II, Queen of Pakistan 1952 – 1956.” It is the most remarkable detail in the chronicle of the Queen’s reign which began in February 1952, just as my father was born in a village in East Pakistan that through the strange meanderings of history was located in her dominions. My family’s fate has, ever since, been twinned with Her Majesty’s.

Of all the titles Elizabeth Windsor acquired on her father’s death, “Queen of Pakistan” would be the shortest-lived. The monarchy of Pakistan, founded in 1947 as a homeland for India’s down-trodden Muslims, was quickly abolished. In time, so was the country itself, most of its population seceding to form a new country (Bangladesh). Although a rump state still claims the name Pakistan, the country of my parents’ birth no longer exists. Yet its sometime sovereign, Elizabeth II, miraculously lives on — the only remnant of the original Pakistani state as it existed before its collapse in civil war and genocide.

That national failure led to my parents’ emigration to the UK, and so my family fell once again under Her Majesty’s reign. They were “New Commonwealth immigrants”. But my father was truly a New Elizabethan, among the first subjects to be born under the new Queen — and born British, since the Nationality Act of 1948 established, with astonishing magnanimity, a common citizenship for the whole British Commonwealth. Three generations of my family have been born subjects of the same Queen, while a full five generations have lived under her reign, in the UK or the erstwhile Dominion of Pakistan.

In all this time, the monarchy has been the dominant political fact in our lives. The labels on our passports — India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the UK — have changed more than once; with the potential break-up of the United Kingdom they may do again. But while countries and their borders, governments and their ideologies, come and go, the one unfathomable fact that endures is the monarchy, whose legal subjects British-Asians have been ever since India was annexed more than a 150 years ago. And this legal relationship stretches back even further for those of Caribbean heritage, as far back as the 17th century.

No-one can claim the relationship began consensually. But whatever the iniquity of our initial subjection to this crown, it is that same crown that now guarantees our equality in this land. The Proclamation of 1858 that made my ancestors British granted them the exact same rights as all other subjects. It was Queen Victoria herself who had insisted on Indians “being placed on an equality with the subjects of the British Crown”, words that would be recited by Indians at political gatherings. The principle was frequently ignored, but it was, as Gandhi put it, our Magna Carta, an assurance of equal treatment, decreed by the highest possible source, that still holds true today.

Monarchy, the philosopher Roger Scruton wrote, “is the light above politics, which shines down on the human bustle from a calmer and more exalted sphere”. There’s something strangely celestial about that description, but he was onto something. As Shakespeare observed, “there’s such divinity doth hedge a king”. Elizabeth II is Dei Gratia Regina (“Queen by the grace of God”) and as even the imam of Cambridge mosque preached on Friday, “she is a servant of the Almighty Allah”. If, in our secular age, there can no longer be God-given rights, the monarchy’s pompous charade of divinity makes it the closest thing we have to an absolute — and that is what I’d like my rights to be.

Minorities don’t trust the “human bustle” — which is all we would have without a monarch. From history we learn that wherever a throne is eliminated, in due course so are ethnic minorities. Consider the multiculturalism of Mitteleuropa under the Habsburgs or of southeastern Europe under the Ottomans. A dozen languages were spoken in the imperial parliament in Vienna, while on any given day in an Istanbul cafe conversations could be heard in Turkish, Ladino, Greek, Armenian, French and Kurdish, at least. But since republican governments replaced these monarchies, the fate of every 20th-century cosmopolis on the continent has been one of merciless homogenisation through ethnic cleansing, population transfers or socio-economic strangulation.

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There’s a kneejerk association of monarchy with nationalism. But the two have mostly been pitted against each other since the imperial age in which European monarchies transformed into continent-spanning empires characterised, especially in the British case, by free trade and free movement. Nationalists opposed the cosmopolitanism and pluralism of these empires, eventually corralling their multiethnic populations into new nation-states, republics in the main, which now struggle to cope with a fraction of the ethnic diversity that their territories previously boasted under imperial rule.

Conservatives today won’t own up to a truth of which they should be proud: the original basis of our multicultural society was the imperialist, royalist ideology of High Toryism. This becomes clear from the debate around the Nationality Act of 1948 that enabled my father’s emigration. It was then the Conservatives who worried about Labour reforms destroying “our proud boast of the open door in this country to people from all the colonies”. The parliamentary statement by Lord Kilmuir, as Shadow Home Secretary, deserves quoting at length:

We deprecate any tendency to differentiate between different types of British subjects in the United Kingdom. We feel that when they come to the UK there ought to be an open door and reception for every type…We must maintain our great metropolitan tradition of hospitality to everyone, from every part of the empire.

What united — and still unites — all these disparate people is the Queen, mere loyalty to whom makes us all British. Our oath of allegiance is to “Elizabeth II, her heirs and successors” — no more, no less. The symbolism of that is profound. It means my mother, a hijab-wearing Bengali Muslim woman who speaks little English can be unimpeachably British in a way she could not be unimpeachably French (even her clothing would not be deemed in keeping with “Republican values”). The simplicity of our oath is one of our constitution’s forgotten jewels, its tolerant spirit generally diffused throughout the state — a state that isn’t truly a nation-state since it claims four different “home nations”. Apart from Scotland, all have an underwhelming sense of nationality. As Daniel Defoe’s ditty scorning English nationalism went:

A true-born Englishman’s a contradiction,
In speech an irony, in fact a fiction.

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By contrast, the nation-states born of decolonisation in the last century demand of its citizens fealty to a nation, that nation commonly being defined in ethnically exclusive terms. In Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, the Roma minority that once had only to express loyalty to the emperor is under pressure to become Hungarian. These are societies at the mercy of ethnonationalism and xenophobia, lacking that impartial light of monarchy which, at its best, allows people of all races and religions to appeal to something beyond their differences from one another.

These unstable political forces haven’t been totally absent even in our tolerant monarchy. In 1968, targeting East African Indians, the Labour government consciously restricted dark-skinned British passport-holders from entering the country, legislation which even the anti-immigrant firebrand Enoch Powell considered, in some of its clauses, to be comparable to the Nuremberg Laws. Still, shortly afterwards, Powell made the ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech that made him the biggest name in UK politics.

Powell envisioned a renewed English nationalism, which arose from a disillusioned critique of imperialism not unlike those taking place in former colonies. He came to believe that the foreign adventure of empire — Powell was a veteran of the Indian Army — had suppressed English identity. Decolonisation was an occasion to rediscover it, as if it were an old oak in an abandoned garden. He railed against the “bogus mythical self-consoling invention of the British Commonwealth”, against the Queen’s new role as its Head, and of course against Commonwealth immigrants. The irony is that Powell could have made the same arguments as an Indian, say, and been regarded as a fairly standard postcolonial polemicist.

Queen Elizabeth deserves credit as probably Powell’s most successful adversary in those turbulent decades. She single-handedly preserved the old imperial High Toryism which Powell and later Tories had turned against, using her charm to launder out of it the darker stains of imperialism. Whereas for Powell, the nation-state was “the ultimate political reality”, for Elizabeth it was the British Empire in its new, egalitarian guise, the Commonwealth. In her famous broadcast on her 21st birthday, Princess Elizabeth pledged her life to serving “all the peoples of the British Commonwealth and Empire, wherever they live, whatever race they come from, and whatever language they speak”.

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Of course, the Queen never addressed him directly, but she was shadow-boxing against Powell’s English nationalism. Powell’s ravings grew more virulent. “It is truly when he looks into the eyes of Asia that the Englishman comes face to face with those who would dispute with him the possession of his native land,” Powell would bellow. But all the while, Elizabeth would reaffirm her own commitment “to that new conception of an equal partnership of nations and races”.

Eventually, Powell’s decorum yielded. In 1984, he attacked Queen Elizabeth — from a family of immigrants herself — using a phrase that would later be invoked, knowingly or otherwise, by Theresa May: “citizen of nowhere”. She was, Powell claimed, more concerned for “a vociferous minority of newcomers than for the great mass of her subjects…threatening the place of the Crown in the affections of the people” — a prediction that was utterly refuted by the jubilant Union Jack-waving of millions over the holiday.

Like most, at times I found myself chafing against the kitschier aspects of the spectacle. But then, when I saw the circle of saffron-robed sadhus from Gujarat at Neasden’s Hindu temple ignite a sacred flame in honour of the Queen, I remembered all over again what the lighting of all those beacons truly symbolised: a celebration by our motley, many-hued human bustle of the light that shines above it.

I dare say a fair few families will be instructed to hold back over the coming weekend, as Britain gears up for four days of Jubilee celebrations. My small Shires town is revving up: covered in bunting, with a marquee and events planned all weekend. But there’s an odd lacuna at the heart of the celebration — something brought into focus for me by an official Jubilee book my reception-age daughter brought home from school last week.

The book sets out to explain the Jubilee, the monarchy, and its history to primary-school pupils. It takes in the Queen’s duties, her family tree, royal residences and activities, and much besides. For anyone with a basic grasp of English history, though, the book has a striking narrative gap — one with considerable bearing on the form of bourgeois downward mobility that results in “FHB”.

The book devotes a double page to the Commonwealth, along with many other mentions in passing. But the question of how the Commonwealth came to exist is briskly despatched. “Its roots go back to the 16th century, when Britain began to expand its Empire,” we learn. The following sentence fast-forwards straight to the end of the story: “During the 20th century, countries that had been part of the British Empire began to gain independence”.

That’s all it has to say about the British Empire, directly at least. “Civil War” gets two mentions in the index; the Commonwealth gets 14; the British Empire doesn’t merit a single one. An immense narrative spanning four centuries, in the course of which Britain shaped the modern world, is relegated to prequel status for the Commonwealth.

Meanwhile, traces of empire are present throughout the book, not least in the framing device of a dialogue between a Jamaican great-grandmother and her dual-heritage great-granddaughter. And in reality, as in the book, empire is also everywhere — but like in the book, mostly indirectly. For there are few more awkward topics in modern Britain.

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Much of Britain’s imposing architecture was built with the wealth of empire: the Royal Societies, the museums full of now-controversial exhibits taken (often forcibly) from conquered peoples around the world, and many of the royal residences themselves. Even the union with Scotland is a by-product of empire, a kind of pragmatic merger after Scotland’s failed attempt at founding its own colonies.

But perhaps the defining feature of Elizabeth’s reign has been the disintegration of the colossal empire held by her predecessors: a process that began in earnest a few years before her coronation, with the independence of India and Pakistan in 1948. Then 1956, four years after she was crowned, delivered the first brutal lesson in Britain’s enfeebled post-war condition: the Suez Crisis. After that the empire crumbled rapidly: the Caribbean colonies were mostly independent by the early Sixties, and Britain’s remaining African outposts were independent by the end of that decade. By 1981, the process of decolonisation that began after the Second World War was largely complete.

And this, in turn, triggered the decline of that old British bourgeoisie now sliding from grandeur toward bulk-buying at Costco, and hissing “FHB” at a greedy teenager behind the kitchen door. This is the class that once earned its wealth and status running that empire but lost such opportunities over the long slow decolonisation of the 20th century.

Subsequent changes in the world’s distribution of power and wealth can be seen in ongoing alterations to our imperial-era architecture. Many Regency and Victorian frontages now exist only as a facade on modern steel-and-glass structures that house the international media and financial services companies of the modern age. Something analogous has happened, too, to the old imperial bureaucratic class: its scions have pivoted to leveraging their cultural capital as refined concierges to modern international billionaires.

Further down the food chain, this class has either adapted by shoving its children into law, estate agency or finance, or else slumped back into suburbia, with only a few bone-handled knives to recall the past. In most such cases, this is borne in silence: for no one is permitted to mourn the passing of so ambivalent a thing as the former source of Britain’s wealth and glory.

Throughout this transformation, the Queen has carried on serenely as though the loss of the largest empire in history were a matter of no great concern. The grand pageantry has continued, within a little ring-fenced zone in which we all pretend not to notice Britain’s loss of stature. But despite being treated as ceremonially exempt from Britain’s collective post-imperial FHB, the Windsors are prime figureheads for this England: chief exponents of a class that would sooner die than cause the family to lose face by gorging a limited supply of some treat reserved for honoured guests.

My hunch is that, in reality, royal lifestyles are, behind the scenes, quite drab in places: all gilt and splendid rooms up front, but with bathrooms in need of updating and central heating that doesn’t always work. Many photos of the royal family’s private living spaces have the characteristic aesthetic of a once-ascendant British ruling class: good-quality chintz wearing in places, dark mahogany, dog hair on the carpet. (I privately suspect Meghan Markle disliked her new life as a princess not because of media pressure, but because being real English royalty turned out to be not nearly as swanky as being the figurative Hollywood kind.)

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In this sense, Queen Elizabeth’s reign is profoundly representative of the collective British post-war condition: rattling around in draughty halls that are a source of pride, a disproportionate drain on resources, and sometimes also an embarrassment. For while there was beauty and grandeur, we can’t weigh the cumulative significance of the British imperial age without taking into account the violence, looting, displacement and sometimes staggering cruelty that also formed part of that story.

What’s less clear, though, is how to reconcile these facts while retaining a sense of ourselves as a whole nation. When Oxford professor Nigel Biggar argued that we should feel a measure of pride as well as shame in our imperial past, 60 Oxford academics wrote an open letter furiously dissociating “Oxford scholarship” from Biggar’s stance.

Given this acute sensitivity, it’s understandable that my daughter’s commemorative Jubilee book would swerve the whole messy business by simply leaving it out. Is this right, or a dishonest erasure? Does our monarchy even make sense if we can’t talk about the empire?

From a purely abstract point of view, I have some sympathy with those who argue we should wrestle openly with the complexities of our national past. But in this specific context, I try to imagine my daughter’s multi-ethnic class taking home either a rabidly jingoistic Jubilee book, or else a full-throatedly condemnatory one, and how they would respond. Whatever historiographers may argue, at ground level it’s not easy to see how we can build a shared story from fierce partisanship on such a contested and often still-painful past.

It’s also true that this doesn’t have to matter. Small schools, like small towns, push against the modern urge to balkanise on identity lines. It’s infinitely more difficult to be identitarian when you can’t muster the numbers. Small-town life relies, to a large extent, on ignoring disagreements in the interests of rubbing along together.

This is perhaps the particular gift and genius of our reigning Queen: she has served, for 70 years, as the ceremonial embodiment of this sometimes grim willingness to pretend everything is fine, and to focus on what we have in common even when everything is falling apart. And she may yet prevail: if Elizabeth II spent her reign presiding over a national feast that’s grown steadily sparser, her Platinum Jubilee has a chance to leave children of my daughter’s generation with a wholly different picture of Britain to the one my grandmother saw at her coronation in 1952.

My daughter, born into a different century to the one that saw the British Empire fall, has no understanding of the history and politics that attended its rise or collapse. She won’t grow up with her grandparents saying “Keen-ya” and her mum saying “Ken-ya”, and awkwardly piecing together the emotional and political payload of that single vowel change.

For her, and her classmates, the Dorling Kindersley book really is accurate in its representation of what the Queen stands for now. The DK Queen is all multi-ethnic pluralism, charities, and a neutered and heavily devolved Union. It’s a carefully pruned version of what past Kings and Queens have represented, and a willingness to look past the bloody and difficult bits, at least while children are little. We might read this as aggressive political correctness; or we might read it as taking a cue from the Queen. No Prince Harry-esque headline-generating controversy, no cringy efforts to “open up” with the attendant probability of riling someone up. Just sailing on as though the difficult bits aren’t there.

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And there’s a case for this. It’s probably true for every family alive that some subjects are best not broached at big family gatherings. We don’t always resolve differences, feuds or ancient offences by talking about them. Sometimes the wiser course is to grow scar tissue around the wounds, and get on with needing one another.

I’ve argued before that, politically speaking, a constitutional monarch is something like the authoritarian grit in the political oyster, whose paradoxical result is not less but more democracy. Perhaps the contradictions and discomforts of our post-imperial condition are another impossible circle our monarchy can help us square — by determinedly representing the idea of a unified nation, in the hope that we might eventually manage to become such a thing.

I hope my daughter’s class grows up remembering the Jubilee as a moment where we set aside the uncomfortable stuff, so the celebrations could belong to everyone. And I hope this serves as at least one memory to hold, against the corrosive narratives of unshakeable moral taint and oppression that increasingly permeate at least the progressive account of our common life.

It’s probably too early to tell whether this is possible, or even wise, on a topic so immense and sensitive as a collapsed empire in whose ruins we now live. But among all the other things families can hold back is the temptation to stir up old quarrels.

And that’s the example Elizabeth has offered us for seven decades: an individual willing to hold back nearly all of herself, in order to serve as a sufficiently neutral figurehead for Britain’s rapidly changing national family. She has spent her 70-year reign as a living emblem for the hope that we might find a way of living together, with dignity, amid those ruins. I may be terminally idealistic, but watching my daughter and her classmates singing together at the school’s Jubilee picnic, I think it’s possible her effort has not been in vain.

The covers of the Flashman series are cultural artefacts in themselves: the image of the smirking anti-hero, sabre in hand, dressed up in his mid-Victorian cavalry finery or Oriental costume, an exotic conquest entwined around his legs, is firmly set against the cultural mood of the moment. The bullying villain of Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays, terror of the Rugby fags until his expulsion, Flashman’s unintentionally swashbuckling career can be understood as an earlier attempt to reckon with Britain’s imperial legacy. 

From his first appearance in 1966, Fraser’s Flashman was a product of the same ironic Sixties craze for Victoriana as the Sergeant Pepper cover, or The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), with which he overlaps in narrative and tone. The empire then was not as distant as it seems now: the brutal counterinsurgency campaigns in Kenya and Malaya were closer in time then than the Iraq War is to us, and the Aden insurgency was still ongoing. Fraser himself had fought the Japanese in Burma, and was commissioned as an officer in the Indian army less than 20 years before the first Flashman novel, one of the very last of generations of young British men to have done so. 

A provincial grammar school boy, born in Carlisle to Scottish parents, Fraser’s family history was as intertwined with the fortunes of the empire as that of his creation, he would later note. “Well, the men will be going away again”, Fraser recalls his grandmother observing on the outbreak of war in 1939, adding that “her uncle had served in the Crimea, her brother had died in the Second Afghan, two of my aunts had lost sweethearts in the Great War, my father had been wounded in East Africa, and two uncles had been in the trenches; probably it was a not untypical record for a British family over a century”. Indeed, Fraser wore his dead great-uncle’s ring — “he’s buried somewhere in Afghanistan”, he notes — during his own active service in Burma.

