End of Empire

Empires never achieve statis: they are either advancing or in retreat. This has been the case ever since Alexander the Great sat down on the banks of the Indus river and wept because there were no more worlds for him to conquer. Of course the Macedonian never did any such thing. The origin of this story is probably a comment by Plutarch on the Atomistic multiverse: "Alexander wept when he heard Anaxarchus discourse about an infinite number of worlds, and when his friends inquired what ailed him, 'Is it not worthy of tears,' he said, 'that, when the number of worlds is infinite, we have not yet become lords of a single one?'". The modern variant seems to arrive in William Congreve's Way of the World of 1700: "Nothing remains when that day comes, but to sit down and weep like Alexander, when he wanted other worlds to conquer". In other words, a lament at how much had yet to be achieved becomes a cry of despair at completion. Congreve's play appears at a time when the British Empire was still in its infancy, just before the War of the Spanish Succession, whose spoils included Gibraltar and an expansion of the slave trade. If there was a contemporary geopolitical gloss, it was in the emulation of Alexander's ambition.

The idea of "grow or die" would remain central to the ideology of empire throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By 1914, following the final scramble for Africa and the first stirrings of non-white colonial independence movements (the ANC was founded in 1912), the evident limits of British rule were already producing a pessimism that sought parallels with the decline of ancient empires, such as Rudyard Kipling's poem Recessional of 1897, with its famous lines: "Far-called, our navies melt away; On dune and headland sinks the fire: Lo, all our pomp of yesterday Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!". Perhaps more pertinently, in his 1906 fantasy Puck of Pook's Hill Kipling imagined the defenders of Hadrian's Wall in the late 4th century just before the legions left Britannia for good. For Edwardians, the Roman Empire was the obvious historical antecedent to the British Empire, both in its self-appointed civilising role and its defence against the encroaching barbarians, though the latter were as much to be found in the metropole among the industrial working class as beyond the limites. 

Despite the colonial gains arising from the First World War, the mood in Britain continued to be sombre and elegiac, when not overtly declinist. The narrative of empire's inevitable decay due to the moral laxity and self-indulgence of the people goes back to early Christian propaganda, but it also has a political resonance in the twentieth century with the arrival of universal suffrage, socialist parties and the welfare state. This continued beyond decolonisation. It has been amusing this week to see Philip Larkin's reactionary 1969 poem Homage to a Government being given an airing in the context of our exit from Kabul. That most British troops had already been withdrawn from Afghanistan by 2014, after a complete failure to "keep order" in Helmand province, doesn't invalidate the parallel because this is very much about the mood. But whereas the form of the classical elegy and the subject of imperial decline could inspire notable poems in the twentieth century, such as Auden's The Fall of Rome and Cavafy's Waiting for the Barbarians, Larkin's piece is a resentful and spiteful diatribe that reads more like a letter to the Daily Telegraph.

As last week's Commons "debate" on Afghanistan proved in its emotional posturing (a handful of mainly leftwing MPs excepted), there is clearly an appetite for expressions of regret, but less over the follies of empire than for its supposedly ignoble retreat. Behind this lies the assumption that the state still has a higher purpose, a raison d'etat, that should not be constrained by democracy. Tony Blair came close to making this explicit in his latest widely-reported and intemperate intervention. After a swipe at what he termed the "imbecilic" phrase of "the forever wars", he explained the withdrawal from Afghanistan in terms of a lack of political determination to reject the less heroic life that Larkin also bemoaned: "We did it because our politics seemed to demand it. And that’s the worry of our allies and the source of rejoicing in those who wish us ill." This is such a perfect example of the form, with its hint of a stab in the back, that you could imagine it being written in Latin. Beyond his demonisation of "Radical Islam", what appears to concern the former Prime Minister most is the "risk of relegation to the second division of global powers", and that clearly goes for many current MPs on both sides of the house. The UK has actually been in the second division since Suez in 1956, which was really what Larkin was complaining about.

The problem with this British frame of reference is that it leads to a misunderstanding of American empire. Despite mimicing the UK's imperial expansion in the 1898 Spanish-American War, the US quickly decided that the better model for its own aspirations to global dominance was not Britain's conquest of India but its economic domination of South America in the nineteenth century: dependency through free trade and direct investment, the cultural hegemonising of the middle and upper classes (i.e. anglophilia), and covert interference to ensure a congenial political environment. This led to a century of American military incursions in support of economic interests, the cultural success of Hollywood, and the routine promotion of coups. The challenge of communism in the Soviet Union and China would trigger major wars, notably in Korea and Vietnam, but far from producing a score-draw in the one and a defeat in the other, what they actually enabled was the wider global hegemony of what would eventually become known as the Washington Consensus. Today, the US military has about 750 bases in 80 countries and its defence expenditure dwarfs that of everyone else. The idea that it is in retreat generally is absurd.

America's is an informal empire but no less powerful for that. What Afghanistan has proved is that the US is ultimately pragmatic about maintaining its imperial reach and influence, as it was in Vietnam, and as indeed were the Romans (Hadrian's Wall was actually a line of withdrawal from Scotland). This includes not only strategic incursions and retreats but also selective blindness to the behaviour of allies (e.g. Israel and Saudi Arabia) and a willingness to make examples of the weak, from Iraq to Sudan. For all the talk of a Taliban victory, the story of Afghanistan is essentially a two decades-long punishment beating. The retreat from Kabul may be difficult for those who associate blood with soil to understand, but that simply shows the persistence of the older imperial paradigm in which the loss of any territory is shameful, which is why the UK has been most vocal in its dismay at President Biden's decision (which, lets not forget, is impeccably bipartisan in following the deal negotiated by the Trump administration), even to the point of voicing unusually direct criticism and questioning whether the "special relationship" exists any more. 

In reality, the US is merely making the nature of the relationship explicit. When Obama said that the UK would be "at the back of the queue" for a trade deal if it left the European Union, this was interpreted by many as a partisan point rather than a simple statement of American interests. Even liberal commentators who were sympathetic to Obama have struggled to explain Biden's attitude towards the UK in anything other than terms of decline (a "nose-dive in relations"). Some conservatives have even characterised the withdrawal as evidence of isolationism and thus an improbable victory for leftwing anti-Americanism. The reality is that at both the political and military levels the US has a generally low opinion of the UK and is not minded to consult it except for the sake of politeness. There is no special relationship. It can usually rely on the UK to be the first ally to volunteer for any coalition of the willing (Wilson's demurral over Vietnam was very much the exception to the rule), but this merely reflects the British obsession with being primus inter pares among the auxiliaries of empire. It's an asymmetric infatuation that will inevitably weaken with the evaporation of the UK's influence in Europe.

If the retreat from Afghanistan symbolises anything it is not the weakening of America's geopolitical resolve, or a turning-in on itself to focus on domestic repairs, but another step towards the dissolution of the remnants of the British Empire. For all the posturing in the press and at Westminster, if push came to shove the UK would probably lack the resolve, not to mention the military capability, to mount another Falklands campaign (which in reality was "a damn close run thing"). In recent years there has been a renewed focus on the dismantling of the United Kingdom, with the possibility of Scottish independence and Irish unification, but this remains a more distant prospect than the loss of the British Overseas Territories, such as Gibraltar, the various Caribbean tax havens and the sovereign bases in Cyprus. This wouldn't necessarily be the result of a hostile takeover by another power. It might simply be the result of a change in the economic and regulatory environment prompting formal independence. Though it was the US that did the heavy lifting and suffered the greater casualties in Afghanistan, it is the British empire that lies in the graveyard.