God and Gold

Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World

Walter Russell Mead

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781782396000
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

For four hundred years, Britain, America and their allies have dominated the world both militarily and economically. They have won the wars - the hot wars, the cold wars and the trade wars - time and again; and yet the battle for hearts and minds has proved far harder to win. In God and Gold, Walter Russell Mead examines why this has been the case and what the overwhelming ascendancy and concentration of power in the hands of 'les Anglo-Saxons' has meant for the direction of world history. In so doing, he sheds scintillating new light on the current political, economic and cultural climate, and suggests where we might be heading from here.

Contents

Preface to the UK edition

Introduction

Part One The Walrus and the Carpenter

One: With God on Our Side

Two: On the Beach

Three: How They Hate Us

Part Two The Dread and Envy of Them All

Four: The Protocols of the Elders of Greenwich

Five: French Toast

Six: The World Was Their Oyster

Seven: The Sinews of Power

Eight: The Playing Fields of Eton

Nine: Goldilocks and the West

Part Three Anglo-Saxon Attitudes

Ten: The Wasps and the Bees

Eleven: The Vicar and the Dynamo

Twelve: Doxy v. Doxy

Thirteen: The White Queen

Fourteen: Called to the Bar

Fifteen: The Gyroscope and the Pyramid

Part Four What Hath God Wrought?

Sixteen: The Meaning of History

Seventeen: War on History

Eighteen: The Golden Meme

Nineteen: Whig Babylon

Part Five The Lessons of History

Twenty: The Future of Sea Power

Twenty-one: Dancing with Ghosts

Twenty-two: The Diplomacy of Civilizations

Twenty-three: The Meaning of It All

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

Preface to the UK Edition

There are three leading points of view about the “special relationship” between the United States and Great Britain. They are all wrong.

The first view holds that maintaining the special relationship with the United States requires Britain to support the United States no matter what—and the special relationship is Britain’s best chance to influence world events and exercise more influence than a country with 1% of the world’s population and about 3% of its GDP might reasonably hope to do. From this perspective, Britain should cling as tightly as possible to America’s skirts.

A second holds that the special relationship is a bewitching illusion causing feckless British politicians to delude themselves into thinking that robotic conformity with American policy is somehow in Britain’s best interest. In reality, this second view holds, the Americans will not pay a fair price for Britain’s support and, far from enhancing Britain’s clout, the perception that London is Uncle Sam’s lap dog actually reduces Britain’s international prestige. Those who take this second view usually propose a closer relationship with Europe as Britain’s best alternative.

The third, more American view reflects a comment the former American Secretary of State Dean Acheson made about Britain in 1962. Britain, said Acheson, has lost an empire, but not yet found a role. Like many American observers, Acheson saw the UK trapped between two unsatisfactory options. Staying close to the United States brought Britain little respect or consideration from the Americans, but British efforts to place itself at the heart of EU affairs foundered on the close and exclusive relationship between Germany and France. The American aircraft carrier did not care much whether the British man o’ war came wallowing in its mighty wake; the European bicycle did not need a third wheel. From this perspective, it hardly matters what Britain does; it is fated to oscillate unhappily between an uncaring America and an unwelcoming Europe.

All these views have something to recommend them. Britain probably does enjoy more attention globally because of its close relationship with the United States. It was, however, not easy for Tony Blair to describe exactly what concessions he extracted from George W. Bush in exchange for Britain’s unflinching support for the invasion of Iraq. And looking at the twists and turns of British foreign policy for the last fifty years, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that neither Europe nor the United States is as thrilled by the prospect of British support as British prime ministers might wish.

Where these three views go wrong is in the common, underlying assumptions they make about the special relationship between the two countries and about the sources of British power in the contemporary world.

To begin with, the special relationship is not a voluntary choice like a friendship between two people with similar tastes; it resembles more the relationship between cousins who work in a family firm. We can be as annoyed with each other as we like, and even temporarily estranged, but the family tie is still there. We may have different views about how the family company should be managed, and we are both capable of trying to extract the maximum advantage in a quiet but sometimes sharp competition with each other, but the prosperity and security of both cousins remains tied to the health of the firm. We may both have interests and relationships outside the family and firm, and we may each belong to clubs from which the other is excluded, but the commonalities in our backgrounds, our interests, and our priorities have a way of making themselves felt—and the family resemblance is so strong that even our most casual acquaintances can see that we are related.