“We saw the end of Empire, the very last of Kipling’s India”, Fraser would later write in his memoirs:

“The cool whitewashed interiors of the two-man rooms, one of which I shared with a Punjabi princeling, the soft-footed bearers fetching and carrying, the twinkling lance-points of the Mysore Lancers, gorgeous in their blue and gold and long-tailed puggarees as they rode from their barracks next door … It was the end of an old and glorious song, and I was lucky to be part of it.” 

As for Enoch Powell, whose views on mass immigration he also shared, for Fraser the loss of India was as tragic a historical catastrophe as that of the Soviet Union is to Putin: the fading of a great imperial story, and the painful lived “experience of a country which passes in less than a lifetime from being the mightiest empire in history, governing a quarter of mankind, to being a feeble little offshore island whose so-called leaders have lost the will and the courage, indeed the ability, to govern at all”.

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And yet the imperial story revealed in the Flashman Papers is far more ambivalent than the old writer’s final reminiscences would make it seem, so much so that it read on first publication as part of the great Sixties satire boom, undercutting the old British certainties with its taste for the hypocritical and sordid. In Flashman, the first novel of the series, the central character reveals himself as a bully, a coward and a rapist, who nevertheless finds himself lauded, following a series of picaresque misadventures, as the brave hero of Britain’s disastrous First Afghan War. 

“Old Flashy, the bully and poltroon, cad and turncoat, lecher and toady” has little time for the moralism of his Victorian contemporaries, “who praise God on Sundays and sneak off to child-brothels during the week”, and whose self-denying imperial heroes are presented uniformly as a collection of fools, hypocrites and God-botherers. The empire’s red-coated defenders are merely “whoremongering, drunken clowns”, while Flashman’s own interest in the empire is purely limited to what he can extract from it. In a passage that could be lifted directly from some modern-day anti-colonial Guardian-fodder, he observes that:

“In India there was power — the power of the white man over the black — and power is a fine thing to have. Then there was ease, and time for any amount of sport, and good company, and none of the restrictions of home. You could live as you pleased, and lord it among the niggers … and there were as many women as you could wish for. There was money to be had, too, if you were lucky in your campaigns and knew how to look for it. In my whole service I never made half as much in pay as I got from India in loot — but that is another story.”

How do we reconcile the two: the caddish anti-hero who exposes the extractive brutality of imperial rule and the writer himself, an unreconstructed imperialist in love with the glory, colour and romance of Britain’s Eastern possessions? Reading Fraser’s two volumes of memoirs together with the Flashman series, the overlap between the fictional creation and the writer himself is instructive. 

The Flashman universe is a clear working through of Fraser’s own wartime experiences, those of a provincial teenager suddenly thrust into a violent, romantic, alien world: “it is disconcerting to find yourself soldiering in an exotic Oriental country which is medieval in outlook, against a barbarian enemy given to burying prisoners up to the neck or hanging them by the heels for bayonet practice”.

Fraser’s own wartime memories — of bloody night-time battles in a Burmese forest, the execution of prisoners of war, the killing of a wounded Japanese soldier, all the fear and discomfort and confusion — are reworked in Flashman’s experiences of the Indian Mutiny and the Charge of the Light Brigade, and the great disaster at Kabul. All the experiences of battle, real and fictional, are written in the same disordered, impressionistic way, in dreamlike passages of literary high Modernism where sudden death and incongruous, hallucinatory scenes swim together in an old man’s fading memory.

The essential literary conceit of the Flashman novels is the unreliability of memory: vivid scenes are seared into the narrator’s memory (“I can still see before me” or “I will never forget” are phrases which run through both the novels and memoirs) even as the details pass into oblivion. The Flashman novels are, in essence, the disordered, heart-racing flashbacks of Britain’s own imperial memory.

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And yet, behind the horror and the fear, the romance of adventure remains. The 40-year-old Fraser wrote the first Flashman novel while Deputy Editor of the Glasgow Herald, one of many from the wartime generation who, trapped behind a desk in middle age, would “throw aside his pencil and stare at the window and exclaim: ‘Oh, God, I wish the war was still on!’” Indeed, the inspiration for Flashman came to Fraser after a rare two-week embed with the Army fighting insurgents in Malaya and Borneo during the waning days of empire, where he had “got the smell of the Orient and soldiering again” and found the prospect of a return to office life too depressing to bear. “They have their hazards, but once you’ve trodden the wild ways you never quite get them out of your system.”

It worked: the Flashman series was a great success, removing Fraser from the newsroom and thrusting him into a world of literary success, and the financial comfort and foreign travel that came with Hollywood screenwriting. Writer of the Octopussy screenplay, Fraser effectively adapted the Bond formula to a Victorian imperial context, conjuring up a world of terrifying, eccentric villains who handily outline their dastardly plans to their trussed-up captive hero; of exotic beauties who give up their bodies in their hundreds for the lustful narrator’s use; of high adventure in romantic locales. Like Bond, the Flashman series is a product of the Sixties, a consoling myth of national derring-do at a period of catastrophic decline.

It is ironic, then, that the elderly Fraser would write so scornfully of “the children of the swinging Sixties” who created a society where “mis-called ‘Victorian values’ are derided, and the permissive society has turned a scornful back on so many things that my generation respected and even venerated”. As he noted sadly: “The tragedy is that when the floodgates are opened only slightly, and possibly with the best of intentions, it’s only a matter of time before they’re torn off their hinges by the torrent.”

Was there any self-awareness in Fraser’s jibe at “the diverting spectacle of those ultra-liberals who rejoiced at the Chatterley decision, pursing their lips and wondering if things haven’t gone a bit too far”? Perhaps, as with Sixties satirists such as John Cleese, the older writer looked back with loss at the passing world he had lampooned, and with guilty disgust at the world he had helped bring into being. 

There seems a great disjunct, after all, between the ageing writer’s contempt for the “the interminable explicit sex scenes” of 2000s television and the actual contents of his published body of work. There is far more sex and violence in a Flashman novel than in even the most vulgar output of modern television, though it must be noted that Flashman’s sex life, all “getting my wench buckled to” and “rattling her six ways from Sunday” as “I romped her up and down” and “bulling away like fury” in a manner “like wrestling with a sergeant of dragoons” is far too cartoonish and strangely sexless to be erotic, like a higher-class version of Carry On Up the Khyber. The older Fraser gets, the more cartoonish the sex becomes, until by the time of 1994’s Flashman and the Angel of the Lord, when our anti-hero lies “collapsed supine beneath that ponderous mass of ebony flesh”, “rogering this prime piece of dusky blubber” and “belaboured by balloons of black jelly”, we find ourselves adrift in a world far beyond the erotic.

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Reading Flashman today, his world — in which the easy libertinism of the Regency era was being replaced by thin-lipped, Victorian puritanism — seems oddly current. With an awareness of the horrors of war born from his own military service, and the cynicism of a senior journalist all too aware of how the sausage gets made, through Flashman Fraser expressed his contempt for the occasional bouts of war fever that excitable journalism awakens in the British public, with “the press promising swift and condign punishment for the Muscovite tyrant, and street-corner orators raving about how British steel would strike oppression down”.

As a downstream result of Fleet Street’s exertions, Fraser’s hero survives the Charge of the Light Brigade and finds himself chased by Russian soldiers on the road to Mariupol, observing that “the Russians fought as badly and stupidly as they nearly always do”, because “the Russian army was a useless thing, as we’d seen in the Crimea. You can’t make soldiers out of slaves”.

In the run-up to the American Civil War, Flashman finds himself forced to work with the idealistic abolitionist John Brown, who had “fuelled the passions of the wildest elements on both sides, and convinced even sensible and moderate people that the only answer was disunion and war”. In a country torn between two political factions who hated each other with visceral fury, divided on the politics of race, “he put gunsmoke on the breeze, and the whole of America breathed it in — and didn’t find the odour displeasing”.

Of Afghanistan, he observes, like many an editorial last summer, that “possibly there has been a greater shambles in the history of warfare than our withdrawal from Kabul; probably there has not. Even now, after a lifetime of consideration, I am at a loss for words to describe the superhuman stupidity, the truly monumental incompetence, and the bland blindness to reason” of Britain’s ignominious retreat, product of a Victorian bubble where “those who studied the country only from the cantonment at Kabul knew no more about it than you would learn about a strange house if you stayed in one room of it all the time”. Flashman’s world is not, after all, so very distant from our own.

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Over time, the Flashman novels became a means for Fraser to process his own experiences of war, and loss and change, and to express his political and moral feelings with a complexity and ambiguity he was incapable of achieving in his memoirs: perhaps not intentionally, but simply because any writer, forced to churn out content regularly enough, ends up revealing more of himself than he intends. A craftsman rather than an artist, his successful formula is still very fine and entertaining handiwork, and the increasing sophistication of the historical footnotes Fraser appended to the novels emerges as the greatest joy of the series. 

It is odd that the 2000s world of his memoirs seems further from us today than Flashman’s world did to him — many of his observations, commonplace then, would now be considered hate speech — and yet Flashman’s world of imperial misadventure still seems resonant, and strangely current. Like Flashman and his creator, we are trapped as unwilling protagonists in history, whose endless rhymes and recurrences cannot be escaped.

The most controversial aspect of the new sanctions regime is without a doubt the freezing of Russia’s offshore gold and foreign-exchange reserves — about half of its overall reserves — but even this is not unprecedented: last year, the US froze foreign reserves held by Afghanistan’s central bank in order to prevent the Taliban from accessing its funds; the US has also previously frozen the foreign-exchange reserves of Iran, Syria, and Venezuela.

So, taken individually, these measures are not as exceptional as they’ve been portrayed. However, never before have so many sanctions been deployed at once: there are already 6,000 various Western sanctions imposed on Russia, which is more than those in existence against Iran, Syria and North Korea put together. Even more importantly, none of the previous targets of sanctions were remotely as powerful as Russia — a member of the G20, and the world’s largest nuclear power.

Likewise, none of the 63 central banks that are members of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel — known as the central bank of central banks — has ever been the target of financial sanctions. The BIS itself has even joined in on the sanctions in order to prevent Russia’s access to its offshore reserves. This really is unprecedented: since its establishment in 1931, the BIS had never taken such a measure, not even during World War II.

So what should we expect from the sanctions? Western pundits and commentators have little doubt: the sanctions will hamstring the Russian economy, sow discontent among the Russian people and elites alike, and possibly even cause the downfall of the Putin regime. At the very least, we’re told, they will hinder Russia’s war efforts. But history suggests otherwise: see Iraq, or more recently Iran. Far more likely is that this turns out to be the latest Western strategic miscalculation in a long list of strategic blunders, of which the United States’ inglorious withdrawal from Afghanistan is just the most recent example.

After all, Russia has been preparing for this moment for quite some time. Following the first wave of Western sanctions, in 2014, and partly in retaliation against them, Putin embarked on what analysts have dubbed a “Fortress Russia” strategy, building up the country’s international reserves and diversifying them away from US dollars and British pounds, reducing its foreign exposure, boosting its economic cooperation with China, and pursuing import substitution strategies in several industries, including food, medicine and technology, in an effort to insulate Russia as much as possible from external shocks.

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True, Putin made the mistake of leaving around half of those reserves parked in foreign central banks, resulting in these now being confiscated. But nonetheless Russia still has access to more than $300 billion in gold and foreign-exchange reserves — more than most countries in the world and more than enough to cushion any short-term fall in exports, or prop up the rouble (for a while).

Moreover, the Russian central bank reacted to the sanctions by stopping capital flows out of Russia and nationalising the foreign exchange earnings of major exporters, requiring Russian firms to convert 80% of their dollar and euro earnings into roubles. It also raised interest rates to 20% in an effort to attract foreign capital. These measures are aimed at bolstering the rouble’s value and providing a flow of foreign exchange into the country. They appear to be working: while the rouble is around 40% of its value since the start of the conflict, the Russian currency’s free-fall seems to have come to a halt for now, even registering an uptick over the past two weeks. For the time being, Russia’s financial account — the difference between the money flowing in and out of the country — is far from disastrous.

Let’s not forget that the main source of Russia’s foreign-exchange reserves — oil and gas exports — has been excluded from the sanctions, for obvious reasons: for most European countries, Russia accounts for a huge part of their oil and gas imports (and other staple commodities), and there’s simply no way of replacing those energy sources from one day to the next.

In short, Russia runs no risk, in the short term, of running out of reserves and not being able to pay for its imports. But even assuming that the West decided to put a stop to all its imports from Russia overnight, there’s no reason to believe that this would bring the Russian military machine to a halt. The notion that “we are financing Russia’s war by purchasing gas and oil”, as the Finnish prime minister recently stated, is fundamentally misplaced.

As the economist Dirk Ehnts has observed, the Russian military machine, for the most part, doesn’t rely on imports (if anything, Russia is an arms exporter). It is sourced domestically and, like the salaries of its soldiers, is paid for in roubles, which the Russian central bank can create in an unlimited quantity, just as the Bank of England does when it comes to pounds.

Equally unfounded are rumours of an impending Russian default. In recent years, the Russian government has taken steps to reduce its foreign liabilities: its foreign currency-denominated debt amounts today to about $40 billion — a tiny amount compared with the size of Russia’s yearly exports of more than $200 billion in oil and gas. Any decision to default would be entirely political. We mustn’t forget that the very creditors expecting to be paid back in dollars are the same that have just confiscated a good part of Russia’s dollars — if the latter were to default on their payments, it would be an even bigger problem for their Western creditors. As with Russia’s oil exports, hurting Russia inevitably means hurting ourselves as well.

Moreover, thanks to the Russian government’s successful efforts at boosting domestic agricultural production, domestic food production now accounts for more than 80% of retail sales, up from 60% in 2014. This means Russia is largely self-sufficient food-wise. So even if its export revenues were to plummet (which is unlikely), the country wouldn’t go hungry — unlike the rest of the world — and would most likely be able to continue to finance its war efforts.

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Might a selective ban on exports of specific high-tech Western components, some of which are bound to be used in Russia’s defence industry, prove more effective? Possibly. But Russia has been reducing the dependence of its military-industrial apparatus on foreign components and technologies for years. More importantly, both hypotheses — that Russia’s economy and military can be brought to their knees through export and/or import bans — rest on the flawed assumption that the whole world is on board with the sanctions. But that is far from the case.

While most of the world’s nations — 143 out of 193 — voted for a resolution in the UN’s General Assembly condemning Russia, the 35 countries that abstained include China, India, Pakistan and South Africa, as well as several African and Latin American states. These and many more countries — including several that voted in favour of the resolution, such as Brazil — have strongly criticised the sanctions against Russia and can be expected to continue trading with Putin. It’s frankly very hard to call Russia isolated when some of the world’s largest economies have refused to support the West’s sanctions regime.

China, in particular, has been very vocal in its support of Russia. Beijing is already the Kremlin’s main trading partner, and it alone can absorb huge quantities of Russian energy and commodities, as well as provide Russia with basically any industrial and consumer goods that the latter currently imports from the West. China also operates an alternative to the Western-managed SWIFT system called CIPS to manage cross-border transactions in yuan, which could allow Russia to partially circumvent the West’s financial blockade. Even though the yuan still makes up a small percentage of international transactions, its role is bound to grow rapidly in the coming years (consider the news that Saudi Arabia may start pricing its oil sales to China in the latter’s currency). All this helps explain why even Western financial analysts, such as Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, predict a year-on-year contraction for the Russian economy of about 7% — bad, but hardly catastrophic (Covid caused a much larger drop in GDP for most countries).

However, much will depend on the policy response of the Russian government. Obviously, the withdrawal of many foreign firms and decline in foreign investments will increase unemployment. But the Russian government can cushion the blow by resorting to a “Keynesian” expansionary fiscal policy aimed at boosting domestic investment and supporting incomes. If ever there were a time for Russia to abandon its historically ultra-tight fiscal policy, as several Russian economists have been arguing for some time, it is now.

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America has won Europe's war

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Two weeks ago, I suggested that, in the short term at least, the US will benefit from the conflict in Ukraine. In the long term, however, it is slowly becoming clear that US-led global Western order will suffer. The West’s imposition of sanctions — involving not only governments, but also private companies and even allegedly apolitical organisations such as central banks — has sent a clear message to the countries of the world: the West will stop at nothing to punish countries that step out of line. If this can happen to Russia, a major power, it can happen to anyone. “We will [never again] be under the slightest illusion that the West could be a reliable partner,” the Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov has said. “We will do everything so as never, in any way, to be dependent on the West in those areas of our life which have a decisive significance for our people.”

Those words are bound to reverberate across the world, with dramatic implications for the West. As Wolfgang Münchau has warned: “For a central bank to freeze the accounts of another central bank is a really big deal… As a direct result of these decisions, we have turned the dollar and the euro, and everything that is denominated in those currencies, into de facto risky assets”. At the very least, it will inevitably push countries to diversify their reserves and increase their yuan holdings, in order to loosen the West’s grip on their economies and bolster their economic resilience and self-sufficiency. Even if it doesn’t push countries straight into Beijing’s arms, as is already happening with Russia, it will likely lead to the emergence of two increasingly insulated blocs: a US-dominated Western bloc and a China-dominated East-Eurasian one.

In this new pseudo-Cold War, “non-aligned” countries could find that they are in a better position to assert their sovereignty than they were under the American global empire. Forget “the collapse of the Russian economy” — this could be the result of the West’s new economic war.

The four newest headstones, decorated with plastic flowers, gave evidence of more recent arrivals — the graves of migrants from Yemen and Syria who died trying to cross the nearby border from Belarus, after the country’s strongman Alexander Lukashenko deployed illegal migration as a weapon against Poland and the EU last autumn.

The Tatars of Bohoniki prepare and deliver food to their co-religionist migrants who make it through the closed border, hiding in the forests, as well as to the Polish troops and border guards whose role it is to hunt them down and return them across the barbed wire border fence. Outside the village’s small wooden mosque, a banner spread against the railings declares: “Thank you for your service and for protecting our border #PolishMilitaryWall.” For centuries, the Tatar minority distinguished itself through loyal military service to Poland’s rulers, serving as cavalry in the contested steppes of Ukraine, against the Ottomans at Vienna, and conducting one of the last Polish cavalry charges against the invading Germans in 1939.

