Repeating British Mistakes

March 1, 1995 Topic: Great Powers Tags: MuslimSuperpowerYugoslavia

Repeating British Mistakes

Mini Teaser: If the United States makes the same mistake that the British did, not only will U.S. interests be set back, but a great opportunity to determine the whole character of the post-Cold War era will be lost.

by Author(s): Jonathan Clarke

"Looking from abroad...it was obvious that Britain had, or shortly
would have, no Imperial or quasi-Imperial role left, and very reduced
international authority as an independent nation without it. Today
these statements seem pretty obvious, but they have taken a long time
to penetrate.The second reason for my conviction that our future lay
in Europe was my appreciation--and again it seems very obvious today
but was a great deal less so even a short time ago--that militarily
as well as economically we were pretty small."

Overemphasizing Military Prowess

The central mistake for Britain--a mistake that should resonate for
the United States today and for the Republicans in particular, as
advocates of high defense spending--was that those in charge of its
affairs overemphasized military power as the defining measure of
national greatness. Symptomatically, this was the one area in which
Britain could claim some successes for its early European policy,
notably the founding of the Western European Union which became the
vehicle for Germany's integration into NATO. Britain has consistently
played a dominant role in NATO, providing intellectual leadership and
taking many more senior positions than were her proportional due; and
since 1989 the British have been among the most energetic and
imaginative advocates of NATO's preservation.

Margaret Thatcher personified this line of thinking. She was always
more comfortable in NATO rather than European Commission settings.
Michael Butler, who served as Britain's ambassador to the European
Commission under Thatcher, has recorded that she "showed a deep
seated prejudice against the European Community" which, according to
her biographer Hugo Young, she regarded as a branch of NATO. In her
autobiography she writes:

"The significance of the Falklands War was enormous, both for
Britain's self-confidence and for our standing in the world. Since
the Suez fiasco in 1956, British foreign policy had been one long
retreat...Victory in the Falklands changed that. Everywhere I went
after the war, Britain's name meant something more than it had."

Emphasis on military accomplishments as the chief determinant of
national identity brings with it an attachment to a crude form of
sovereignty that severely complicates any relationship with a
supranational authority. In 1951, Attlee said, "We are willing to
play an active part in all forms of European cooperation on an
inter-governmental basis. We cannot surrender our freedom of decision
and action to any supranational body." Later, Macmillan said that
Britain would never allow a European body to "close British steel
mills or coal pits." His argument echoes today in the American debate
over the World Trade Organization.

Unfortunately, however, military prowess and a global reach have
proved to be less central to national success than most Britons in
the early postwar years expected. The British have placed unusual
emphasis on military expenditure and adventures--in 1950 Britain was
spending more per capita on defense than the United States and as
late as 1964 still maintained more forces on the ground in Southeast
Asia than any other outside power. Even today Britain spends a larger
percentage of its GDP on defense than any other European member of
NATO other than Turkey and Greece. Experience has shown that these
policies have not proved to be a good investment in terms of British
domestic welfare.

This is perhaps why, in his comparison of de Gaulle's and Thatcher's
contributions to their countries, Desmond Dinan comes down hard on
the latter:

"De Gaulle looked to the future; Thatcher harked to the past. De
Gaulle espoused a 'European Europe;' Thatcher embraced U.S. hegemony.
De Gaulle battled against bipolarity; Thatcher was a creature of the
Cold War."

An Island off Eurasia

"Creature of the Cold War:" this returns the story to the United
States. In an age when, for the first time in nearly half a century,
we are having to reconsider foreign policy's first principles, does
American thinking remain captive to Cold War norms in the way that
British attitudes remained so long in thrall to imperial habits? Does
the British difficulty in coming to terms with its reduced
post-imperial role hold any lessons for the United States as it
struggles to define its place in the world?

The proposition that the United States may have to work out its
destiny against a background of decline--let alone one as sharp and
palpable as that of Britain--may not at first sight seem persuasive.
After all, events seem to be moving ever more decisively in favor of
the United States. The Soviet Union has disappeared. A new bout of
political and economic sclerosis grips Europe. Japan remains mired in
domestic recession, no matter how much its exporters sell.
Commentators like Harvard professor Joseph Nye (a recent head of the
National Intelligence Council) who have labored to "debunk the myth
of decline" feel themselves triumphantly vindicated.