The special relationship is less a result of policy choices made by either the British or the Americans than it is the cause of the similar choices the two countries so frequently make. America and Britain do not always see things the same way, and even when they agree on what needs to be done they often disagree quite bitterly over how to do it. Yet over time, and taking the world as a whole, the chief “Anglo-Saxon powers”, as their rivals often describe them, tend to reach similar if not identical conclusions about what needs to be done.

Over the 230 years since American independence, the special relationship has persisted through bilateral crises, withering hostility, and a mutual antagonism that at various times made war between the two English-speaking countries look more probable than not. Often, the rhetoric about the special relationship has been most lyrical when the underlying competition has been sharpest. Franklin Roosevelt was the most Anglophobic American president of the twentieth century, and despite the resistance of British negotiators he managed, as John Maynard Keynes put it, to “pick out the eyes of the British Empire” during World War II. Yet seldom has the rhetoric of Anglo-American solidarity been more loudly proclaimed and enthusiastically hailed than in the public remarks of both Churchill and Roosevelt during the war.

Tony Blair was not the first Anglo-American leader to discover that the special relationship can be a millstone around the neck rather than an anchor in stormy seas. American presidents such as James Monroe and William McKinley were embarrassed rather than pleased by the way that American initiatives like the Monroe Doctrine and the Open Door in China reflected and supplemented British policy at the time. One American president, Grover Cleveland, lost his 1888 bid for re-election after the publication of an artless letter written by a British diplomat praising Cleveland’s pro-British stance. The British prime minister at the time was the Marquess of Salisbury; his strong stance against Irish Home Rule made Irish-Americans even more Anglophobic than usual and Irish opposition cost Cleveland the election.

In those days, it was American presidents who worried about being poodles of Britain. In any case, the special relationship survived the Marquess of Salisbury; it will also survive George W. Bush.

The special relationship is based largely on the family firm, and as it happens the family business is spectacularly successful and influential. For roughly three centuries now the English-speaking peoples have been more or less continuously organizing, managing, expanding, and defending a global system of power, finance, culture, and trade. The British branch of the family held the majority of shares and furnished the firm’s leadership up through World War II; since then, the American branch has taken the lead, but the firm, though periodically updating and revising its methods and objectives, still bears the imprint of the British leaders who built it. For better or worse, the family business is the dominant force in international life today, and looks set to remain the foundation of world order for some time to come.

The family business is not merely the basis of the special relationship between the cousins; it is also the source of Britain’s enduring and even growing power and influence in the world. Britain does not just have a special relationship with the United States; it has a special relationship with the international capitalist order, an order largely built by Britain and now largely managed by the United States. The world system today as managed by the United States preserves most of the chief features of the British system that existed before World War II: a liberal, maritime international order that promotes the free flow of capital and goods and the development of liberal economic and political institutions and values. However much the British may object to particular American policies and priorities, the overall direction in which the Americans seek to lead the world is the direction in which most if not all Britons more or less hope it will go. Both British and American leaders can and do make mistakes about how best to develop and defend this world system, but the health of that system has been the chief concern of British foreign policy since the eighteenth century, and this is unlikely to change.

The close similarity between the British and American world orders does not just influence both Britain and the United States toward international policies that are usually broadly compatible; it also gives Britain a unique and special role in the world order. This is most clearly seen in the close and beneficial relations that exist between London and New York, the twin financial centers of the world. The financial genius of Great Britain has been one of the great driving forces that created the world we live in; Americans share that genius and, like the British, seek to make the world a safer and more profitable place in which increasingly sophisticated financial markets can operate on a progressively greater and more global scale.

When Acheson made his nasty crack about Britain’s fallen empire and missing role, it was at a time when Great Britain had, temporarily, lost sight of the sources of its own prosperity and power. The crash of the international system during the Great Depression and World War II, combined with the forced liquidation of Britain’s overseas investments during and after the War, left the world less hospitable to British enterprise—and left British investors ...