This bleak stretch of borderland, an extension of the great Eurasian steppe with no defensible natural frontiers, has always witnessed the movement of peoples and the sudden extinction of nations following the ebb and flow of imperial borders. The golden onion domes of Orthodox churches rise up from the wooden cottages of villages which seem to have spilled over the natural border: though of course it was the borders which came after the peoples, washing back and forth in bloody waves.

An ethnic map of the province in the late 19th century reveals a Pollock painting of peoples, two of whom — the Jews and the Germans — have been entirely expunged from the region within living memory. Twice in the past 300 years, Poland has vanished entirely, carved up by hungry neighbours. Twice in the twentieth century, these borderlands were drenched in blood as great empires rose and fell. Now, once again, Europe’s eastern marches are witnessing the massing of armies and the threat of a sudden, violent reordering of borders as a great empire wanes.

At its moment of greatest strength in the Nineties, the American empire expanded to encompass these borderlands, taking the former satellite states of the Soviet Union under the Nato umbrella. Now that the great empire is itself weakened by political turbulence at home and an existential challenge in East Asia, a resurgent Russia feels emboldened to renegotiate this settlement by the threat of force, demanding that not just that Nato advances no further eastward, but also that it withdraws from the region.

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No-one can predict with certainty what will happen next: but as troops and materiel flood westwards in vast numbers across Russia to the eastern marches of America’s European empire, it seems clear our continent is at a great inflection point, like 1914 or 1939, 1945 or 1989. The generation-long slumber of the post-Cold War era has ended: Europe is awakening to history once again.

With every day, it becomes more likely that a great hammer blow is about to descend on Ukraine. More than 100,000 Russian troops have been deployed to Ukraine’s frontiers, in a great arc from Belarus to the north to the Black Sea in the southeast. Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its parallel detachment of two predominantly Russian-speaking portions of eastern Ukraine did not bring about the great reordering Putin sought in Eastern Europe. The Minsk agreement that sought to end the war did not bear fruit; Ukraine’s armed forces are stronger than they were eight years ago, and the Ukrainian purchase of Turkish Bayraktar attack drones threatens to overturn the fragile stalemate in the country’s east.

For Russia, there is therefore no better time to attack than now, while Europe is weak and divided and the Americans are distracted. The sheer size and strength of the Russian armed forces, which have rapidly modernised since 2014, will likely overwhelm any Ukrainian opposition. What happens next will be Putin’s choice, and perhaps he has not yet decided.

Yet the military toolkit he has assembled in recent weeks gives him a wealth of options: he could destroy the Ukrainian armed forces from afar with stand-off weapons without any new border incursions; he could formally annex the breakaway regions of Donetsk and Luhansk; he could even attack along Ukraine’s Black Sea coast, deploying the naval infantry and amphibious armoured vehicles recently moved to the border from the Russian Far East, capable of seizing territory from Mariupol in the east as far west as Odessa and the border with Romania; finally, Russia could move on Kyiv itself, striking both south from Belarus and westward across the flat plains in a display of armoured warfare of a type Europe has not seen since 1945.

Ukraine’s options in all this are limited in the extreme. The claims by Western thinktankers that Russia will have no stomach for the guerrilla warfare that will ensue seem doubtful: Putin is unlikely to send his troops to the Ukrainian nationalist heartlands of the west, where the topography lends itself to armed resistance.

The flat plains of the country’s east, though useless for an insurgency, are ideal for a quick armoured blitzkrieg all the way to Kyiv and the Dnieper river. Russia will control the airspace above the battlefields, and a Ukrainian repeat of the successful deployment of Bayraktar drones by Azerbaijan against a degraded Armenian army therefore seems impossible. Ukraine’s greatest chance of avoiding military defeat and perhaps dismemberment at Putin’s hands lies in Western diplomacy: and this is surely now the country’s greatest curse.

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The simple fact is, Nato will not go to war with Russia for Ukraine. As it stands, Ukraine is about to suffer a historic defeat to defend the illusion that it may one day join the Nato alliance, a point of principle that everyone involved knows to be fantasy. By sending Ukraine munitions and non-lethal aid, Nato powers like the US and Britain, as well as the Baltic states, have already approached the utmost limits of their response to Russia. The threat of sanctions will count for less than our leaders claim against a Russia that has successfully reordered its economy to cope with the Western sanctions deployed since 2014, and which is increasingly reorienting itself towards America’s great rival China. Indeed, it is now Russia that has the upper hand in threatening Europe by withholding its own vital resources.

It is midwinter after all, and Europe is dependent on Russian gas to keep European voters warm in their homes. Almost half of Germany and Poland’s gas supply comes from Russia; countries like Slovakia, Latvia, Estonia and Finland are almost 100% dependent. No wonder that Germany’s government is doing all that it can to avoid becoming embroiled in this confrontation, refusing to supply Ukraine with munitions, and with Germany’s new SPD chancellor Olaf Scholz refusing even to take Biden’s calls on the crisis. Europe has had since at least 2014 to wean itself off its dependence on Russia, and chose not to, with Germany instead deepening its energy dependency by shuttering its nuclear power plants and constructing the Nordstream 2 pipeline despite American pressure to cancel it.

Instead, it is France, energy secure through its network of nuclear power stations, that is playing the greatest EU role in defending Nato’s eastern borders, pushing for a forward presence in Romania and sending warships to the Black Sea. There is a great irony here: the scepticism of Poland and the Baltic states over French proposals for greater European capacity to defend itself from external threats was used by the German security establishment to dampen any enthusiasm for strategic autonomy, with German politicians and analysts making great rhetorical play of the sacred Nato bond. But now that Nato’s integrity is threatened by Russia’s demands that the alliance “pull back” from Romania and Bulgaria, which joined in 1997, Germany recuses itself from involvement. Through its dependency on Putin’s goodwill, it is ironically Germany that has distanced itself from Nato, a negative form of strategic autonomy from the US, if not from Russia. That great weakness at the heart of Europe, Merkel’s parting shot, now threatens the security of the continent’s eastern fringes.

One way or another, Nato’s newer Eastern members will now learn the value of America’s security guarantee compared to that of a strong Europe capable of defending itself. Biden’s initial remark that the United States would not severely punish a “minor incursion” into Ukraine’s territory did not inspire confidence; his administration is now briefing that America is considering deploying thousands of troops to the eastern Nato countries.

The limited deployment of US forces in Poland and the Baltic states after 2014 was a purely symbolic exercise: the decision to deploy tens of thousands of American troops, if it actually occurs, is a signal to Russia that America is prepared to defend the European half of its core empire if necessary, despite the greater need to concentrate its attention and resources on the looming showdown in the Pacific’s other half. Rather than being a force multiplier for the US, Nato obligations now weaken America’s overall position: Europe’s weakness has now become America’s burden.

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For Britain, the options for involvement are limited. We are perhaps fortunate that decades of neglect have left the Army unable to deploy anything but a token force to the region. Even if it had a better record of success in recent conflicts, the British Army is now simply too small and weak to play any role in a major European war. The Russian forces massed on Ukraine’s border are already larger than the entire British Army, and their numbers grow every day.

Yet British politicians always display an appetite for getting involved in distant conflicts greater than their capabilities allow: it would surely be better for our political opposition to now focus their attention on what, if anything, Britain’s response should be to the looming war in our home continent than to drag on their weeks-long exegesis of civil servants’ illicit cheese and wine parties.

There is not much time to waste: a Russian armoured push will need to take place while the ground is still hard and frozen, before the spring thaws settle in and the soil turns to mush. This year’s late snows have likely delayed the hammer blow: Russia’s announcement of joint military exercises with Belarus between the 10th and 20th of February indicate the probable starting date. The deployment of Russian troops in large numbers to southern Belarus, whose border is less than 60 miles from Kyiv, is a major threat to Ukrainian planners: even if Putin does not decide to take the capital, the need to guard against a sudden push will force Ukrainian generals to spread their forces thinly, weakening their response to an assault elsewhere.

Principled though it may have been, the vocal support Poland and the Baltic states gave to Belarus’s opposition after last year’s disputed election may not have been wise. By driving Lukashenko further into Putin’s embrace just to survive, they have allowed Russian forces to deploy closer to the European Union’s borders than was previously the case, and enraged a mercurial neighbour. The recent migrant crisis with Poland, at the border post at Kuznica, just a few minute’s drive from the Tatar village of Bohoniki, was the immediate result, and perhaps history will record it as the opening incident of a great and terrible conflagration.

With European nations from Sweden in the Baltic to Romania in the Black Sea now deploying their limited troops and equipment in a defensive crouch, a great confrontation is developing across the continent’s east. All the states involved — apart from Britain — are acting according to the rational motives of self-interest.

It was natural for Nato’s eastern nations to seek America’s defence guarantees against their historic master, just as it is natural for Russia to resent the alliance’s expansion to its own borders. It was natural and rational for the United States to expand Nato eastward at the moment of its greatest strength and Russia’s greatest weakness, just as it is natural and rational for Russia to seek to renegotiate Nato presence now that her own forces are stronger than they have been since the fall of the Soviet Union, and now that the American empire seems to have entered its own period of decline.

In the coming days, the likelihood is that a shock and awe campaign analogous in scale to that of America in Iraq will take place in Ukraine; its chances of success seem far greater. The demands Russia has made of the United States — over the head of a Europe kept weak and powerless by its own leaders — cannot be met without America ceding its imperial role and prestige. Perhaps they are not intended to be met, and perhaps by enhancing the Nato presence on its borders, they will turn out to be counterproductive.

Yet once again, these flat and snowy borderlands seem destined to play their allotted role as arena for the contest of great empires, and the cockpit of Europe’s bloody history.

First published on 31 January 2022

De Kom is to Suriname what Mandela is to South Africa: a heroic patriot, an advocate of the oppressed, and a symbol of resistance against colonialism. His magnum opus, We Slaves of Suriname — originally written and published in 1934 — was the first history of slavery and Dutch colonialism in Suriname written by a Surinamese man. It was composed while he was exiled to the Netherlands and under surveillance for anti-colonial protests. After its publication, he and it were censored and neglected for years by the Dutch, let alone the West in general.

But then came the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, and a renewed interest in examining the racial injustices of the past. There has since been a surge of interest in De Kom. Last February, the Dutch government pledged to honour him “with a generous gesture”. He became the first Surinamer to be included in the canon of Dutch history, alongside Vincent van Gogh and Anne Frank. And this month, the first ever English translation of We Slaves of Suriname will be published, 88 years after its completion.

The book is, in part, an ode to De Kom’s homeland: a beautiful, tropical wonderland, teeming with life. But it also tells the history of Suriname, from the beginning of European settlement — which very quickly led to the catastrophic demise of the nation’s aboriginal peoples — to when the Dutch fully colonised it in 1667, turning it into a plantation colony. From this point onwards, thousands of enslaved Africans were imported, to work producing sugar and coffee to export back to the mother country.

For De Kom, slavery was personal. He repeatedly refers to the enslaved as “our fathers and our mothers”, and deftly weaves his own autobiography into the history of Suriname. His father was born a slave, and later became a farmer. He was part of the generation of slaves emancipated into “free” citizenship under Dutch rule, yet haunted by memories still fresh in their minds, and stories passed down by their elders.

Early in the book, De Kom invites “the white reader”, who he believes will be sceptical of what he writes, to contemplate a sailing ship. For De Kom, the image is not one of freedom; it represents instead the torture of his ancestors:

“But we do wish to warn you. From your lofty seat, do not venture down the futtouck shroud … Up here you can smell the invigorating smell of tar and the salt sea wind … Down there it already reeks a mile leeward of the sweat and excrement of a thousand slaves packed into a hold.

Up here you can hear the cries of the albatross, the song of the sailors, and the crash of the wave … Down there you can hear the cries of the slaves, the wails of the women in labour, and the crack of the whip coming down on the backs of blacks.”

When the history of European colonialism is interrogated, the focus tends to be on the British and French (and, to a lesser extent, Spanish) empires. The role of the Netherlands is rarely noted, though it had one of Europe’s oldest empires, including colonies in Suriname, Java and Southern Africa. And, as Pepijn Brandon has argued, the Netherlands was also a key player in the Atlantic slave trade in the 17th and 18th centuries. Dutch planters had a reputation for being especially cruel and sadistic in their treatment of slaves.

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The typical colonial narrative argues for the “civilising” influence of the imperial power. De Kom counters this with brutal expositions of what Dutch rule really meant for the Surinamese, documenting gruesome accounts of the torture frequently dished out to those seen as slacking or insubordinate. A common technique was the notorious “Spanish billy goat”, where the slave would be mercilessly flogged while his two hands were tied together, his knees pulled up through the arms with a stick inserted between them and planted onto the ground. The frequent sexual abuse of black women by their masters, long a taboo subject, is also given in-depth treatment by De Kom.

Despite all this, De Kom is uneasily ambivalent towards the end of slavery in Suriname. In 1863, 100,000 or so slaves became free citizens — in name, but not in essence. “The physical instruments of torture,” De Kom lamented, “have largely been replaced by mental torments, poverty and want.” While former slave-owners were compensated for the loss of their “property”, former slaves received no reparations. They weren’t given any land, training, education or credit — unlike European settlers, who had received all these things upon arrival, to help them make a living.

Instead, former slaves had little choice but to enter coolie contracts under “state supervision” for ten years before they could even be officially “free”. It was basically another form of slavery; in other words, the abolition of slavery was managed in the interests of plantation owners, rather than the individuals they’d exploited. It was a sham.

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Likewise, Suriname’s “autonomy” was also a sham. The nation was still seen as inseparable from the Dutch kingdom. De Kom’s raison d’etre for writing We Slaves of Suriname was to unshackle his compatriots from their “inherited sense of inferiority and to rouse the self-respect of the Surinamese people” so that they could extricate themselves from the Dutch yoke.

Nevertheless, despite his fervent indictments of the evils of slavery and Dutch colonialism, De Kom was unlike some of his contemporaries, in that he did not subscribe to the “back to Africa” agenda. The decolonisation struggle he envisioned was not meant to be a violent one, or a regression into narrow tribalism: “What I was after was organisation, not a bloodbath.” He firmly believed that the mosaic society of Suriname — composed of blacks, Indians and Javanese — could unite in the spirit of solidarity to liberate their nation, and achieve a dignified human existence for all citizens.

On the last page of his book, De Kom dreamt of the day he would return to a free Suriname:

“Sranang my fatherland.
I hope to see you again once.
On the day when all misery shall be erased from you.”

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The lines are particularly poignant if you know that, when he wrote them, he would never see his treasured homeland again. Shortly after the German invasion of Holland in 1940, De Kom joined the Dutch resistance and wrote for the censored De Vonk, a paper affiliated with the Dutch Communist party, which mainly documented the abusive activities of fascist gangs in the streets of The Hague (in particular those against Jews). On the 7th August 1944, he was arrested by Nazi forces and sentenced to forced labour at Neuengamme concentration camp, where he died of tuberculosis and was buried in a mass grave. Ever since, his legacy has risked fading into history.

His work is poignant, too, because Suriname has suffered since then. National independence, like the abolition of slavery, has not been a glowing success. Since 1975, when Dutch rule finally came to an end, Suriname has endured civil war, dictatorships, tribalism and corruption — similar to that which plagues a lot of post-colonial nations. The nation is still haunted by the abuses of empire.

Anton De Kom’s work doesn’t tell an uplifting story, then; but it is a common story, of how our modern world came to be. Black labour, in the form of chattel slavery, played a significant role in creating the wealth of the West. “This is the price we pay for the sugar you eat,” cries out the limbless and nameless Negro slave (owned by a cruel and unscrupulous Dutch merchant) in Voltaire’s Candide. Human beings turned into commodities: this is our history whether we are comfortable with it or not. And De Kom, despite all the efforts to silence him, will not let us forget it.

Without a moment’s hesitation, I corrected them. I told them that I was intent upon returning to my own country, for good or for ill. My friends were mildly stunned. I like Americans — so much that I married one. But I know where I belong: here in Britain.

Quite why I feel this way is not easy to explain. Lots of people who were born here and who live here don’t feel that way — or at least, they don’t appear to. And yet it has determined the direction of the whole of my life. In the words of W. H. Auden, I accept the fate I am. I accept it as a vocation to be true to my deeply felt attachment — and now to confess it.

I say ‘confess’, because throughout my life I have been acutely aware that in the educated, middle-class social circles of my own generation, patriotism has been regarded — and is still regarded — as embarrassing. I am aware that, if old and dear friends in Oxford and in London, politically centrist with a leaning to the Left, read this, there will be a sharp intake of breath and a sucking of teeth — a mental stepping back, as if they’d just encountered something diseased.

I have been aware of the un-coolness of patriotism among members of my own class and generation for all of my life, which is why I have suppressed it. I have always felt it, but rarely expressed it — because I assumed that ‘everyone else’ must know better. However, older age, I have found, confers two benefits: first, one finally knows what one thinks; and second, one cares less for what other people think. So, I now say what I have always felt. I confess the truth: I am a British patriot.

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Accordingly, I have become critical of my self-styled ‘progressive’ friends. Not critical, necessarily, of their attachment to Europe, but critical of their habitual silence over the signal blessings that life in this country has conferred on them — and critical, most of all, of their habitual tendency to denigrate it, unnecessarily and irrationally.

Hilary Mantel, the famous author of Wolf Hall, is not a friend of mine, but she does represent lots of people I know. Last September she told the Italian newspaper, La Repubblica, that she’s planning on moving to Ireland, so that she can become European again. Why? Because, she says, Britain is “an artificial and precarious construct” and has shown its “ugly face” in “abusing exhausted refugees even as they scramble to the shore”.

Now, Dame Hilary was born in Derbyshire, blessed with a university education at the LSE and Sheffield, enabled to become a best-selling and prize-winning novelist, and then awarded public recognition in the form, first of a CBE, and then of a DBE. Such a person, I suggest, owes Britain considerable gratitude, and if she is moved to think ill of her country, it should only be under great pressure and with great reluctance. But Dame Hilary’s alienation is partly incoherent, partly untrue. It’s not reluctant; it’s wilful.

She says that Britain is an artificial construct. Of course, it is. Every state is man-made and artificial. No state ever dropped out of heaven. Britain in its current form as the United Kingdom did not exist before 1707. The United States did not exist before 1783, nor Italy before 1871, nor Ireland before 1922. Since states are artificial, not natural, they come and go: Czechoslovakia was founded in 1918 and in 1993 it ceased to exist.

