After America полностью

And then there’s the hyperpower. The transition from Pax Britannica to Pax Americana, from the old lion to its transatlantic progeny, was one of the smoothest transfers of power in history—and the practical, demonstrable reality of what Winston Churchill called the “English-speaking peoples,” a Britannic family with America as the prodigal son, but a son nevertheless and the greatest of all. In his sequel to Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Andrew Roberts writes: Just as we do not today differentiate between the Roman Republic and the imperial period of the Julio-Claudians when we think of the Roman Empire, so in the future no one will bother to make a distinction between the British Empire-led and the American Republic-led periods of English-speaking dominance between the late-eighteenth and the twenty-first centuries. It will be recognized that in the majestic sweep of history they had so much in common—and enough that separated them from everyone else—that they ought to be regarded as a single historical entity, which only scholars and pedants will try to describe separately.

As to what “separated them from everyone else,” there has always been a distinction between the “English-speaking peoples” and the rest of “the West,” and at hinge moments in human history that distinction has proved critical. Continental Europe has given us plenty of nice paintings and mel-lifluous symphonies, French wine and Italian actresses, but, for all our fetishization of multiculturalism, you can’t help noticing that when it comes to the notion of a political West—with a sustained commitment to individual liberty and representative government—the historical record looks a lot more unicultural and indeed (given that most of these liberal democracies other than America share the same head of state) uniregal.

Many Continental nations have constitutions dating all the way back to the disco era: the United States Constitution is not only older than the French, German, Italian, and Spanish constitutions, it’s older than all of them put together. The entire political class of Portugal, Spain, and Greece spent their childhoods living under dictatorships. So did Jacques Chirac and Angela Merkel. We forget how rare in this world is sustained peaceful constitutional evolution, and rarer still outside the Anglosphere. “The English-speaking peoples did not invent the ideas that nonetheless made them great,” writes Roberts. “The Romans invented the concept of Law, the Greeks one-freeman-one-vote democracy, the Dutch modern capitalism….” But it is the English world that has managed to make these blessings seemingly permanent features of the landscape. Take England out of the picture and there are not just a lot of holes in the map—but the absence of most of the modern world.

As always, Britain’s decline started with the money. When Europe fell into war in 1939, FDR was willing to help London fight it, but he was determined to exact a price: not just a bit of quid pro quo (American base rights in British colonies) but a serious financial and geopolitical squeeze. The U.S. “Lend-Lease” program to the United Kingdom ended in September 1946.

London paid off the final installment of its debt in December 2006, and the Economic Secretary, Ed Balls, sent with the check a faintly surreal accompanying note thanking Washington for its support during a war fast fading from living memory.² Look at how Britain shrank during those six decades.

In 1942, Winston Churchill told the House of Commons, “I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.”³ But in the end he had no choice. The money drained to Washington, and power and influence followed.

In terms of global order, the Anglo-American transition was so adroitly managed that most of us aren’t quite sure when it took place.

Some scholars like to pinpoint it to the middle of 1943. One month, the British had more men under arms than the Americans. The next, the Americans had more men under arms than the British. The baton of global leadership had been passed. And, if it didn’t seem that way at the time, that’s because it was as near a seamless transition as could be devised—although it was hardly “devised” at all, at least not by London.

Yet we live with the benefits of that transition to this day: to take a minor but not inconsequential example, one of the critical links in the post-9/11 Afghan campaign was the British Indian Ocean Territory. As its name would suggest, that’s a British dependency, but it has a U.S. military base—just one of many pinpricks on the map where the Royal Navy’s Pax Britannica evolved into Washington’s Pax Americana with nary a thought: from U.S. naval bases in Bermuda to the Anzus alliance Down Under to Canadian officers at Norad in Cheyenne Mountain, London’s military ties with its empire were assumed by the United States, and life and global order went on.