One of my favorite lines from the Declaration of Independence never made it into the final text. They were Thomas Jefferson’s parting words to his fellow British subjects across the ocean: “We might have been a free and great people together.”4 But ultimately, when it mattered, they were. Britain’s eclipse by its transatlantic offspring, by a nation with the same language, same legal inheritance, and same commitment to liberty, is one of the least disruptive transfers of global dominance ever.
Think it’s likely to go that way next time ’round? By 2027 (according to Goldman Sachs) or 2016 (according to the IMF), the world’s leading economy will be a Communist dictatorship whose legal, political, and cultural traditions are as foreign to its predecessors as could be devised.5 Even more civilizationally startling, unlike the Americans, British, Dutch, and Italians before them, the pre-eminent economic power will be a country that doesn’t use the Roman alphabet.
They have our soul who have our bonds—and the world was more fortunate in who had London’s bonds than America is seventy years later.
Britain’s eclipse by its wayward son was a changing of the guard, not a razing of the palace. By contrast, the fall of America would mark the end of a two-century anglophone dominance of geopolitics, of trade, of the global currency (sterling, and then the dollar), and of a world whose order and prosperity most people think of as part of a broad universal march of progress but which, in fact, derive from a very particular cultural inheritance and may well not survive it.
According to Lawrence Summers, America and China exist in a financial “balance of terror”—or, in Cold War terms, on a trigger of Mutually Assured Destruction.6 You could have said the same for London and Washington in March of 1941, nine months before Pearl Harbor, back when Lend-Lease began. Without American money and materiel, Britain and the Commonwealth would have been defeated. On the other hand, if Britain and the Commonwealth had collapsed, German-Japanese world domination would not have proved terribly congenial to the United States, not least the Vichy regimes in Ottawa and the Caribbean. But, as the British learned, any balance shifts over time—and so does influence: by 1950, for Britannia’s lion cubs in Canada and Australia, getting a friendly ear in Washington mattered more than one in London.
The Sino-American “balance of terror” is already shifting, and fast.
By 2010, China was funding and building ports in Burma, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Pakistan.7 They, too, are Britannia’s lion cubs, part of London’s Indian Empire. Yet all four went from outposts of the British Raj to pit-stops on Chinese manufacturing’s globalization superhighway within a mere sixty years. Ascendant powers take advantage of declining ones: FDR and his successors used Lend-Lease and the wartime alliance to appropriate much of the geopolitical infrastructure built by Britain.
China, in turn, will do the same to the United States—initially for trade purposes, but eventually for much more. Here’s just a few things London didn’t have to worry about Washington doing: In recent years, Beijing has engaged in widespread intellectual-property theft and industrial espionage against the West;8 attempted multiple cyber-attacks on America’s military and commercial computer systems;9 blinded U.S. satellites with lasers;10 supplied arms to the Taliban;11 helped North Korea deliver missiles to Iran and Pakistan;12 assisted Teheran with its nuclear program;13 and actively cooperated in a growing worldwide nuclear black market.14
In response, American “realists” keep telling themselves: Never mind, economic liberalization will force China to democratize. Lather, rinse, repeat.
If there is any single event that marked the end of Britain as an imperial power of global reach, it’s the Suez Crisis of 1956. Egypt nationalized the Suez Canal and London intervened militarily, with the French and Israelis, to protect what it saw as a vital strategic interest, a critical supply line to and from the Asian and Pacific members of the Commonwealth.
In the biggest single disagreement between Britain and America since the Second World War, Washington opposed the invasion. We can argue another day about what prompted Nasser to seize the canal and whether the American reading of the situation helped lead to the late twentieth-century fetid “stability” of the Middle East and, among other things, 9/11.
But for now just concentrate on one single feature—what Eisenhower opted to do to the Brits once he’d decided to scuttle the Suez operation.
He ordered his Treasury Secretary to prepare to sell part of the U.S. Government’s Sterling Bond holdings (that is, the World War II debt).