Perhaps, however, by calling Britain artificial, Mantel means that it’s an unnatural yoking together of different peoples — English, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish. But if that’s what she thinks of the UK, what on earth does she think of the EU? The artificiality of a state, or its multinational character, is no reason for leaving it.

What then about the ugly, racist face of contemporary Britain? Well, there’s no denying that racism exists here — as it does in Europe. But according to the 2018 report of the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, racial discrimination occurs less in Britain than in any other EU member state, including Ireland. (Just for the record, I voted Remain in 2016, not out of blind faith in the EU, but out of Burkean caution. Now, however, I want Brexit to succeed with my whole heart.)

So something perverse, something dishonest, is going on here. One reason, I take it, why my ‘progressive’ friends would suck their teeth if they heard my patriotic confession, is that they find it very difficult to distinguish patriotism from nationalism, and nationalism from fascism. So let me make quite clear what kind of patriot I am. I am a Christian patriot.

What does that mean? In part, it means that I recognise that my country, like every other, is indeed an artificial construct. It is man-made. It is not divine and eternal. My country is not God. In that respect, my Christian patriotism is quite distinct from the kind of Romantic nationalism that so scarred the twentieth century, most infamously in Germany. In this kind of nationalism, the nation is a substitute for God and it’s by investing oneself wholly in the life of the nation that the individual achieves a kind of immortality.

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Such an idolatrous nationalism conflates the nation with divinity. Christian patriotism cannot do that. Therefore, the Christian patriot recognises that his loyalty to his country cannot be blind and it has to be critical, holding it to account before the law of God.

My Christian ideal of patriotism was incarnated, as it happens, in the life of a German. His name was Helmuth James von Moltke. A lawyer, he was the great-grand-nephew of Bismarck’s famously victorious general. Although an aristocrat, he became a Christian socialist and an opponent of the Nazi Party. In the mid-Thirties, he came to England to qualify for the English bar in case he should decide to flee here with his family. In the end, however, he chose to return to his country, to suffer alongside his people, and to do what he could to mitigate the evils of the Nazi regime and prepare for a better future.

And yet he did not support the July 1944 plot to kill Hitler. The reason was that he foresaw that the plot, were it to succeed, would have given Germany a conservative regime that, while not Nazi, was not different enough. He believed that, in order to be redeemed, Germany had to suffer an unequivocal, catastrophic defeat, before being reconstructed from the bottom up. Imagine how painful it must have been for a patriot to want that for his country. Christian patriotism is not Romantic nationalism. The Christian patriot must be willing to play prophet to his country, criticising it because he loves it and wants to save its soul.

So, I am a Christian patriot. But I’m also a British patriot. I have always been a British patriot because I am an Anglo-Scot, born in Scotland to a Scottish father and an English mother, and educated on both sides of the border. I do not answer to ‘English’ or ‘Scottish’, for, being both, I am British.

During the run-up to the referendum on Scottish independence in 2014 I lost several nights’ sleep worrying about the possible break-up of the United Kingdom. As a Christian, I had to admit that it was possible that the UK should break up. It could be that its time had come to and end and that, like Czechoslovakia, it should disintegrate into its constituent parts. At the time, I found it difficult to explain why I was viscerally opposed to this conclusion, and what would be lost if the UK were to disintegrate.

However, in the months following the independence referendum, I discovered at least two things about what the UK is good for. First, the UK is good for multi-national trust and solidarity. Germans identify themselves very closely indeed with the European Union. Yet German taxpayers are adamantly opposed to fiscal transfers, whereby their resources are used to subsidise the French, no matter the Greeks. In contrast, the English, and especially Londoners, hardly bat an eyelid at the redistribution of ’their’ taxes to Scotland or Northern Ireland, or indeed other parts of England and Wales.

During the referendum campaign Alex Salmond was glibly misleading on a number of things. One of them was the supposed ease of the process of dis-uniting. In addition to the Queen, the BBC, and the pound, Salmond genially assured us that the ‘social union’ would persist.

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But since English and Scottish interests would be opposed, it’s a practical certainty that negotiations would be fractious. It’s highly probable that the separating Scots would not get all that they wanted, and that, in turn, the English would recover a resentment of the Scots not seen since the 18^th century.

The truth is that we here in the UK have achieved a level of multi-national trust and solidarity of which the EU can still only dream. It’s a precious achievement, which we should not take for granted nor surrender lightly. That’s one thing the UK is good for.

A second thing is the security and promotion of humane and liberal values. There is a strong strain in contemporary Scottish nationalism, as there is in Corbynite socialism, which believes in the equation, “Britain equals Empire equals Evil”. By ‘Empire’ here is meant, not only the imperial past, but the present aspiration to play a global role in bolstering the liberal international order.

According to some nationalists, therefore, for Scotland to separate from England, and so to disintegrate the United Kingdom, would be an act of national repentance and self-purification. It would redeem the English as well as the Scots.

This view is documented in John Lloyd’s excellent book, Should Auld Acquaintance be Forgot, in which he quotes from Robert Musil 1930s novel, A Man without Qualities, which was set during the decline of the Austrian Empire around 1900. Of that empire, Musil wrote “However well founded an order may be, it always rests in part on a voluntary faith in it, a faith that, in fact, always marks the spot where the new growth begins, as in a plant; once this unaccountable and uninsurable faith is used up, the collapse soon follows; epochs and empires crumble no differently from business concerns when they lose their credit”.

I agree with Musil that faith in what we might call a globally responsible Britain is uninsurable: there’s no guarantee that it won’t be lost. But I disagree that it is unaccountable. I think a good account can still be given.

Maybe in the Nineties we thought that History had ended, that the West had won, and that NATO had lost its reason for living. But with an aggressively nationalist Russia rattling its nuclear sabre on the borders of Europe, and with a ruthlessly authoritarian China building military bases in the South China Sea, it seems that humane and liberal values still need defending. So, who will defend them? The United States, we hope. But after that, who? Arguably, the UK, more or less alongside France.

Britain may no longer rule the waves single-handed, but we can still help to rule them. The fact that we’re no longer Number One in the world doesn’t mean that we’re nothing. If the UK were to disintegrate, one of the West’s three serious military powers would be hamstrung.

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So, I think that the United Kingdom is good both for multinational solidarity and for a liberal world order. My British faith still has credit in the bank. That’s why I am a British patriot.

But it is not just Scottish nationalists who disagree. Another major way of corroding faith in global Britain is to denigrate its historical record, the most recent part of which involves empire. This is why the decolonisers focus so relentlessly on slavery, presenting it as Britain’s dirty secret.

There are two main objections to this story. First, as I’ve indicated, there is hard social scientific evidence that contemporary Britain is actually one of the least racist countries in Europe. More recently, this year saw the publication of the so-called ‘Sewell report’ of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, which concluded that Britain is not systemically racist. The second problem with the decolonisers’ equation of the British Empire with slavery and the ugly racism behind it is that fact that the Empire was the first major power in the history of the world to abolish the slave-trade and slavery in the name of a Christian conviction of the fundamental equality of all human races under God.

John Wesley, Anglican priest and founder of Methodism, prefaced his Thoughts upon Slavery (1774) with a quotation of the tenth verse of the fourth chapter of the Book of Genesis: “And the Lord said—What hast thou done? The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground”. The context is Cain’s murder of his brother Abel and the implication is clear: African and Englishman, slave and master, are brothers, common children of the same God. This was the racially egalitarian view that triumphed in 1807 when the British parliament voted to abolish the trade in slaves throughout the Empire, and again in 1833, when it voted to abolish the institution of slavery altogether.

What is more, from 1807 and throughout the second half of its existence until the Sixties, the Empire was committed to suppressing the trade and the institution across the world — from Brazil, across Africa, to India and Malaysia. In the 1820s and 30s, the Slave Trade Department was the largest unit in the Foreign Office.

At one point in mid-century, the Royal Navy was deploying over 13% of its total manpower in suppressing the trade in slaves between west Africa and the Americas. According to the economic historian, David Eltis, the British spent almost as much suppressing the Atlantic trade in the 47 years from 1816-62 as they earned in profits over the same length of time leading up to 1807. And according to the American scholars of international relations, Chaim Kaufmann and Robert Pape, Britain’s effort to suppress the Atlantic trade in 1807-67 was “the most expensive example [of costly international moral action] recorded in modern history”.

So, no, there is no causal connection that runs through the British Empire from colonial slavery in the past to systemic racism today. Britain today is not systemically racist. And between the slave trade and slavery of the 18^th century and the present lie 150 years of imperial penance in the form of costly abolitionist endeavour to liberate slaves around the globe. The vicious racism of slavers and planters was not essential to the British Empire, and whatever residual racism exists in Britain today is not its fruit.

Despite the heated nature of these debates, some, on both the Right and the Left, think that the ‘Culture Wars’ are a fuss about nothing. I could not disagree more strongly. What’s at stake in the ‘decolonising’ front of the ‘Culture Wars’ is nothing less than faith in Britain.

Keeping that faith is important for the welfare of human beings, not only on these islands, but all over the world. That is why I’m a British patriot.

A version of this article was delivered at a meeting of the National Club in September 2021.  

But to my surprise we won, and by a considerable majority, in a packed chamber. Not due to my halting efforts, but rather to a brilliant speech by Trevor Phillips, who evidently touched both the hearts and the minds of the large and diverse audience. He was able to draw on his family’s opposition to colonial rule in British Guiana, and yet also on his father’s patriotic service in the Second World War and his own respect for many of our country’s achievements today.

Not all students fit the “woke” stereotype that I was too ready to ascribe to them, then. Many of those present, including several who spoke, were not British; the University is today a highly international institution. And yet they recognised that our nation can and should inspire pride and gratitude.

Trevor urged the audience not to emulate their Oxford predecessors and encourage the enemies of democracy and freedom by publicly rubbishing our common culture; and he politely but firmly rebuked a young woman who proclaimed from the floor that the current Tory government was little better than a populist dictatorship. Though he had never been and would never be a Tory, he said, the present government included more people from ethnic minorities in senior positions than all the governments in our history combined, and more than any government in Europe today.

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This is what our “history wars” are really about. Not analysing and understanding the past, but using historical claims to support negative assertions about the present. Despite the majority of students who voted for us that evening, I was alarmed at some of the opinions that were presented as incontrovertible fact. Two that remain in my mind are that our history had been “a long bloodbath”, and that Churchill was responsible for the Bengal famine if 1943.

I hope these were not History students, who should have known that the Bengal famine is a complex and contested episode, and our domestic history, compared with most countries’, has been relatively peaceful and bloodless. I hope that History students might also have recalled the conclusion of that deeply anti-colonialist former imperial policeman, George Orwell, that the British Empire had been “peaceful as no area of comparable size has ever been [with] fewer armed men than would be found necessary by a minor Balkan state”.

Where do (some) Cambridge students get the idea of our history as a “bloodbath”? Much recent popular writing on the empire — for example John Newsinger’s The Blood Never Dried — has emphasised its violence practically to the exclusion of all else. But for that perspective to seem plausible, it is necessary to avoid all comparisons with what existed before colonial rule, and with what, in some countries, came after it. It is necessary to draw a veil over pre-colonial societies, and imagine them uncritically either as “noble savages” living in a peaceful and ecologically sustainable Eden, or as viable modernising states. It is even more important to avert one’s gaze from post-colonial failures and tyrannies.

Instead, one has to accept the accounts of axe-grinding nationalist politicians, such as the Indian polemicist Shashi Tharoor, who in Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India, uses the British Raj as a scapegoat for the failings of modern Indian governments. Or one has to play up to the politics of victimhood by making slavery the hallmark of the Empire — even though the Empire was the major force that suppressed global slavery during a century and a half of effort.

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The “woke” fervour that has recently disturbed the cloistered calm of Cambridge is based on bad history, then. The kind one would expect of a doctrinaire first-year undergraduate, perhaps. And yet, as my pleasant and interesting evening at the Cambridge Union suggested, I do not believe that it comes primarily from the majority of students. Some of it may come from PhD students and academics in subjects such as “postcolonial literature”, for whom wokeness is practically a requirement of the job. But although they managed to bully one young academic out of his college fellowship after accusing his research of being “racist”, generally they are too few and intellectually too marginal to have an impact on their own.

The real problem comes from the University and College administrations. It is they who are encouraging, and even requiring, gestures towards “decolonisation” and the sort of anonymous denunciation that masquerades under the once innocent slogan of “Equality, Diversity and Inclusion”. It was a Pro-Vice Chancellor who pushed a now notorious anti-racist strategy that encouraged secret complaints about “microaggressions”, and which had to be withdrawn in the face of strong internal and external criticism. It is certain Colleges, notoriously Downing, that are now attempting to adopt an almost identical policy at the lower level. It was the University’s central authorities who dragged their heels over guaranteeing free speech, until forced to change direction by a vote of the academic rank-and-file in the Regent House. And it was the Vice-Chancellor, Stephen Toope, who in 2019 set up an enquiry into the University’s links with slavery, “amid a wider reflection taking place in the United States and Britain on the links between universities and slavery”.

Herein lies a clue as to what is really going on here. The university is in competition, especially with American universities, and, pretty obviously, wokeness is part of a marketing strategy. University managers are increasingly operating like any other multinational corporation. All have to “curate” their public image, and their gestures carry no more intellectual or moral weight than those of Nike or Ben and Jerry.

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My own College, St John’s, has been spared the temptation of progressive histrionics: luckily, our connection with slavery is that the two greatest English abolitionists, William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson, were undergraduates, as were Lord Castlereagh (who secured the first international anti-slave-trade commitment in the 1815 Treaty of Vienna) and Lord Palmerston (who in 1850 sent the proverbial gunboats to Brazil to stop the largest remaining trans-Atlantic trade). It seems that the father of an 18th-century student owned slaves, but fortunately the College got none of his money.

Not so fortunate has been Jesus College, whose contortions have epitomised the worst hypocrisies of “woke”. Their embarrassing record of lucrative sycophancy towards the Chinese regime means that discussion of human rights has been regarded as “unhelpful”, and suppressed, in case the College were “perceived as being a campaigning college for freedom for Hong Kong [or] freedom for the Uighurs”. But if they show limited concern for genocide in the 21st century, they are very sensitive indeed to an investment in the slave trade by their great benefactor Tobias Rustat in the 17th. Him they are busy cancelling, to the extent of trying to remove his memorial from the College chapel. Meanwhile, the college’s China Centre, which “aims to deepen mutual understanding between China and the West by ‘using the past to serve the present’”, blithely continues.

Jesus College has also just ostentatiously returned to Nigeria a “Benin Bronze”, seized during a British punitive expedition against the slave-owning Kingdom of Benin in 1897, following the slaughter of a diplomatic mission. Of course, the college is free to donate its property as it wishes, and it could have decided, unobtrusively, that a brass cockerel from Nigeria would be more appreciated in its ancestral homeland than merely by being placed on a dinner table in Cambridge during feasts.

But instead, the college staged a fulsome ceremony, in which the statuette was handed to a descendent of the Obas of Benin, the slavers from whom it was confiscated. The British who freed the Oba’s slaves were described by the Master as having committed “a wrong that is so egregious”. Slaving by Africans, it would seem, is not worth a mention. At Jesus College, the Master added, “we teach, we educate.” It is hardly surprising if Cambridge students thereby acquire strange notions of history.

Bruce Gilley, Professor of Political Science at Portland State University, first had a taste of such treatment in 2017, when he published a now famous, or notorious, article entitled, “The Case for Colonialism”. It was peer reviewed and published by a reputable scholarly journal. But then came the storm: a collective letter signed by hundreds of colleagues denounced him; editors of the journal resigned; terrified publishers pleaded with him to withdraw the article to protect them from possible violence; and abuse and death threats came flying his way.

What was his crime? To suggest, in careful and moderate terms (judge for yourselves — the piece is available here), that European empires did some good. And that some similar arrangement, through which advanced democracies might adopt some of the duties of government in failed states, might do some good today. Of course, one could object that not all European empires were benevolent or effective. One could equally suggest that few (or no) developed countries would be willing to shoulder the burdens of quasi-colonial government today. Many, even most, people might think Gilley’s ideas one-sided or unrealistic. So what? Debate — often heated — has for centuries been the way we have advanced knowledge and reached agreed position: thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

But Gilley was not being offered debate. He was being threatened and silenced, labelled a heretic. Needless to say, this has become a familiar sight in Western academic life. Fortunately, he seems to have a secure tenured position; and admirably, he seems not to be easily intimidated. His new book, The Last Imperialist: Sir Alan Burns’ Epic Defense of the British Empire, takes the battle to a different level. “The Case for Colonialism” was a general survey: a birds-eye view of empire. A biography, of course, is the opposite: a worms-eye view from the grassroots.

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Burns, who died in 1980 at the age of 92, was a distinguished man in his field, and a witty and dedicated public servant. But he was not a maker of high policy or an intellectual of wide influence. I had never heard of him; I expect few historians have. This, of course, is part of the attraction, if you want to show what governing the British Empire meant in everyday terms — not the view from Whitehall, but from an office in Nassau, a mud hut in Benin, or ultimately Christiansborg Castle in Accra. Burns started at the bottom of the colonial administration, as a 17-year-old junior revenue officer in St Kitts, and he ended as Governor of the Gold Coast. He was a true son of empire, born in the Caribbean, one of that rather small occupational class (his father was a local official), who for a few decades managed the largest empire in history on a shoestring.

Perhaps Gilley was drawn to Burns because he was “the last man” to make a principled defence of empire, as his career drew to an end at the United Nations. “It is the fashion today to decry colonialism,” Burns wrote in his memoirs, “but it has saved millions of people from worse evils … slavery and human sacrifice, corrupt judges and tyrannical chiefs, famine and disease.” Merely to say this is to break a contemporary taboo: “on balance, we have nothing to be ashamed of.” But Gilley clearly agrees.

He goes further in this lively, accessible, often amusing and frequently exciting story: he hammers home facts that outrage the “woke” consensus on colonialism. That many of its peoples wanted to be part of the empire. That they were proud to be colonial subjects. That opposition to colonial rule was rarer than the desire for more of it. That its peoples showed loyalty, even to the point of fighting for it. That officials like Burns were popular with the people they governed.