The same view has gained ground overseas. In France, Alfredo
Valladão's best-selling book Le XXIème Siècle Sera Américain (The
Twenty-First Century Will Be American) has forecast that the United
States will dominate the next century through its control of
international corporate and media networks. In September 1994, the
Swiss-based World Economic Forum anointed the United States as the
world's most competitive nation.

Unfortunately, there lurks in these apparent advantages a trap
similar to the one into which the British fell. Surveying the
smoldering ruins of defeated or occupied Europe and with the British
armed forces and empire still intact, Britain's postwar leaders were
blinded to the need for a fundamental reordering of British
priorities. They misread British financial woes as merely temporary.
As the United States savors its Cold War triumph, it seems now
embarked on a parallel course to that already charted by Britain.
Basking in the warm glow of apparently unmatchable military
superiority, American leaders are evading the task of foreign policy
reassessment in favor of continuing on a business-as-usual course
that will keep the United States, in the words of Assistant Secretary
of State Strobe Talbott, "fully engaged abroad."

Since 1989, the "sole remaining superpower" or "unipolar" notion has
established itself in the United States as the short-hand description
of the nation's place in the world. According to this notion,
American ascendancy--especially in the military sphere--is so marked
that the United States can have its way effortlessly with the rest of
the world. One commentator has even spoken in terms of an American
master and world donkey, with the former applying occasional sharp
raps on the latter's back. In the October 10, 1994 issue of The New
Republic, Owen Harries, the editor of this journal, set out the
reasons why this notion may not be the surest foundation on which to
build today's American foreign policy purposes.

The superpower concept has resulted in a continuing almost reflex
embrace of American global activism. In a speech to the Council on
Foreign Relations in September 1994, National Security Adviser
Anthony Lake declared a Cold War-esque jihad on "extreme nationalists
and tribalists, terrorists, organized criminals, coup plotters, rogue
states, and all those who would return newly free societies to the
intolerant ways of the past." General Colin Powell has said that "the
vital interests of mankind are the vital interests of America, no
matter how far from our shores." Speaking of aid to Russia, former
Secretary of State James A. Baker said that "only America can do it."

Whose Interests?

In 1952, the British historian Denis Brogan wrote about the "illusion
of omnipotence," saying that "this is the illusion that any situation
which distresses or endangers the United States can only exist
because some Americans have been fools or knaves." American
activities over the past two years show that this illusion is alive
and kicking today, at a time when the American slice of the world's
GDP is roughly half what it was when Brogan wrote. And more than
rhetoric is involved. During this time forces have been deployed to
Somalia, Macedonia, Haiti, the skies over Iraq and Bosnia, the waters
off Cuba. An American military presence on the Golan Heights is
envisaged. A near-war situation on the Korean peninsula has expanded
the American commitment there, and there have been war games in
Poland. The rules of selectivity (widely invoked though they may be)
hardly seem to apply.

But do these activities reflect a rational calculation of the core
interests of the American people in whose name they are conducted? Or
do they--in the manner of British over-ambition--spread the United
States so thinly and needlessly across the globe that these same
interests go unheeded? Fixing the correct place in the global scheme
of things for an enormous country like the United States is a
difficult enterprise. So is the determination of a rational scale of
priorities among so many competing special interests. As we saw over
Haiti, the range of opinions is vast--from those who think remaking
Haitian democracy is well within the capabilities of the United
States to those who assert that this task lies beyond American power.

In the days when systems analysis enjoyed a vogue in the study of
international relations, researchers developed a pseudo-scientific
approach to rank nations: they set up multiple variable equations
involving such factors as population, size, and popular will power.
By assigning numerical quantities to these factors, they were able to
determine a nation's precise rank in the international pecking order.
Vietnam exposed the limitations of this approach as a useful
instrument for operational deployment. As in tennis, top seeds could
still be felled by journeymen players having a good day.

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