Category: History

Arts & Letters Daily links today to a fascinating review of Andrew Roberts’ A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900 — continuing in the spirit of Churchill’s famous work.

The review is a reiteration of what those few voices in the wilderness have been saying for years — that the Britain & America have been the world’s greatest forces for good in the last couple of centures:

Roberts argues that the successful reintroduction of West Germany, Austria, Italy, and Japan into the democratic world was one of the great contributions of the English-speaking peoples to twentieth- century civilization. They were not to know whether ex-Nazis might stage an insurgency campaign lasting years. The example of Japan showed that liberalism and democracy could be successfully introduced even to authoritarian, theocratic societies with no Western political tradition.

Roberts argues that in trying to do the same in the Middle East today, the United States is acting out its traditional cultural imperatives. The desire to liberate from tyranny runs deep in the English-speaking peoples’ psyche. Just two hundred years ago, they were the first to pursue the unusual goal of first impeding and then abolishing slavery by force of arms. They are still carrying out the task, as the women of Afghanistan and the majority of Iraqis can attest.

That is not to say that Britain or America are or have ever been perfect:

The list of crimes, follies, and misdemeanors of the English-speaking peoples also includes: underestimating the Turks at Gallipoli and the Japanese before Pearl Harbor; failing to dismember Germany in 1919; not strangling Bolshevism in its cradle in 1918–1920; treating France rather than Germany as Britain’s more likely enemy in the 1920s; not opposing Hitler’s remilitarization of the Rhineland in 1936; allowing too few visas to Jews wanting to escape Nazi Germany; not doing enough to publicize the Holocaust once the truth was known; transporting non-Soviet citizens to Stalin after Yalta; the U.S. State Department fervently supporting closer European integration after World War II; allowing Nasser to nationalize the Suez Canal; encouraging the Hungarians to rise in 1956; Britain misleading Australia and New Zealand about the implications of its joining Europe; waiting for a century after Lincoln’s Emancipation Address genuinely to emancipate black Americans; fighting only for a stalemate in Vietnam; Jimmy Carter pursuing détente long after its initial purposes were exhausted; appeasing the Serbs too long after the collapse of Yugoslavia; failing to overthrow Saddam Hussein after the first Gulf War; encouraging the Kurds and Shias to rise against him while allowing Saddam to keep helicopter gun ships; treating the al Qaeda assaults of the 1990s as terrorist-criminal acts rather than acts of asymmetric warfare; relying too much on intelligence-led WMD arguments to justify the Iraq war; and not establishing a provisional Iraqi government immediately after Saddam’s fall.

This amounts to “a long and at times shameful catalogue of myopic and failed statesmanship,” Roberts admits, “but other powers would have done worse, and a century is a very long time in politics.”

What makes me screamingly frustrated is those fair-weather friends, who having voted overwhelmingly in 2002 to invade Iraq, now cry sour grapes and heap criticism on the executive for the crime of imperfectly implementing the lofty ideals that motivated the vote in the first place.

The supreme irony is that it is only because of the traditional freedoms of the Anglosphere that such criticism is possible:

World hegemony, however, has many costs. Like the Romans, the English-speaking peoples would be envied and hated by others. They would sometimes find, Roberts argues, that the greatest danger to their continued imperium came not from their declared enemies without, but from vociferous critics within. One of the constants of their common culture’s freedom of expression has been its propensity to harbor a degree of internal censure that among many other peoples would probably prove fatal.

As early as 1901, British Prime Minister Lord Salisbury was complaining: “England is, I believe, the only country in which, during a great war, eminent men write and speak as if they belonged to the enemy.” He wrote this about the critics of his policy on the Boer War, an encounter which Roberts demonstrates has ever since been perversely and unfairly blamed entirely on Britain. Winston Churchill was later to remark in a similar vein: “I think I can save the British Empire from anything—except the British.”

Sounds like a great book. It’s too bad my birthday just went by :-)