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One small episode is intriguing in today’s context. As reforming governor of poverty-stricken British Honduras (now Belize) in the 1930s, Burns got the British Museum to return Mayan relics that had been recently discovered by a British doctor and sent to London. His plan was to set up a local museum to foster Mayan self-respect: “We see that the people have their bread but too often forget to let them have some butter with it”. The colonial government in Ceylon repatriated the royal regalia of the pre-colonial Kandy kingdom for similar reasons. But Burns never regarded the acquisition of these artefacts as theft. The Mayan ones, for instance, had been saved from oblivion.

Over the course of the period covered by Gilley’s book, and Burns’s career, the empire reached its apogee and its end. Two world wars and then the Cold War shattered its foundations. Burns became governor of the Gold Coast (Ghana) in 1941, surrounded by Vichy-controlled territory. The colonies proved, he wrote, “true loyal friends” at this time: had they wished “to push us into the sea there was little to prevent them.” Instead, they provided donations for Spitfires and volunteers for the army. Visiting Americans were astonished that Burns travelled the country without a bodyguard.

But Burns knew that the war meant the days of British rule were numbered. He was to face growing political opposition. Bizarrely, his worst problem stemmed from a case of ritual human sacrifice. The victim had been gruesomely slaughtered to mark the accession of a new chief. Important men were involved. Nevertheless, the authorities arrested the murderers, who were sentenced to death. Burns supported severity — he regarded human sacrifice, which still lingered on, as something he had a duty to suppress. But the case became politicised, opposition led by a nationalist lawyer, Joseph Danquah, who won support in Westminster against what was presented as excessive colonial harshness. Even Churchill denounced Burns.

More broadly, nationalist opposition, though limited in its popular support, acquired backing not only in Britain, but internationally. Burns foresaw all this. Indeed, he had long understood his task as being to prepare for independence, and had tried to reduce racial inequality. He forcefully promoted “Africanization”. But he believed that premature independence would endanger “the mass of the population”, especially if the Soviet Union (or indeed the Americans) weighed in.

Gilley begins his book with a poignant story that encapsulates the tragedy that ensued after the British released the reins in 1957. Burns’s erstwhile opponent, Danquah, who had seemed destined to rule Ghana, soon ended up in prison under the new dictator Kwame Nkrumah. The darling of Western progressives, feted by John F Kennedy and decorated by the Soviet Union, Nkrumah caused the economy of Ghana, hitherto Africa’s richest country, to collapse. Shortly before Danquah died of ill treatment in 1965, he wrote to Nkrumah from prison about justice and compassion, reminding him that:

“it was our people’s love of justice that compelled them to ask the British in 1843 to come back to Ghana … Now the British people have gone away … and already some people are asking … “Is this justice?”’ 

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This, then, is potentially a very controversial book — unless Gilley’s adversaries manage to have it written off as the work of a lone extremist, published by an obscure press and hence systematically ignored. There is an interesting story behind its publication — of at least one contract rescinded by a mainstream publisher after protests by their staff.

But why has the subject of empire become so explosive that a minority voice like Gilley’s must be silenced? If his general argument about empires were obviously false, it would be easy to refute. If his scholarship on Burns were faulty, the book could be effectively criticised. The orthodox view in academe today — that the empire was essentially repressive, exploitative, racist, violent, destructive, and so on — is backed up by numbers, research funding, and patronage. Even though its scholarship and intellectual bases are sometimes embarrassingly shoddy, it is in no danger of being overthrown.

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But this is clearly not the point. Anger is aroused by Gilley’s work not because what he says is false, but because much of it is evidently true. Scholarship aside, mere common sense suggests that a system as huge as the British Empire, which the Cambridge scholar Ronald Hyam describes as “a global mosaic of almost ungraspable complexity and staggering contrasts,” must have had some good effects. Perhaps those idealistic young people who volunteered for the colonial service, like Burns, were sometimes arrogant or naïve. But they often worked hard and selflessly to keep the peace, create economic development, provide medical treatment, build infrastructure and promote education. As Gilley’s book shows, they believed they were making the world a better place.

This is what cannot be admitted. It explodes the idea of the British empire as purely violent exploitation. It exposes the fragility of nationalist myths about struggles for freedom. Above all, it undermines the view that empire created a permanent legacy of racial oppression that still weighs on us today.

This stance won him few friends among his fellow postcolonial writers. The Caribbean historian C.L.R. James spoke for many when he dismissed Naipaul as a colonial stooge who simply published “what the whites want to say, but dare not”. But while it may have been true that Naipaul provided comfort to Westerners licking their wounds over the end of European empire, he also offered something to those he critiqued: a challenge. Naipaul wrote about the pathologies of the downtrodden with an intimacy that could neither be faked nor ignored. Today, at a time when the American empire has entered its twilight, Europe is somnolent, and the long-marginalised are slowly attaining power commensurate with their numbers, Naipaul’s challenge feels worth reflecting upon.

“He had been fed by so many civilisations; so much had gone into making him what he was, but now, at what should have been the beginning of his intellectual life, he [had] cut himself off,” he wrote in his travelogue Among the Believers about a Leftist Iranian friend whose life he used to critique the culturally defensive trajectory of Iran after its revolution. The Iranians had wanted the amenities of modernity — fighter jets, medical technology, television. But the headlong cultural Westernisation of the Shah had unnerved them. Their passionate, unforeseen revolution had tried to turn back to the past while holding onto modernity’s material benefits, only to find that such a thing was impossible. The new regime they now lived with was ruthlessly modern in its style of oppression while still corrosive to the old values. In place of the Shah, they had not received the warm certainties of the past, but a gaping spiritual void.

It was these types of half-modernised peoples whose psychology Naipaul picked apart in his travel writings, from the Middle East to India, to Argentina. Even as he skewered the hypocrisy and brutality of empire, which he did with quiet effectiveness, Naipaul knew the pathologies of those on the other side. The child of an impoverished Caribbean society deeply shaped by the slave trade and colonialism, Naipaul, when he turned his sights onto his own people and those like them, knew how to press where it hurt.

Naipaul’s fiction, for which he won the Booker Prize fifty years ago this month, poked holes in the confidence of the newly liberated masses. In his 1979 novel, A Bend in the River, Naipaul depicted a fictional African country spiralling into the abyss after winning its freedom. At a time when cathartic violence was very popular on the postcolonial Left, he wasted no time pointing out where those furies would lead. “They’re going to kill all the masters and all the servants. When they’re finished nobody will know there was a place like this here. They’re going to kill and kill. They say it is the only way, to go back to the beginning before it’s too late.” These chilling words remind one of the apocalyptic visions of Isis. But they could describe any number of countries that have plunged into limitless violence after winning independence.

“Hate oppression; fear the oppressed,” Naipaul once wrote, pessimistically. Too often this has turned out to be wise advice. Naipaul painted with a broad brush. He got his share of things wrong. Later in his life, he even succumbed to the same fanaticism and hypocrisy for which he chastised others. Even so, his writings — about the squalor of India, the prideful stagnation of most Muslim countries, and the dangerous fantasies of the recently liberated across Africa and Latin America — could not be brushed off as simple ignorance. They had the sting of truth.

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I started reading Naipaul a few years ago on the recommendation of friends. These recommendations typically came with a murmured warning that his politics were questionable, but that his books were worth it for the prose alone. I found that they were even better than that. Discovering Naipaul was like finding a curmudgeonly uncle who could point to one’s neuroses because he, too, had suffered from them.

Any reader who identifies with what used to be known as the ‘developing world’ will find in Naipaul’s writing a heavy dose of introspection. Naipaul’s first book about India, An Area of Darkness, was so pitiless about the country’s backwardness that its publication there was banned for several years after its initial release in 1964. His words seemed to open something up in people who were willing to listen. The Indian writer Pankaj Mishra said that the experience of discovering Naipaul as a young man left him “shocked and bewildered”. “I didn’t know that you could write a book like that about India,” he added. “I think it was the first book I read in English that contained the world I lived.”

Naipaul could be ungenerous to his subjects, most of whom were just emerging towards political independence after the long trauma of colonisation. But by shining a harsh spotlight on their failures, he also offered them a more comprehensive kind of freedom. Naipaul returned to those he wrote about moral responsibility for their own condition. This was the burden of independence, and accepting it, Naipaul suggested, was the only way that the formerly colonised would ever truly be liberated.

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There’s a lesson in Naipaul’s life story as well. As the son of a lower middle-class Indo-Trinidadian family, he had one of the unlikeliest literary careers in history. At a time when the Western publishing world was considered the racial patrimony of those who controlled it, Naipaul triumphed so thoroughly that his personal background became immaterial. By the time Naipaul finished A House for Mr Biswas in 1961, he had established himself as perhaps the finest writer of the English language to be published in decades.

Naipaul achieved this in the face of an atmosphere that was not just unwelcoming but actively hostile. He did not retreat into a defensive cocoon but instead conquered the English literary world on his own terms. Like James Baldwin, whose writings on race dwarf most of what is published on the subject today in eloquence and coherence, Naipaul’s writings were put up against the Darwinian test of an unsympathetic audience. “I have got to show these people that I can beat them at their own language,” he wrote to his father in an anguished letter while at Oxford. And he did.

The “bootstrap” mantra of modern American conservatism is correctly criticised for serving as a defence of unjust economic or social arrangements, often by those who fail to live up to the high standards they prescribe for others. But there is also something to be said for persevering in the face of a world that never has been and never will be fair. “The world is what it is,” as Naipaul put it in the immortal opening lines of A Bend in the River, and those who begin at a disadvantage must strive to be their best selves regardless. This, at least, was the world that he inhabited. “You couldn’t be a victim in the 1950s,” Naipaul observed drily. “There wasn’t the market.”

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If there was no market for victimhood in Naipaul’s time, even for a brown-skinned, lilting-accented son of Caribbean poverty, now it seems there is no market for anything else. These days I sometimes find myself involuntarily rolling my eyes at the mention of terms like “race” and “empire,” even though, objectively speaking, they remain important subjects. The deference that comes when these sacred terms are invoked feels too easy. No one has the courage to push back, to demand from the victims rigour and consistency. Without worthy adversaries to overcome, their writing devolves into cliché.

Like C.L.R. James and Edward Said, I likely would have been a political opponent of Naipaul had I lived in his time. But one does not need to endorse all of his views to recognise that he was a worthy critic of many who would conceive of themselves as members of an underclass — and that we, like everyone else, need such critics. I never met him. Yet reading his books decades after they were published, I’ve often had the feeling that that Naipaul was challenging me personally. His entire career was an argument against taking up the mantle of sainted victimhood.  To a reader of a particular background, he offers bitter medicine through self-reflection rather than the sugar rush of moral self-righteousness.

Fifty years after winning the Booker Prize and a few years after his own death, it turns out that this descendant of indentured labourers cast off by the British Empire still has something important to say.

The experience hardened his belief that European colonialism was out of date. In August 1941, in discussions on the Atlantic Charter  —  which laid out the Allied goals for a post-WWII order  —  FDR stressed the inclusion of an article on self-determination, much to Winston Churchill’s anxiety. Roosevelt insisted that a precondition for a peaceful world was the development of “backward countries”, but that one-sided colonial trade agreements — like those of the British Empire — were why those countries “are still as backward as they are”.

American leaders have long liked to position themselves as opponents of European colonialism. John F. Kennedy, during the 1960 Presidential election, declared that the US should side with third world nationalist movements. After all, America itself is the product of thirteen colonies emancipating themselves from the British Empire and building a democratic republic. That revolution, which took place 245 years ago, has since been a model for movements worldwide. Vietnam’s nationalist leader Ho Chi Minh, for instance, explicitly invoked the American Declaration of Independence as inspiration.

America, then, claims to stand for a liberal international order composed of independent nations, dedicated to promoting peace, prosperity and freedom. In theory, anyway. In practice, America did not become a benign superpower after the Second World War; it became an empire in its own right. It did not liberate European colonies; it inherited them and made them American.

In Indochina, the US supported the French colonial regime, before replacing it as the occupying force — leading to the original forever war. In the Middle East, the US replaced Britain as well as France as the imperial power ne plus ultra — a project that, as recent front pages graphically demonstrate, hasn’t ended well. But American interventionism in Africa is less widely understood. A revelatory, meticulous new book by Susan Williams — based on declassified documents and new testimony — has done a lot to correct this.

Africa, Williams suggests in White Malice, has long been of “central importance” in the vision of American foreign policy planners. During the second world war, in response to Hitler’s armies conquering most of North Africa, the US built a number of air bases on the continent  — in Liberia, for instance  —  to prevent its enemies using West Africa as a platform to attack the Americas. The OSS (the forerunner to the CIA) established an Africa service with three field bases in Ghana, South Africa and Ethiopia. And the Manhattan Project — the secret program to develop the first nuclear weapons — made the Congo, with all its natural resources, central to American foreign policy.

The Uranium used to create the first atomic bombs originated from the Shinkolobwe mine in the Katanga province in Southern Congo. In 1942, a band of OSS agents were assigned to secure the mine, holding the richest Uranium in the world, to stop it falling into Nazi hands. They were also tasked with covertly transporting the Uranium  —  disguised as “diamonds” —  to the US, via airports in Elizabethville and Leopoldville designed by the Americans to ensure reliable transport. Shinkolobwe’s role in the Manhattan Project, as Williams notes, “was shrouded in secrecy”. Journalists were not allowed any information about the mine — let alone to visit it. It’s name and location was wiped off the map in 1942 and security was akin to a “fortress”, with armed guards patrolling 24/7.

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The Congolese miners were hyper-exploited. They were paid terribly, were frequently whipped by overseers and had little protection as they handled high-grade Uranium — which caused many to suffer long term health conditions. In other words, they were no better off than they had been under the Belgian colonisers.

After the war, the withdrawal of European empires left a void. And so most of America’s military bases in Africa remained. Pan-Africanism, on the ascendancy, was influencing civil rights and black radical movements among black Americans. The Soviet enemy was threatening to gain influence over the newly independent African nations. America, Williams writes, had to “recapture Africa”, putting it back into Western hands “by any means necessary”.

The CIA was anxious to get a foothold in these newly independent nations early to contain any possible spread of Communism. In the 1950s, the CIA’s African division developed an elaborate network of front organisations to acquire information and intelligence from across Africa. It funded journals and concerts, and established contacts with journalists, writers and businessmen who would become informants. For instance, Maurice Tempelsman (known for his relationship with Jackie Kennedy), who had big financial interests in Africa, sat on the board of the African-American Institute, a CIA front group. His business associate, George Wittman — whose company operated in a dozen African countries — was recruited into the agency in 1951, and helped produce a massive study of Ghana. The CIA also developed a close relationship with the apartheid regime in South Africa. It was they who informed the South African police as the whereabouts of Nelson Mandela.

Meanwhile American policymakers, like the European colonisers before them, believed that Africans weren’t quite ready for “orderly development” and “progress towards self-determination”. Williams quotes the vice-President Richard Nixon advocating that the US side with the “strong men of Africa”  —  the tyrants, in other words  —  to maintain stability and cultivate military regimes. This would counter the Communist threat. President Eisenhower agreed. Despite grandiloquent rhetoric in support of democracy, then, US foreign policy actively supported anti-democratic movements in Africa.

Because of this, the US was perpetually irritated by the two main heroes of Williams’ book: Kwame Nkrumah, who became the first leader of independent Ghana in 1957, and Patrice Lumumba, the first prime minister of the DRC. Both were huge icons of anti-colonialism. And both were Pan Africanists, who believed in the dream of a united, strong and sovereign African continent  —  one that would be an influential power bloc on the world stage independent of both the West and the Soviet Union.

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Nkrumah was initially well-disposed to the US; immediately after Ghana’s independence, relations were relatively “friendly and fruitful”. But by 1960, Accra was promoting an “African centric” foreign policy and Ghana was becoming the HQ for anti-colonial insurgents from all across Africa. With his quest for an atomic reactor, and his close relationship with Lumumba, Nkrumah was now seen as a “subversive”. His “tendency to support extremist elements in neighbouring African countries”, as a State Department document put it, troubled America.

The motivation behind Nkrumah’s nuclear program was the aim to modernise Ghana within a generation. According to Williams, Nkrumah got support from Canada to build a reactor, but US pressure ceased this collaboration, so he decided to appeal to the Soviet Union instead — raising US suspicions. It is worth noting here that the US gave a nuclear reactor to Congo in 1958, when it was still a Belgian colony, and also supplied enriched Uranium to apartheid South Africa for its nuclear program. It seems that, for the US, “a necessary qualification in Africa for access to a reactor”, as Williams notes, “was colonial occupation or white minority rule”. In other words, atomic energy was only appropriate in white hands, not sovereign black hands.

Throughout the 1960s, relations between Accra and Washington would deteriorate. Nkrumah publicly called the US a “neo-colonial” power in a book titled Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. He became paranoid and more dictatorial in his rule. The state monopolised the media; critics who “disrespected” the President were jailed. Economic mismanagement was rife; many state-run companies made losses. The cost of living rose dramatically, which led to protests on the streets, and repression in return. Discontent with Nkrumah’s rule within the armed forces produced easy allies for the CIA, who had been flirting with the idea of regime change in Ghana since 1961. In 1966, Nkrumah was overthrown in a military coup indirectly supported by Britain and America, while on an official visit to China. Shortly afterwards, the pro-Western military junta swiftly shut down the Kwembaya atomic reactor.

America’s main gripe against Patrice Lumumba, meanwhile, was his desire to keep Katanga  —  Congo’s richest province, where separatism was building  —  as part of the Congo. The province was the home of lucrative American and Belgian mining companies; Lumumba wanted to nationalise the industry. And so the CIA suspected Lumumba was a secret Communist and in “Soviet pay” — even though ideologically he was a nationalist. His reputation tarnished by these suspicions, Lumumba’s appeal for UN intervention during the Congo crisis of 1960 fell on deaf ears. With Belgian support, Katanga seceded. Around 100,000 people were killed. Lumumba was captured and executed by Katangan separatists in January 1961.

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In 1960, as Williams reveals through recently declassified documents, the CIA had officially approved a plan to fund and help organise opposition to Lumumba — with the expressed purpose of overthrowing him and replacing him with a “moderate”, pro-Western strong man. The prime candidate mentioned for this role by CIA Director Allen Dulles was Colonel Mobutu, who organised a coup against Lumumba on later that year, but wouldn’t fully come to power until 1965  —  via another American-backed coup. Williams presents unequivocal evidence that Mobutu had been an informant for Belgian intelligence and the CIA for years previously.

