The Empire in Twilight

By Kevin D. Williamson

Tuesday, December 07, 2021

 

We all know how this story ends: After years of intense conflict and convulsion, the empire surrenders.

 

Eighty years ago, President Franklin Roosevelt made a speech to Congress: “Yesterday, December 7th, 1941 — a date which will live in infamy — the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.” The war that followed would transform the United States, the British Empire, Europe, Japan, and most of the rest of the world.

 

In the end, the Empire of Japan surrendered. But so did the British Empire, as a practical matter. The moral and economic exhaustion of the British Empire would transform much of the world in the immediate post-war era, with the independence of India and Pakistan, the British exit from Palestine and the establishment of Israel, the retreat from Malaya, the independence of Ghana. Britain, impotent in the face of the Soviet threat, conceded world leadership to the United States, becoming an informal client state of the new superpower.

 

Under Roosevelt, the United States was itching for a fight. The nation was young — median age: 29 — and it had the mad self-sureness of youth. In spite of the setback of the Great Depression, Roosevelt was confident in his country’s capacities. (Roosevelt never lacked confidence; many of his policies made the Depression deeper and longer than it needed to be, but he remained certain that a man of his breeding and training could solve any problem, given sufficiently autocratic powers.) The credibility of American progressivism is founded in the two world wars, during which the two most aggressively étatiste presidents (Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt) each oversaw a national mobilization of economic resources in a Washington-led crusade that effectively put the whole of American life under political discipline — the state of war is the model of progressive government.

 

Whereas World War I was rightly experienced as a catastrophe by the victors as well as the vanquished, World War II was, for the United States, an unqualified success on almost every front: military, economic, diplomatic, moral. It was the experience of World War II that elevated science and technical expertise to their current Olympian status and convinced a generation of Americans — not all of them left-wing welfare statists — that the American state could, with the right leadership and sufficient resources, do practically anything it chose. (The waste and corruption of the war-mobilization effort were conveniently forgotten.) Less dramatic displays of American power have partly resuscitated that confidence at times since, notably at the fall of the Berlin Wall and in Operation Desert Storm, which helped to unleash the (delusional) optimism of the 1990s.

 

But that era is over. The attacks of 9/11, the frustrating failures in Afghanistan and Iraq, the internal disuniting of these United States — these are the result of moral incapacity, not military or economic incapacity. We had more than enough bombs and troops to do whatever we liked in Afghanistan for as long as we liked. As with Iraq, we did not achieve our ultimate end there because we did not understand what it was.

 

More consequently, we are failing to achieve our objectives vis-à-vis China for the same reason: because we do not know, or cannot agree about, what those objectives actually are. Our “diplomatic boycott” of the upcoming Beijing Olympics is comically typical of American geopolitical action in our time: We are depriving Beijing of the presence of diplomats who had not been expected to attend the Olympics in the first place. Of course, we will still send our athletes: We charge the People’s Republic of China with genocide, but we would never dream of keeping our figure skaters and our luge team at home, because we are sentimental about young athletes. “But they’ve put in so much hard work!” everybody says. Not as much hard work as the Uyghur slaves.

 

The United States must figure out how to craft for itself a new kind of diplomacy, one that reflects not the country it was in the post-war era but the country it actually is: rich, aging, eager for comfort and luxury, disinclined to fight. Americans, being prideful, naturally bristle at anything that sounds like a tribute payment or protection money, but if you have a great deal of money and no willingness to fight, you had better be honest with yourself about what that means. If we are still a superpower at all, our superpower is money.

 

An empire is different from a nation in that the supreme imperial power presides over peoples who are fundamentally dissimilar, peoples who are connected not by love or shared aspirations but by commercial and political relationships. Empires are unstable because the corporate aspirations of their constituent peoples are not only different from one another but incompatible with one another — the people in New Delhi and Calcutta could be part of the British Empire or part of the Republic of India, not both. The United States is not an ordinary empire in the sense of the old British Raj, but Washington is the home of an overarching state comprising two great peoples, each of which increasingly sees itself as having interests that are — at best — separate from the other, whose interests, mode of life, and ambitions are at least alien, if not hostile.

 

These two peoples, being mutually antagonistic at home, find it increasingly difficult to pursue a shared agenda abroad, hence such risible half-measures as the “diplomatic boycott” of the Beijing Olympics. The United States may stagnate, but the country is not going anywhere — not for a while, anyway: We have a great deal of wealth and power and (here I am quoting Jonah Goldberg quoting the great philosopher) “a long tradition of existence.” You might be surprised how far that can carry a state.

 

But we all know how this story ends: After years of intense conflict and convulsion, the empire surrenders.