The ousting of Nkrumah in Ghana and Lumumba in the Congo followed a similar pattern of US interventions: such “deliberate violations of democracy” had taken place in Iran in 1953 or in Guatemala in 1954. The CIA would support in various ways  — indirectly, and sometimes directly  —  the overthrow of governments that had been democratically elected. These governments were deemed unacceptable by America because they had the misfortune of believing that their nations deserved to exercise self-determination, not simply have it in name. The US would then help install brutal dictatorships — like Mobutu’s — that used torture to repress critics and treated the national treasury as their own personal piggy bank. For American policymakers, this was an acceptable outcome, even though it contradicted the values of their own constitution. Communism was kept in check. Black lives did not matter.

We are in the midst of a frenzied post-colonial “reckoning” but, with notable exceptions (like Vincent Bevin’s absorbing Jakarta Method, published last year), this reckoning has focused on events that took and take place on American soil. For all the interest in black people, there has been little interest, even on the Left, in the African continent — except as a historic victim of Europe. The enemy is 19th century colonialism, which gave rise to the slave trade; 20th century American imperialism has been largely ignored.

But as refugees pour out of Kabul, dragging the failures of American intervention into the spotlight, the revelations in White Malice are perfectly timed. Perhaps now we’ll collectively object to the fact that American companies  —  Apple, Google, Dell  —  are using child miners in Cobalt mines in the Congo. Perhaps we will realise that little has changed in America’s relationship to Africa since the Cold War.

The US has promised to remove all its forces from Afghanistan by 11 September this year, and there is something astonishing about the world’s hyperpower agreeing to a date that will become doubly resonant not of American victory but of American failure. Were America leaving Afghanistan after 20 years of spent blood but with a thriving, stable Afghan society, then it is possible that the whole exercise could still have been marked up as a success. Instead, the opposite is true.

After two decades of insurgency, open warfare and betrayal, the US and her allies are leaving an Afghanistan that could be overwhelmed by the Taliban at any moment. Only yesterday, just hours before Boris Johnson announced the end of Britain’s military mission in Afghanistan, Sir Nick Carter, Chief of the UK Defence Staff, revealed that the Taliban now holds “nearly 50% of the rural districts”.

Suhail Shaheen, the Islamist group’s spokesman, this week warned that all foreign troops must obey the withdrawal deadline — a demand that the Biden administration has so far displayed every indication of following. Yet it would be wrong to think Biden is solely to blame. As wildly different administrations have come and gone in the past two decades, a vacillating commitment to the Afghan operation has remained a constant.

Perhaps it is inevitable that when a conflict goes on for so long, people, including politicians, eventually switch off. But even without that, I suspect that many would have tired of the Afghanistan war long before this grim season finale. For the truth is that if there is no point in fighting wars you’re going to lose, there is even less point in fighting wars you’re going to lose slowly.

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In hindsight the outlines of the Afghanistan disaster were clear from an early stage of the conflict. The US and her allies went in to ensure that Al-Qaeda and its affiliate groups would never again be able to have a country they could call home and from which they could plan attacks on the West. The allied bombing campaigns and ground operations wound up the first stages of that operation successfully and in good time.

And then, within the first year, the mission creep began. Al-Qaeda and the Taliban merged into an understandable blur in the eyes of the allies. The borders of Afghanistan and her neighbours were more porous than our generals expected, and as the conflict became entrenched within the country, it also seeped out. All the while, America and her allies failed to create anything that resembled civil society.

It was famously, if erroneously, claimed in 1883 by Sir John Seeley that Britain acquired her empire in “a fit of absence of mind”. America today has spent her time as the world’s leading superpower attempting not to be accused of the same. But while the US has often been criticised by her enemies for “empire-building”, the country’s problems on the world stage have largely been caused by her unwillingness to do any such thing.

If you are going to invade a country like Afghanistan and attempt to transform its society in the space of a few years — or in this case decades — then your military, diplomatic service and political class all must contain people who wish to engage in that activity; people who are fascinated with the local culture, are willing to learn the language and are eager to live among its people and to show leadership if needs be. To put it simply, if you are going to acquire an empire then you need empire-builders.

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For better or worse, this is not an American instinct. Its military does not want to remain in control of large countries thousands of miles away from home. Its diplomats have no special vision for how these societies might realistically look. And its political class professes its desire to get out as swiftly as possible even as they become more embroiled in conflict. Whether it is Barack Obama, Donald Trump or Joe Biden, all wanted to get out of the mess they had inherited. Yet all professed commitment while dreaming of abandonment. And now we see the results.

Will anything be learned in all of this? Possibly. The undoubtedly hubristic moment that America engaged in under George W. Bush after 9/11 is unlikely to return. There is now no appetite for foreign adventures on either the political Right or Left. The late John McCain could always be relied upon to call for American intervention in any country he saw, but since his death no one has stepped forward to pick up his mantle.

After all, they have witnessed countless interventionists talk with certainty about what societies would look like if America showed its might and the muscle, before watching them get it wrong again and again. I know, because I was one of them. I had hopes for Afghanistan, as I once had hopes for Iraq. But nobody could watch these interventions  and come away believing in America’s half-hearted imperial ambitions. That isn’t to say that the UK would have been any better if it had attempted such missions alone. Simply that America has repeatedly demonstrated herself to be eminently capable of starting fights while being profoundly disinterested in actually winning them.

Syria was the moment I decided to get off the train, having become immune to claims of foresight, special intelligence or “operational ease”. By then — late in the day, it may well be said — I believed that America had neither the will, knowledge nor desire to see through the operations that it started. It had the resources and the technology, certainly. But without the personnel to make a success of it, that’s meaningless. The country had fallen for the pottery barn rule of intervention (“You break it, you own it”), despite having no wish to own the countries it intervened in and forgetting that in warfare it is perfectly permissible to go in, break a lot of things and then leave.

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That is what America should have done in Afghanistan: gone in, carried out some punitive strikes, made an example of her enemies and then left. Would it have still had to return to the country from time to time? Most certainly. Would it have been able to do everything it wanted to do from 20,000 feet? Almost certainly not. But it would have beaten two decades of American soldiers having to give up their lives for stretches of road which their colleagues — and eventually their government — would shortly abandon.

So perhaps it is inevitable that the stories emerging from Afghanistan are greeted quietly. They stir quite a cocktail of feelings: inevitability, boredom, disappointment, shame.

But if this is true, how could we ever translate anything without hopelessly mangling it? If a translation risks twisting or ruining the original, stripping it of nuance or even misrepresenting an idea, then it must be done only with the greatest sensitivity and skill.

This isn’t a problem that concerns only dilettantes and art mavens; ideas, even in translation, can be revolutionary. The dissident Chinese artist Ai Weiwei describes how his father sought to evade accusations of being anti-communist during the Cultural Revolution by burning the family’s books, including poetry by Pablo Neruda and Rabindranath Tagore. Likewise, just as translated works can be subversive, so they can be evangelical: the world’s most translated text today is the Bible. Whether encouraged in order to spread ideas, or forbidden in order to suppress them, translation is difficult to separate from power.

Predictably, then, the politics of translation have become a culture-war battleground today, with reports that the Dutch writer and poet Marieke Lucas Rijneveld has pulled out of translating Amanda Gorman’s poem for the Biden inauguration. Translation rights to Gorman’s work were hotly contested, and Meulenhof, the publisher that secured them, described Rijneveld, an International Booker Prize winner, as the “dream translator”.

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But Rijneveld’s selection was quickly seized upon by self-styled “cultural activist” Janice Deul, who wrote that Meulenhof should instead “choose a writer who is — just like Gorman — a spoken-word artist, young, female and unapologetically Black”. The implication was that Rijneveld, who is white, would have less insight into Gorman’s life than a Dutch writer who is black. In response, critics of Rijneveld’s decision to step down have objected to this firewalling of cultural artefacts on the basis of skin colour. But such well-trodden culture war arguments can easily obscure the complex power dynamics of translation.

Rabindranath Tagore, whose work Ai Weiwei remembers reading before his father burned the family library, was the first non-white person to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Gitanjali (or Song Offerings) was Tagore’s own translation of 103 of his Bengali verses into English prose, and was described by William Butler Yeats as “the work of a supreme culture”.

Tagore’s Nobel Prize in 1913 certainly widened the previously Eurocentric focus of such awards. Yet despite Tagore’s prolific artistic output and status as giant of the Bengali Renaissance, Gitanjali remains his best-known work outside the subcontinent, the subject of Pinterest pins and YouTube content, precisely because Tagore translated it to English. For, in no small thanks to the political legacy of two successive Anglophone empires, English remains the dominant global language.

This fact sits uncomfortably with the post-imperial and (officially at least) anti-imperialist perspective of modern Britain. Today it is common to feel, somewhat queasily, that the English language has been an irreversible and sometimes harmful imposition on the world: this sentiment even appears in the GCSE English syllabus, in the form of Brian Friel’s 1980 play Translations.

Translations depicts the exercise of English colonial power in 1833 rural Ireland, as represented by a group of military surveyors who anglicise Irish place names while making a new map. It directly addresses the fundamentally violent process of using military force to impose a foreign language, and translating the cultural (and physical) terrain of an occupied people into that language.

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Although we decry Britain’s former imperial aggression today, the process Translations describes didn’t come to an end with the dissolution of the British Empire. In Hong Kong, the anglicisation described in Translations has been taking place in reverse since the return of the island to Chinese rule in 1997. As Beijing has tightened its hold, street names and signage have undergone a slow but sure shift from English to Chinese, which is framed explicitly as a process of erasing the British colonial legacy.

The cultural inroads made by empire — and the violence this often entails — are more visible yet when it comes to “translating” people from their native culture to the imperial one. This dates back to ancient Egypt and Rome, when hostages were routinely taken among the children of conquered aristocracies and educated in their conquerors’ culture. The Ottoman Empire turned such translation into a fine art, with the devshirme or “child-levy” system, which took children from subject nations and raised them as the empire’s elite governing class.

Nor was the practice of coercive assimilation abandoned in more modern empires: America in the 19th century saw the creation of boarding schools for Native American children, who were separated from their parents and compelled to study “the habits and arts of civilisation”. And a similar process is underway in China today, with reports emerging of boarding schools in Xinjiang where Uighur children are taught to forget their heritage and embrace loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party.

The mixed feelings such assimilationist cultural policies produced among those who experienced them can be seen in the writing of Nirad C. Chaudhuri, a Bengali contemporary of Tagore. Born in 1897, Chaudhuri’s boyhood coincided with the burgeoning Indian independence movement, which by then was trickling into schoolbooks.

But far from cheering this process on, in Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951) Chaudhuri describes envying the excerpts of English poetry in his older brother’s textbooks, which he found far more interesting than his own “Indianised” study material. And in The Continent of Circe (1965), Chaudhuri is even more explicit, claiming that “English is not a mere instrument for us but a force shaping and moulding personality”. That is, to argue for a language is to argue for a worldview.

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Having learned to translate my own worldview twice as a child, I never felt entirely “English” even after our return. Indeed, as the ebb and flow of translations follows that of politics, those who have been translated (voluntarily or otherwise) into a hybrid culture can be left radically adrift when the currents change. Chaudhuri was one such: he left India altogether in 1970 for England, explaining: “England is decadent, the young people are savages, but here I can still live according to the lights I have always known.”

The landscape of cultural and imperial power thus flows across places and cultures via literal and figurative processes of translation. And when we think of translation in these terms, it becomes clear that the quarrel over who translates Gorman’s poem isn’t a matter of race or marginalisation at all, so much as of imperial court politics.

Amanda Gorman’s work has been broadcast around the world from the nation that remains — in however battered a condition — the world’s pre-eminent superpower. She is not marginalised. In terms of pure cultural clout, she’s a heavy hitter, in the world’s top nation, writing in the world’s dominant language. Rijneveld, on the other hand, is a relatively obscure writer and poet, working in a language spoken by a mere 23 million people.

Being a trendy figure in Dutch literature has nothing on being America’s premier court poet. And so winning the job of translating Amanda Gorman’s inauguration poem is less white appropriation than the scoring of an immense honour — one that was, in fact, conferred by Gorman herself, who personally selected Rijneveld for the job.

Deul’s intervention was not a move to amplify marginalised people so much as the use of a fashionable argument to redirect a desirable opportunity toward her own social network. (Her article names several of her personal friends whom she thinks would be more suitable than Rijneveld.) That is, it was less a fightback against imperial power than an intra-class skirmish for perks and status.

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Much of the currently fashionable “decolonisation” agenda that excites so much conservative commentary can be understood in a similar framework; as a process of imperial translation, with a new order reorganising the ideas and artefacts of alien cultures to suit its own priorities.

The lesson to draw from this isn’t that all empires are evil by definition, but that all of them exercise power literally, via coercive means, and also culturally via the spread and translation of ideas and ways of life. We may bridle at the new woke American anti-imperialist imperialism, gasp at the ruthlessness of the Chinese drive to assimilate its minorities, or recoil at the atrocities committed by the British empire. But the uncomfortable fact is that such forces are also the deep drumbeat of the most long-lasting achievements in human history.

The only way to avoid this drumbeat, in all its brutality, would be to end imperialism full stop, which history suggests isn’t going to happen. And even if it did, it would likely mean the end of art and culture. Is that a price worth paying? The intense competition for the right to cling to Amanda Gorman’s coattails suggests not even today’s self-styled woke anti-imperialists really want to give up the imperial power of literature. They’re just fighting over who gets to wield it.

As Nathalie Tocci, chief advisor to EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell Fontelles, notes in a recent paper, “the European project developed under… an order made up of international organisations, laws, norms, regimes and practices premised on US power”. Yet today, “that world is fast fading”. While the US remains the only state able to project power globally, it “no longer represents the undisputed hegemon of the international system”. Indeed, as Tocci observes, China’s rise “suggests that we can no longer claim with confidence that economic prosperity and political freedoms can only go hand in hand”. Moreover, our dramatically different experiences of Covid “suggests that the jury is out on which governance system is perceived as best addressing the pandemic crisis, prompting questions about the management of other global challenges too”.

To his credit, Biden squarely addressed these pressing questions. Summoning up the ghosts of past confrontations, he declared that “we’re at an inflection point” between those who believe that “autocracy is the best way forward… and those who understand that democracy is essential to meeting those challenges”. For the President, “Democracy will and must prevail… We have to prove that our model isn’t a relic of our history.”

Yet this justificatory emphasis on democracy as the foundation of empire is a relic of a very specific moment in world history. As the historian Stephen Wertheim observes in his book Tomorrow the World, following the fall of France in 1940, American foreign policy elites feared that a Nazi victory would see the United States hemmed into the Western Hemisphere. But the British victory in the Battle of Britain opened up a new prospect, hitherto undreamed of by American politicians: first of an Anglo-American imperial condominium, dividing up the post-war world between them; and then, as Britain’s relative decline became apparent, a vision of total global hegemony.

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“Americans ever since, from experts to ordinary citizens, have considered world dominance to be their nation’s natural role,” Wertheim notes. It is an ideology which “holds that the superior coercive power of the United States is required to underwrite a decent world order” — one which “assumes that in order to prevent the international realm from descending into chaos or despotism, a benign hegemon must act as the world’s ordering agent,” with that onerous burden falling upon themselves.

To turn its wary populace into eager participants in this imperial project, American intellectual and foreign policy elites framed global expansion as the establishment of a universal liberal-democratic order, guided and protected rather than ruled by Washington. As Wertheim notes in a passage that is as true of American liberal commentators today as those of the 1940s, “anything less [than global supremacy] would be an abdication, tantamount to inactivity, absence, and head-in-the-sand disregard for the fate of the world.” America’s pursuit of global hegemony was not a sordid, self-aggrandising imperial project like that of the fading European powers; instead, it was a moral duty, a noble sacrifice undertaken for the benefit of the rest of the world. In such a way, Wertheim writes, “the country jumped from ‘isolationism’ to ‘imperialism’, acquiring a taste for unilateral intervention everywhere in order to remake the world in the image of the United States”. In doing so, they constructed the global order whose waning days we now inhabit.

Yet by making the Second World War the founding myth of the American-led order, certain pathologies were built into the system which now threaten its survival. As a useful myth became liberal dogma, the neurotic belief that the end of American hegemony would mean the return of dark forces has become so entrenched that it constrains America’s ability to negotiate reality. In the same way US political radicals appear doomed to endlessly replay the ideological battles of 1930s Germany in the streets of America’s cities, it is always 1933 in the world of the D.C. liberal hawk: American hegemony is all that stands between the free world and the rise of new Hitlers, destined to crop up from the blood-soaked soil of the Old World without regular American pruning.

The increasing salience since the 1990s of a Hollywood-esque understanding of the Second World War exemplifies this distortion of reality in the pursuit of a grand, moralising origin myth. It is a worldview shorn of moral compromises, such as the necessary alliance with Stalin’s murderous regime, in which every challenger to US hegemony magically becomes a new Hitler. Complex and intractable ethnic, tribal and sectarian conflicts — literally inexplicable in such a moral framework — are either reduced to the evil deeds of individual dictators, whose removal will lead automatically to the flourishing of liberal democracy, or ignored as too difficult to comprehend.

The results are plain to see. As Tocci notes, more in sorrow than censure, “the last war which the US led and unequivocally won both militarily and politically was over Kosovo 22 years ago.” In the ever-expanding wars since then, the US has “won militarily, but (abysmally) lost politically.” The result, as she observes, is that “the outcomes of the many wars that have been fought in China’s absence during the decades of its economic rise have been, in one way or another, to China’s strategic advantage.”

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The danger for America, then, is that its leaders have become high on their own ideological supply, overlaying their fantasy map on the real world. It seems, at times, that by fusing the Realist desire for hegemony with an idealistic mission to remake the world, America’s elites believe they have secured the mandate of heaven for their project. Challengers, from Putin to Gaddafi to Assad, are not merely opponents; they are rebels against the arc of history, individual reincarnations of the 1930s whose very existence, let alone survival, is morally unbearable.

Indeed, there are worrying intimations that America’s leaders believe the victory of liberal democracy is predestined, purely through its own perceived moral virtue: as if the victories of the Second World War and the Cold War were won by holding the correct ideology, and not through the possession of stronger industrial bases and amoral political alliances. The rise of China, concomitant with America’s decline, is largely the unintended product of such a dangerously idealistic worldview.

Yet like the American millennials role-playing Weimar, their elders continue to re-enact the sacred myth on the global sphere, invoking the litanies of another time, on another continent, for their magical power. By intoning the sacred word democracy over and over again at the Munich conference — including three times in his concluding sentence — Biden echoed the themes of his first domestic foreign policy speech: that he will “host the summit of democracies early in my administration to rally the nations of the world to defend democracy globally” and that “there’s no longer a bright line between foreign and domestic policy”. The riot at the Capitol and the future confrontation in east Asia are now part of the same Manichean struggle, a worldview we could term the true D.C. cinematic universe.

Of course, Biden’s framing is not true in a literal sense: the same speech contained a pledge to defend Saudi Arabia — which is not noted for its liberal governance — even as he announced the welcome end of American military support for the Saudi kingdom’s bloody and disastrous war in Yemen. Likewise to confront China, the US will need to enhance alliances with authoritarian or dubiously democratic South East Asian states, with even India’s commitment to “liberal democracy” in the American sense increasingly debatable. Even in Europe, Poland, the most eager cheerleader for America’s continued military dominance on our continent, displays a far more equivocal approach to both liberalism and democracy than Biden’s framing suggests. As in the first Cold War, America can either promote global democracy or preserve its imperial reach, but not both.

Nevertheless, the democratic ideal retains immense rhetorical power for defenders of the American-led global order. Thus the openly imperialist writer Robert Kagan argued recently that Americans must “accept the role that fate and their own power have thrust upon them”, because “the only hope for preserving liberalism at home and abroad is the maintenance of a world order conducive to liberalism, and the only power capable of upholding such an order is the United States”.

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The ideology that broke Britain

By Aris Roussinos

In starker terms than Biden, Kagan argues that the empire is necessary to preserve democracy at home: an America that retreats from global hegemony would no longer be America. But as the Realist professors of International Relations David Blagden and Patrick Porter observe in a recent paper arguing for a strategic withdrawal from the Middle East, the precise opposite case can be made. The pursuit of global hegemony since the end of the Cold War has seen the United States overstretch itself, taken on unsustainable levels of debt to fund its military expansion, eroded the country’s image abroad, militarised policing at home, enabled the rise of China and fostered disillusionment and political radicalism in America. The Trump era, they note, was not so much a threat to America’s global mission as its product, a marker of growing popular dissent to imperial overreach now observable on both the Left and Right of the American political system.

As they observe, America’s “position as ‘global leader’ is premised on a set of impermanent and atypical conditions from an earlier post-war era”, but “the days of incontestable unipolarity are over, and cannot be wished back”. The result is that “overextension abroad, exhaustion and fiscal strain at home, and political disorder feed off one another in a downward spiral, cumulatively threatening the survival of the republic”.

The US empire is, then, at an impasse. Its moral and political justification of overseeing a global order of universal liberal democracy — the closest real-world equivalent to the Kantian perpetual peace that has both motivated and eluded liberal idealists for the past two centuries — is now beyond its capabilities to maintain. Yet to return to its core imperial concerns of the Western Hemisphere, Europe and Northeast Asia, as Blagden & Porter counsel, would tarnish the imperial crown. Without the idealistic universalism that has justified America’s global mission since the Second World War, the US empire would be an empire like any other: self-interested, amoral, and hostage to the cycle of rise and fall that has seen every other empire pass into history. Kagan is in this sense correct: without the justifying myth to organise the empire around, the moral logic of the entire enterprise falls apart.

Even within the heart of the Nato alliance, European strategic autonomy therefore represents a dilemma for America, which, as Blagden & Porter note, has always “displayed a longstanding preference for preventing even its major allies in Europe and Asia from exercising true strategic autonomy”. A more autonomous Europe lessens the strategic burden on the United States, allowing America to refocus its forces on confronting China; yet a more autonomous Europe will also be less constrained by American pressure, and more inclined to pursue its own interests.

How does this end for America? Biden and the presidents after him will be forced to make a hard choice: whether to retrench to a smaller and more manageable empire, or to risk a far greater and more dramatic collapse in defence of global hegemony. In the meantime, perhaps our European allies are correct in discerning a greater opportunity to rebalance the Atlantic alliance in our favour for the first time in decades. A more modest American commitment to a limited democratic order, rather than an unsustainable global one, can only enhance European influence, including ours, especially as the bloody distractions of the Middle East, America’s self-defeating imperial burden, fade from prominence. American leaders will soon be forced to choose between realism and idealism; the same is also true of us.

Most of the people killed in the war were from a particular ethnic group – the Igbos – who had attempted to secede from freshly-independent Nigeria and were brutally prevented from doing so. Nigeria’s post-war leaders thus believed it in the interest of “national unity” to speak as little as possible about that particularly painful episode in the country’s history.

There is some logic in the strategy, since how do you teach a nation an aspect of its history that is inherently divisive? Years later, when I asked my British university class what they had learned at school about colonisation, “Nothing really!” was the chorused reply. “In A-level history, I learnt a bit about the British Empire, all positive stuff,” one student offered. “There was a little on colonialism in India, but nothing about Africa.” I teach a pretty mixed bunch, coming from various parts of Britain, and the suggested education gap on this subject strikes me as problematic.

The calls to “decolonise” the curriculum have returned this year, intensifying in the weeks following the killing of George Floyd and the attendant heated debate about race. But with something as consequential as British colonialism, I think the question should not be whether to teach it — yes — but rather how to teach about it.

This presents no small challenge, the problem being that Britain is inhabited both by the descendants of those who were conquered, and those who did the conquering. One’s story of victorious expansion is the other’s reminder of humiliating subjugation.

My Nigerian secondary school teachers had it easier on this front. Everyone in the school — teacher and pupil alike — was Nigerian. We were thus all automatically united on one side of the colonial divide, the side of the colonised. This provided teachers with a clear perspective from which to teach colonial history, with an emphasis on prominent Nigerian anti-colonialists, stretching from the early 19^th-century resistors to the pro-independence leaders of the Fifties. It was obvious to us all who the heroes of the colonial story were, and who were its villains (the British of course).

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Has BLM picked the wrong target?

By Remi Adekoya

But the demographics are different in the UK; unsurprisingly, so are attitudes towards Empire. According to a 2019 YouGov poll, 32% of Britons are proud of the British Empire, 19% are ashamed of it, 37% are neither proud nor ashamed, while the rest don’t know what to think. On top of this, 33% of Brits believe former colonies are “better off” for being a part of the British Empire, compared to 17% who think them “worse-off”.

There clearly exists an expectation among some scholars demanding more education about colonialism that this would dramatically shift British public opinion against Empire. I wouldn’t be so sure.

This expectation underestimates the human desire to feel strong, the powerful psychological appeal for many, not just in Britain, in taking pride in the conquests of their ancestors. It offers a sense of collective strength they can tap into as individuals. If they, of whom I am one, could be so triumphant in the past, surely I too possess triumph in me?

The morality of taking pride in ancestral conquests involving the killing and subjugation of other human beings is questionable, but its psychological appeal is undeniable. People want to feel strong and they often grab at whatever gives them that feeling of strength. According to YouGov, as many as 50% of Dutch people feel proud of their past Empire; the French are only slightly less proud than the British of theirs, and less prone to shame about it.

This is not just a white people thing; the same YouGov survey showed that only one in five Japanese today are ashamed of their imperial past, despite its disastrous consequences. Turks enjoy emphasising their role in the powerful Ottoman Empire, with current president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan even declaring modern-day Turkey a “continuation” of the Ottomans.

Hence, while I think it important to teach about British colonialism because of its consequences for present-day history and while it is difficult for me, the son of a Nigerian father, to view colonialism and Empire positively or even neutrally, I understand why some (white) Britons feel differently. However, what complicates matters for me somewhat is that some Africans who actually experienced British colonialism had mixed feelings about it, a theme rarely explored in current debate.

I emphasise that British colonialism is what I am referring to. No one was ambivalent about the barbaric rule of the Congo by the Belgian King Leopold II, whose savagery cost some 10 million lives, as documented in Adam Hochschild’s heart-wrenching King Leopold’s Ghost. I cried reading that book, and experienced intense feelings of animus towards white people, even though my own mother, being Polish, was white.

But in a country like Nigeria, Britain’s largest African colony, feelings towards colonialism were more complicated. In his 1947 book Path to Nigerian Freedom, Obafemi Awolowo, considered one of Nigeria’s Founding Fathers for his role in the independence struggle, offered a frank assessment of the challenges in mobilising his compatriots against British rule at the time. “Given a choice from among white officials, [Nigerian] chiefs and educated Nigerians as the principal rulers of the country, the illiterate man today would exercise his preference for the three in the order in which they are named. He is convinced, and has good reasons to be, that he can always get better treatment from the white man than he could hope to get from the chiefs and the educated elements,” Awolowo wrote.

According to this, while Nigeria’s educated elites wanted Britain out as fast as possible so they could start running their country, many regular Nigerians seemed to sense a fairness in the British exercise of power that they were not so sure of in their own leaders. Awolowo did not put this down to what was called “colonial brainwashing” but said that he felt many Nigerians had “good reasons” to think this way.

Of course, because British colonialism was hypocritically justified as stemming from concern (bless their good hearts) for the supposedly “savage” conditions of life in pre-colonial Africa, African anti-colonialists had little strategic choice but to construct a counter-narrative strongly negating this depiction, one portraying Africans in a positive light. This led to what Nigerian historian Toyin Falola described as the “simple but seductive thesis that Africa used to live in peace and innocence until its contact with Europeans”. And so the one-sided, sweeping colonialist narrative was countered with a one-sided, sweeping anti-colonialist narrative. But this did not mean that regular folk on the ground lost all memory of the past.

Obviously, as Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe’s famous 1958 book, Things Fall Apart, brilliantly portrayed, the disruption colonialism brought to the lives of everyday Nigerians was massive, and in my view, ultimately indefensible. Imagine foreigners come to your homeland, kill some of you, and tell the rest everything you ever believed is rubbish. Your religion is rubbish, your traditions are rubbish, your values are rubbish, the way you organise your entire economy and life is wrong.

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The assault on African ideas was so severe that the continent is still trying to recover its identity; still trying to figure out an idea for modern Africanness that would not be an imitation of Westernness or so focussed on resisting Eurocentrism it ends up defining Africans in opposition to Europeans, thus ultimately being Eurocentric itself. Post-colonial Africa is still searching for an identity that explains who Africans are, not who they are not.

Yet in an interview a few years after independence, the same Achebe who had highlighted colonialism’s disruptive nature stated: “I am not one of those who would say Africa has gained nothing at all during the colonial period…this is ridiculous – we have gained a lot. But unfortunately, when two cultures meet . . . what happens is that some of the worst elements of the old are retained and some of the worst of the new are added.”

Intellectuals such as Achebe clearly recognised the identity crisis colonialism triggered. They also knew about British atrocities such as the looting and destruction of the ancient Benin Kingdom in southern Nigeria, among others. Yet on the other hand, Achebe believed that Africa benefited from the introduction of Western education, technology and medicine, as well as liberal European ideals such as “democracy” and “equality”, which had not necessarily been popular beforehand.

It is, however, important to emphasise that even between British colonies, there were significant differences in the actual practice of colonialism. It was significantly more brutal in Kenya than in Nigeria, for instance, with the former witnessing bloody events such as the Mau Mau Uprising in which thousands of Kenyans were slaughtered as late as the mid-20th century.

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Why shouldn't the curriculum be 'Eurocentric'?

By Nigel Biggar

I know some fear that if we start allowing for nuances in our assessments of colonialism, then we are opening the door for white people to shed any guilt whatsoever over the entire affair. That even more Britons will start asserting, humiliatingly for us, that colonialism left our ancestors “better off”. That saying anything “positive” about it is tantamount to justifying it.

I understand this line of reasoning, but I ultimately refuse to live my life in fear of what some people may say or think. That is the quintessential post-colonial complex: living dominated by anxieties over how white people see us. Instead we should liberate ourselves from the shackles of these historical complexes that yes, were thrust upon us, but that only we can shake off ourselves; those complexes that limit what we feel we can say about ourselves once white people are listening. Discussing colonialism frankly is a sign of strength, not weakness.

So for British teachers wondering how to teach the subject, it is important to cite various perspectives, including, crucially, the perspectives of the colonised; not in a wholly arbitrary manner seeking to buttress this or that grand narrative, but in a way revealing the complexities and contradictions of Britain’s colonial encounter with Africa.

This does not mean truth-seeking can be an excuse for insensitivity. The reality is that colonialism is an inherently emotive subject for millions of black and brown people in this country. We need more frank and open debate about it, definitely, but that debate should always serve the ultimate purpose of helping build this nation rather than tearing it apart.

Where does this leave Britain? How should it define itself and defend its place in the world after liberalism? The Defence Secretary has asserted the need for strategic autonomy. And in his maiden speech, as reported on UnHerd, Danny Kruger spoke of the need for Britain to reject “an accommodation with one of the sterile new powers of the world, America, Europe or China” and fashion “a particularly British model, independent of the great powers”.

One way to assert our autonomy, paradoxical though it may seem, would be to deepen our bilateral strategic relationship with our closest European neighbour and historic rival, France. It may seem quixotic, but it is Macron’s France that is most clear-sighted in its apprehension of the new global order. We also have equivalent military capacity and a desire to preserve a role as an autonomous, mid-ranking power on the world stage.

As Macron himself remarked: “We have unparalleled reach. Basically, only the UK, via the Commonwealth, can claim a similar reach, although it’s decided to follow a different path.”

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By Mike Martin

When Macron features in British political discourse, it is most often in his role as a lightning rod for political protest at home. It is a point no less true for being made to the point of cliché by Brexiteers that France is experiencing the most violent and wide-ranging political convulsions since 1968, nor that Macron’s throne is propped up by tear gas and truncheons more than popular acclaim. Were Poland or Hungary to have experienced such political instability, or to have repressed it as violently, they would certainly have aroused the condemnatory attention of British liberal commentators far more so than our Jupiterian neighbour has so far achieved.

Yet the acclamation of Macron as the strongman of the liberal order by anxious liberals keen to reverse the political trends sweeping across Europe misses the increasingly post-liberal drift of his strategic vision. His is a realist vision, shorn of idealist yearnings to remake the world according to the teleology of liberalism. It is keenly aware both of where real power lies and how to use it in France’s interests.

As French foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian remarked in a major recent speech at The Hague, Europe has suffered from “the error of believing that we can ensure our place and security in a brutal and violent world simply through the example of our model and with our words”. Europeans need, Le Drian asserted, “to open our eyes to the reality of international power relations. In a way, we need to stop being naïve”.

It is in this difference, between a realistic acceptance of how human societies function and an idealistic vision of endless human progress towards a perfect future, that post-liberalism distinguishes itself from liberalism. Liberalism derives from its distant Christian heritage a belief in the perfectibility of man, and from Enlightenment thought the assumption that history moves inexorably in one direction. A post-liberal foreign policy, like Burkean conservatism, would accept that a nation’s politics derives from its own unique historical circumstances and that different societies are unlikely to share the same visions of the common good. Therefore, a cautious realism is both safer and more conducive to the happiness of mankind than the revolutionary idealism with which well-meaning, but misguided, liberal interventionists have torn nations asunder.

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Macron has considered these questions carefully. In his recent interview with the Economist in which he pronounced upon Nato’s “brain death,” he noted that:

“There is a deep current of thought that was structured in the period between 1990 and 2000 around the idea of the “end of history”, of a limited expansion of democracy, of a triumph of the West as a value system. That was the accepted truth at the time, until the 2000s, when a series of shocks demonstrated that it wasn’t actually so true.”

This is, of course, an outright rejection of the dominant ideology of late 20^thcentury liberalism: the quasi-religious belief that increasing trade would link the world in an ever-closer global system which would drag non-Western powers in the direction of a gleaming, liberal-democratic future. As Macron notes,

“The dominant ideology had a flavour of the end of history. So there will be no more great wars, tragedy has left the stage, all is wonderful. The overriding agenda is economic, no longer strategic or political. In short, the underlying idea is that if we’re all linked by business, all will be fine, we won’t hurt each other. In a way, that the indefinite opening of world trade is an element of making peace.

Except that, within a few years, it became clear that the world was breaking up again, that tragedy had come back on stage, that the alliances we believed to be unbreakable could be upended, that people could decide to turn their backs, that we could have diverging interests.”

Having perceived the direction of the Weltgeist, the former Hegel scholar has changed the course of French foreign policy towards the new prevailing winds, and not against them. Once lauded by anglophone liberals as Putin’s nemesis, Macron now seeks an accommodation with the Russian leader, attempting to draw Russia into a new security framework with Europe, and expounding his civilisationist conception of an autonomous Europe stretching “from Lisbon to Vladivostok”.

This is a vision of Europe shared, incidentally, with the Identitarian thinkers of France’s radical Right, and which perhaps accords with Macron’s recent decision to give a long, exclusive interview to the French Catholic-reactionary magazine Valeurs Actuelles, to the horror of French liberals.

Macron’s increasing references to political Islam as the dominant threat to European civilisation, and repeated warnings over unsustainable birth rates in sub-Saharan Africa have also alarmed French liberals — though they have drifted unnoticed over the heads of British Remainers looking longingly for a continental saviour.

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On immigration too, Macron’s once condemnatory rhetoric towards Salvini and Central European leaders for refusing to accept Third World migration has not been matched by action: in practice, France under Macron has accepted as few migrants as possible, pushing attempted arrivals back to Italy with some force. Ritual condemnation of Orbán as a threat to European democracy has been replaced by a growing warmth between the two leaders, termed by some as the “Macron- Orbán axis”, with Macron aiming to use Orbán as a means to persuade the wary Poles to embrace his vision of rapprochement with Russia. “He’s quite close to our views,” Macron has said of the Hungarian champion of illiberal democracy, “and has a key intellectual and political role within the Visegrad group, which is important. That’s also the way we may be able to convince the Poles a little more.”

Pursuing this vision, Macron travelled to Poland to heal the bad blood caused by his previous critiques of the country’s drift away from liberal norms. His aim: to secure a military partner for France to fill the massive hole left by Brexit. Forced by geography to maintain robust defence spending, Poland’s rapidly modernising armed forces are, these days, a safer bet’s than those of Germany, now a superpower only in moralising, both unwilling and unable to assert its interests on the global stage. Yet Macron’s pleas for Polish involvement in France’s ongoing war in the Sahel, and support for French ambitions in Libya, serve only to highlight the centrality of the United Kingdom to any meaningful European project for strategic autonomy.

Within Europe, only Britain can match the expeditionary capacity of the French armed forces. Indeed, France’s gruelling intervention in the Sahel was dependent on RAF C-17s to airlift troops to Mali in the first place, and three RAF chinook helicopters provide vital flexibility to French operations in the Sahel even now; the mission will be bolstered by 250 British troops later this year. On the day we left the European Union, Macron observed of the UK that “it is in our common interest to define as close and deep a partnership as possible in defence and security”, and in the Economist he insisted:

“the British must be a partner on European defence. We’re keeping the bilateral treaties we upheld at Sandhurst. I believe that the UK has an essential role to play. Actually, the UK will be faced with the same question because the UK will be even more affected than us if the nature of NATO changes. So I see the bilateral relationship as essential from a military perspective.”

Both great world empires shrunk to mid-ranking power status; both nuclear powers and UN Security Council members, with commitments across the world derived from global trade and the flows of migration which followed our retreat from empire. France and Britain share interests and ambitions we are each unable to defend alone.

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Decades of defence cuts have whittled our armed forces to the stage where we are unable to fight as anything other than a token auxiliary force to an American effort, fulfilling a similar niche in American doctrine as the Brigade of Gurkhas do in ours. Given that the global hegemon is itself struggling to maintain its presence in Iraq in the face of Iranian pressure, and is attempting, two decades into a bloody and unsuccessful war, to negotiate as un-humiliating a retreat from Afghanistan as possible from the Pashtun farmers who have outfought it, the advisability of a British government following the United States into further military adventures in pursuit of liberal goals is questionable at best.

Chastened in Southern Iraq and Helmand, despite the tactical skill and courage of our soldiers, Britain must seek a new role on the world stage commensurate with our abilities; it’s vital we accept that any attempt at strategic autonomy is meaningless unless we repair the damage decades of neglect have wrought on our armed forces.

Our new aircraft carriers are spectacular but undeployable in combat without escort ships we do not possess. Our army has been slow to modernise in recent decades, and has fought two long and bloody counterinsurgency campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan at America’s behest with very little to show at the end of them. Until our capabilities have been restored and the lessons of our failed wars firmly learned, sharing capability through enhanced strategic cooperation with France seems essential for both countries in preserving some measure of autonomy in a global system torn between rising authoritarian powers and an increasingly unstable and erratic United States.

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Why is French democracy so prone to violence?

By John Lichfield

One shared plank of a post-liberal foreign policy would surely be a retreat from military adventurism where French and British interests are not directly at stake. The failure of the Arab Spring to bring forth flourishing liberal democracies in North Africa and the Middle East has wrought great damage on the fantasies of liberal interventionists, and its baneful effects have, in Europe, been borne most bloodily by Britain and France.

It was not foreseen by the cheerleaders of globalisation that civil wars in distant lands would lead to civilians lying dead by the dozen in the streets and stadia of London, Manchester, and Paris, but this is what came to pass. The Nato operation to unseat Gaddafi in Libya, a Franco-British project which dragged in an uncertain Obama administration, has likewise led, nearly a decade on, to the grim prospect of a conflict within the Nato alliance itself, as French and Greek warships engage in a tense standoff with the Turkish navy in the Eastern Mediterranean, and to a migrant crisis on Europe’s southern border likely to turn both Italy and Spain in an illiberal rather than post-liberal direction sooner rather than later.

Furthermore, it was as an unforeseen consequence of the intervention in Libya demobilised Tuareg fighters returned home to Mali with the spoils of Gaddafi’s armouries, sparking the bloody conflict France is still struggling to end.

Macron has mused repeatedly on the failure of the 2011  intervention in Libya to secure European interests, remarking this month that “it’s a country that has never known real unity”, and that “we took a path that never seemed right to me which is to say we don’t like this leader [so we’re going to] overthrow him, except we didn’t have a better leader to replace him with, and we find ourselves in this anomie.”

In his Economist interview, reflecting on the Arab Spring in general, Macron observed that:

“We’ve sometimes made mistakes by wanting to impose our values, by changing regimes, without popular support. It’s what happened in Iraq or in Libya. It’s perhaps what was envisaged at one point in Syria but failed. It’s an element of the Western approach, I would say in generic terms, that was a mistake at the beginning of this century, undoubtedly fatal, and sprang from the union of two forces: the right to intervene with neo-conservatism. And these two forces intertwined and produced dramatic results. Because the sovereignty of the people is in my opinion an unsurpassable factor. It’s what made us what we are, and it must be respected everywhere.”

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As a consequence of this newly realist assessment of European interests, France under Macron has deepened military ties with the counterrevolutionary governments of Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and has shunned the US-led “maximum pressure” naval mission in the Persian Gulf, now helmed by a Royal Navy admiral in an attempt to persuade wary Europeans to join it. Instead, France leads its own European mission, aiming to secure freedom of navigation while maintaining the diplomatic outreach to Iran which distinguishes British and French aims from hawkish US policy.

Sharing Britain’s bases in Cyprus with France, along with our new naval facilities in Bahrain and Oman, would do much to bolster the effectiveness of British and French forces working together to secure our joint interests, and is a policy worth considering in our forthcoming strategic review. Deepened cooperation with French forces in the Sahel, though not a vital security interest for Britain as it is for France, would win us much goodwill from a powerful neighbour consistently disappointed by its German partner, and would establish greater interoperability between British and French assets which may prove useful in some future, yet unforeseen emergency.

This is, arguably, a Burkean foreign policy fit for a Conservative government: wary of military interventions to support revolutions whose bloody and chaotic end-states do not live up to the liberal aspirations of their cheerleaders, and reliant on European states acting in concert as sovereign powers to preserve their joint security in an increasingly unstable world.

Yet despite the hopes being placed by British post-liberals in Johnson’s government to forge a new path, it is the residual ideological liberalism of the Conservative government, expressed most vividly and disappointingly by the recent Huawei decision, which may present the greatest stumbling block to a Johnson-Macron strategic alliance.

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The assumption that China is a neutral or even liberalising player on a competitive global market, unwilling or unable to exert political power through its economic might, ought to have been discarded on the rubbish heap with the other fantasies of the age of high globalisation. Macron has expressed a firm stance against Huawei, observing that:

“The day that everyone is connected to 5G with critical information, will you be able to protect and secure your system? The day you have all your cyber-connections on a single system, will you be able to ring-fence it? That’s the only thing that matters to me. On the other issues I’m business-neutral. But this is a sovereign matter. This is what sovereignty is all about.”

Similarly, France is threatening to block the sale of British Steel to a Chinese state-run company on the basis that it threatens French sovereignty over infrastructure essential to its national rail network.

Analysing British politics, Macron witheringly observed that the UK:

“decided to abandon sovereignty for a Singapore-type model, I would call it. Personally, I’m not so sure that’s sustainable. I discussed this with Theresa May, and then with Boris Johnson, because I think it was the middle classes who reacted and voted for Brexit. I think the elites stand to gain from that type of model. I don’t believe that the middle classes do. I think the British middle classes need a better-functioning European model, in which they are better protected.”

It is an ironic truth then, that Macron, the soi-disant saviour of liberalism, is far more sceptical towards the logic of the unfettered market than any senior British Conservative, and far more passionate about national sovereignty than any free-trading Brexiteer.

His foreign policy has pushed him away from the twin liberal fantasies of a global market and post-historical harmony, in favour of a shrewdly realist and increasingly post-liberal desire to secure his nation’s place in the world as it is, and not as it ought to be. In observing this radical shift in French policy, a Johnson government toying with post-liberal thought has much to study and perhaps to engage with in balancing Britain’s global and national interests in pursuit of the country’s common good.­­­

Historic turning points are not uncommon – maybe every century or so something happens to change the fate of countries and even continents: wars, collapses of empires, economic crises. Think of the fall of the Roman Empire, the Muslim conquest of Constantinople, the Mughal invasion of India, the Russian revolution.  

But changes affecting the whole planet are much rarer and usually slower: the agricultural revolution, the spread of metal use, the Black Death, the Industrial Revolution, which, even after 250 years, is not quite complete.  

Changes such as these are slow processes that can rarely if ever be ascribed to individuals. What we might call global events are quite modern – short-term human actions that have a world-wide effect. Perhaps the first of these was the Seven Years’ War (1756-63), a barely remembered episode that Winston Churchill called “the true first world war”. 

In a sense, it is the only world war – the only global conflict involving all the great European powers that began outside Europe, was fought primarily for extra-European aims, and whose consequences were greatest beyond Europe. Playing a crucial role in that event was William Pitt: arguably the first Englishman to affect the history of the world.  

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The Seven Years’ War was, in part, another of those Central European dynastic conflicts that punctuated the Age of Enlightenment. So far, so familiar. But the conflict drew in France, as the ally of Austria, and Britain, as the ally of Prussia. This made the war global. 

The Glorious Revolution of 1688 had pitted Britain against a much larger and more powerful France. Overseas trade and the possession of colonies had become both the means and the end of this conflict: both countries needed to channel the profits of trade – in sugar, textiles, spices, tobacco, coffee, tea and slaves – into their European struggle. France and Britain were rivals in the Americas, Asia and Africa in what has been called the Second Hundred Years’ War.  

A perceptive French diplomat wrote: “The discovery of the New World has transformed the political system of Europe. Once, land forces made the destiny of states, but since a century ago Neptune’s trident has become the sceptre of the world.”

For this reason, the first clashes, well before war was declared in Europe, came in North America (where in 1754 a British colonial force commanded by young George Washington slaughtered a small French patrol) and on the seas (where the British navy seized 300 French merchant ships) – well before France and Britain came to blows in Europe.

Things then went disastrously for Britain. The naval base at Minorca was captured by the French. In Bengal, France’s ally the Nawab captured the British post at Calcutta (leading to the ‘Black Hole of Calcutta’ incident). French troops invaded New York and Pennsylvania. The army in Hanover commanded by George II’s son, the Duke of Cumberland, was forced to capitulate. Widespread food riots broke out at home. One British politician lamented that “we are undone at home, by our increasing debt and expenses; abroad by our ill-luck and incapacity. We are no longer a nation. I never saw so dreadful a prospect.”

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Enter William Pitt, who was appointed a secretary of state briefly in 1756, aged 48, and again, from June 1757 to October 1761. Pitt was an early example of a coldly professional populist politician – able, wrote a colleague, to “deny his own words with an unembarass’d countenance”.

An unstable maverick, often in poor health, he stood as a “Patriot”, purporting to represent the interests of the nation against the Hanoverian elite, and glorying in the sarcastic label “the Great Commoner”. His heedlessly destructive and implacable ambition made him a man whom it was sometimes safer to have inside than outside the tent. His power depended on swaying the House of Commons by bombastic, rambling but often brilliant oratory. 

When he took over a major part of the direction of the war, his popularity enabled him to persuade parliament to increase British involvement on the Continent, landing troops in France and reinforcing the bloody struggle in Germany, which ironically he and other Patriots had strenuously opposed as only serving the interest of the Hanoverian monarch. He persuaded parliament to borrow and spend unprecedented sums of money on the war, and this was crucial to victory.

Finally, he was able to communicate an indispensable sense of boldness and determination. While this has arguably been exaggerated, it certainly frightened the French, who ascribed Britain’s sudden run of successes to him alone. Their loathing was a back-handed compliment – as a French foreign ministry report put it:

His ambition is not wealth, for he despises it, and is incorruptible, but power. An extreme Republican in a moderate Monarchy, he wishes above all to be patriotic, or at least appear it, to be the favourite of the people. Mr Pitt, insolent to his sovereign, in France would end his days imprisoned in Mont Saint-Michel; in Russia, would have made a revolution, or had his tongue torn out and perished under the knout.

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By Robert Tombs

Whatever the role of luck, Pitt was in charge when the tide turned decisively, and Britain enjoyed in 1759 its ‘Year of Victories’: at Minden in Germany, in India, in North America with the capture of Quebec, and with the destruction of the French navy at Quiberon Bay. Pitt wanted to go further, and resigned when his colleagues drew back.

Nevertheless, the end of the war marked a decisive global shift. France had lost its position in North America and India – as it turned out, for good – and its primacy in Europe began to wane. The global balance of power was set for at least 150 years.  

What if things had gone the other way? A French Raj in India? The dominance of ‘New France’ in North America? In trading terms, France would have outstripped Britain. The Industrial Revolution might have been still-born. The French Revolution would probably never have happened.

France was well placed – better placed than Britain – to become the world’s first hegemonic power. French would have become the first global language. France might easily have become what General de Gaulle later hoped for – a country of 100 million people. But Pitt, that lonely unstable hypochondriac, had his moment, and he left his mark on the world for good and ill.  

Robert Tombs is co-author of That Sweet Enemy: The French and the British from the Sun King to the Present (2007)

Further reading

How the EU infantilises national politics

By Tim Parks

I, however, think he’s brilliant – not because I agree with him (I really, really don’t), but because he’s so open and upfront about the nature of the European project. Here, he sums it up in a tweet:

“The world of tomorrow will be dominated by empires like China, India, the US and Russia. The status quo isn’t enough. We need a strong, united Europe to protect our way of living.”

This is admirably clear. To date, most EU leaders have preferred to hide behind non-words like ‘coordination’ and ‘solidarity’. Verhofstadt, however, defines the European project by comparing it to existing and potential superstates.

Admittedly, he doesn’t quite say that the EU should become an empire itself, but rather that it should be “strong” enough and “united” enough to hold its own against states he does describe as empires.

In any case, one could argue that we’re well on the way to an imperial EU. It’s already a big multinational entity with a single currency (for the most part), a common trade policy, its own legislature and numerous federal institutions. And though the EU cannot be described as a sovereign state, it is the only entity that isn’t one to be permanently represented at the G7, and to be a member of the G20.

It’s a shame that the Brexit debate became bogged down in arguments over net and gross contributions to the EU budget; the minutiae of trade policy; and controversies over immigration. It’s not that these issues are unimportant – but more important than any of them is whether the United Kingdom ought to participate in the construction of a new European empire (or ‘superstate’ if you find the e-word too much to deal with).

Further reading

Europe's biggest test yet

By Matthew Goodwin

Despite the referendum, I don’t think we’ve ever had this debate – not out in the open. Neither Eurosceptics nor Europhiles have wanted to face the question head-on because it doesn’t suit the standard narratives.

On the Eurosceptic side, the tendency has been to present the EU as either an out-of-control bureaucracy or a vehicle for the machinations of rival nation-states (especially France and Germany). Eurosceptics do, of course, refer to the logical implications of “ever closer union,” but almost always in terms of the threat to UK sovereignty, as opposed to the creation of a new and much larger sovereign entity – their focus being what would be lost rather than what could, potentially, be gained.

Mainstream Europhiles have also avoided the issue – presenting the EU not as an empire in the making, but as a bulwark of a rules-based international order. In fact, they’d probably argue that the European project is all about challenging the very basis of imperialism: the idea that might is right. At its heart is an understanding that the powers of the Earth, whether big or small, should jointly abide by rules determined by principles of peace and justice, fairness and efficiency. And the EU has a special role to play in the implementation of this global vision, as the vanguard and exemplar of rules-based internationalism.

Writing for Prospect, Helen Thompson argues that European leaders are taking a more pessimistic view of the rest of the world these days:

“Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron may not agree on the future of the EU, but they are of one mind in understanding its origins. Both believe it was founded as part of a precious liberal, rules-based international order—that Europe must now rally to defend. In a joint press conference with Canada’s Liberal premier Justin Trudeau last year, Macron declared that ‘the rules-based international order is being challenged not by the usual suspects, but by its main architect and guarantor: the US.'”

They are right to be concerned. America’s Trumpian turn comes on top of Russia’s growing belligerence and the rapid extension of China’s power across Asia, Africa and, increasingly, Europe itself.

Further reading

Why Europe can't cope

By Helen Thompson

We should therefore not be surprised to see Europe adopting an increasingly defensive posture – even if most of its leaders aren’t yet following the logic of Mr Verhofstadt’s conclusion (though here is Angela Merkel talking his language, last week).

However, Thompson makes a compelling case that the rules-based international order isn’t breaking down – and that’s because it never existed in the first place.

She provides one example after another of America’s post-war hegemonic power – from the Suez crisis to the making and breaking of the Bretton Woods system. In the 21st century, the US continued to do as it pleased, breaking the ‘rules’ as necessary – the invasion of Iraq being a prime example.

In an odd parallel to Verhofstadt’s undisguised federalism, Donald Trump’s main innovation is to make the implicit explicit:

“Trump is different from his predecessors not because he rejects multilateralism or deploys sanctions, but because he feels no need to disguise the fact that US dominance rests on coercive power. When he pulled out of the Paris climate accord, he was merely acting as the US Senate had when it refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, even before Clinton had signed it. When he imposed steel and aluminium tariffs on the EU, Canada and Mexico, he repeated George W Bush’s actions in 2002 in erecting tariffs on steel imports, including from Europe.”

Masks are being dropped all over the place these days. Authoritarian leaders like Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Mohammed Bin Sultan, Recep Rayyip Erdogan, Jair Bolsonaro and Rodrigo Duterte are not even pretending to play by liberal rules.

Further reading

The surprising supporters of the strongman in Brazil

By David Adler

There are those within the EU who’d dearly love Europe to throw its weight around too. They are not afraid to do so within the club (evidenced by the crushing of Greece during the Eurozone crisis or the punishment of the British for trying to leave). Pressure is building for an EU capable of acting as a unified force against external antagonists too.

That, of course, would require a common foreign policy and a European Army sustained by a greatly expanded EU budget. Whether the EU is capable of such integration is another matter. The current situation in which the Germans profit from the single currency and common trade policy, while not having to pay for fiscal or defence integration is such an absurdly good deal that I don’t see why Berlin would give it up if they don’t have to.

If the EU does do more to assert itself against the likes of America and China, then, for the time being, it will be by wielding its undoubted economic strength.

Where does that leave Britain? The answer is in the same place as many other major economies around the world: nations that can’t or won’t be absorbed into the 21st century empires. Looking around the world, examples include Canada, Australia, India, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico and the emerging African giants like Nigeria. These are too far flung and diverse to form a superstate of their own – but they do have a shared interest in not allowing the biggest trading blocs to push the rest of the world around.

Britain should play its part in building a global alliance against economic imperialism – and, yes, I am aware of the historical irony.

Further reading

How the Eurozone could avert disaster

By Peter Franklin