How Britain Became America’s Stooge
As Britain lost the ability to maintain its empire, the US took on the role of managing the global order. In Someone Else’s Empire, Tom Stevenson shows how American dominance, aided and abetted by Britain, has caused untold suffering across the world.
British prime minister Tony Blair holds a bilateral meeting with US president George W. Bush on June 7, 2007 in Heiligendamm, Germany. (Peter Macdiarmid / Getty Images)
Review of Someone Else’s Empire: British Illusions and American Hegemony by Tom Stevenson (Verso, 2023).
Minor nations are not in need of grand strategies — those are the prerogative of major powers. It is no surprise, then, that as the United Kingdom ceded its status as a great power to the United States as World War II came to a close, the former engaged in a fundamental reorientation of its international outlook. Dean Acheson, the US secretary of state under President Harry Truman, was largely responsible for creating a euphemistic language that could protect British pride and Western hegemony. The declining empire need not, Acheson wrote to an American ambassador, be viewed as having been cast aside; rather, it had assumed the position of “lieutenant.” This new role entailed helping the American foreign policy establishment secure what it viewed as its country’s key geostrategic interests: the maintenance of Eurasia as a landmass on which the United States wielded the most significant influence; hegemony over the Pacific and Northeast Asia; and control over the Persian Gulf and its supplies of petroleum.
Allied victory and the containment of the Soviet Union secured the first of these aims; nuclear strikes on Japan the second; and Britain’s gradual handover of power to the United States in the Middle East guaranteed the third. In Someone Else’s Empire: British Illusions and American Hegemony, Tom Stevenson, a writer for the London Review of Books, explains the United Kingdom’s role in enforcing American dominance as part of an attempt to retain some global relevance amid decline. The fear of British elites was, Stevenson suggests, that their country was at risk of becoming a “greater Sweden” — prosperous but geopolitically irrelevant.
Almost eight decades on from the close of World War II, fealty to the United States remains part of Britain’s DNA. On leaving office, a disgraced Boris Johnson offered three pieces of advice to his would-be successor: “Stay close to the Americans; stick up for freedom for the Ukrainians; stick up for freedom and democracy.” Atlanticism is such a defining feature of politics across the political spectrum in the UK that no British prime minister since World War II has ever seriously questioned the fact that they ought to reflexively follow the United States’ lead.
The Labour Party’s first postwar foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, who made his name attacking communists in the Trades Union Congress after the failure of the 1927 general strike, helped to inaugurate this new era of British subservience. Bevin hailed from the right-wing of the Labour movement, which viewed Britain’s national interests as guaranteed by its position as the largest imperial power. Colonialism was not for Bevin at all problematic — it just needed to be deepened with more secure mechanisms for ordering the world system. “Our crime,” he is reported to have said, “isn’t exploitation, its neglect.”
Initially, sections of Britain’s postwar elite thought that this civilizing mission could be upheld through the reorganization of European power. “The great colonial powers of Europe should pool their colonial territories and link them up with a European Commonwealth,” Bevin proposed in a speech to the Labour Party conference in 1937. However, after the close of World War II, Europe lacked any significant regional power. The project of securing Western dominance thus had to rely on the United States. This account of the development of Britain’s close relations to the United States is absent in Stevenson’s essays, although it goes a long way to explaining the special relationship between the two nations. Rightly, Stevenson rejects the idea that there was ever a strong anti-American voice within British politics, on either the Left or the Right. For instance, while Labour’s Harold Wilson did not send British troops to Vietnam, a contribution which would have been of negligible value to the Americans, he did send naval aid as well as supply planes to Laos.
Of course, part of the reason for allegiance to the United States is undoubtably the latter’s overwhelming military dominance. The Single Integrated Operational Plan, which American generals completed in 1960, outlined plans for responsible use of the power the United States had at its disposal. These proposals, leaked by Daniel Ellsberg, made clear that the United States was committed to a first-strike nuclear policy. In the eventuality of a conventional war with the communist states, America would drop 3,423 warheads, destroying every city in China, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe with weapons that Stevenson reminds us, are, in terms of power, “4,000 times that of the bomb used on Hiroshima.” Soberly, American officials contemplated killing six hundred million people, including one hundred million in Western Europe. With the moral seriousness that has characterized Stevenson’s writing, which has appeared in the London Review of Books since 2015, he observes calmly: “It would be hard to argue that any document in history contains greater evil; there is nothing in the Nazi archives that approaches it.”
Providing military training and arms creates relations of dependency, because weapons made in the United States must be replaced, repaired, and upgraded by the United States.
But while fear of subjugation perhaps explains the foreign policies of countries that have experienced coups and invasions, it does not account for the position of the UK, which is in every sense an accessory to, rather than a victim of, American crimes. Here, Stevenson’s consistent focus on the role that the relationship between both nations plays in preserving a balance of power generally favorable to Western interests is welcome.
This is particularly true in the Persian Gulf. There, contrary to popular views, the United States and UK are not primarily concerned with procuring oil for themselves — both nations are basically energy self-sufficient because of their own domestic hydrocarbon and renewable production. Rather, their aim is to secure the control of a nonreplaceable input for industrial production on which China, Japan, as well as nations in the Global South are heavily dependent. The Obama-era talk of a “pivot to Asia,” a fantasy of foreign policy hawks like John Mearsheimer, urged a move away from the Middle East so as to gear up for a confrontation with China. This ignores the fact that US leverage globally depends heavily on its position in the Gulf. “If there are indeed such plans, it would suggest that recent US administrations are ignorant of the way the system over which they preside works,” Stevenson coolly observes.
With the exception of the 1973 oil embargo, Western control over the Gulf has been unchallenged either by the emergence of regional powers or local resistance. The princelings of the Gulf monarchies, Stevenson tells us, are frequently educated at Sandhurst, a prestigious English military academy, producing a political class socialized with solidarity for the Anglophone elite. Similarly, American and British arms equip troops in both Riyadh and Cairo. This is not, Stevenson stresses, a sign that the United States and UK are beholden to an arms industry that perpetuates wars that aren’t in their interests. Rather, providing military training and arms creates relations of dependency because weapons made in the United States must be replaced, repaired, and upgraded by the United States.
The highpoint of the Anglo-American alliance came at the turn of the twenty-first century, when both nations launched campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. The scale of the horror of both wars is discussed by Stevenson, who has no patience for liberal attempts to chalk up the murder of millions to misapplied political idealism. Brought into view in Stevenson’s discussion is Britain’s complete incompetence, which allowed torture and other acts of cruelty to flourish. His discussion of the character of the UK’s military personnel merits quoting at length:
British officers told the Americans that they knew what they were doing thanks to their exploits in Northern Ireland. Yet they failed either to pre-empt or recognize the emerging Shia resistance. The British army proved incapable of securing [Basra], and not for lack of trying. In September 2003 British forces arrested a group of men, including the hotel receptionist Baha Mousa, and took them to battalion headquarters. There . . . “Mousa died of his injuries” — one way to describe torturing a prisoner to death. Mousa was hooded and suffered ninety-three distinct injuries. Here were the skills acquired in Northern Ireland.
On the American side, a booming economy and possession of the world’s reserve currency mean that adventurism is practically, if not militarily, defensible. But the UK’s interest in following the United States’ lead is much harder to understand. Its excesses remain somewhat of a mystery throughout the essays that make up Someone Else’s Empire. Nowhere is this inexplicability more present than in the UK’s commitment, expressed in a series of Integrated Reviews prepared by the Ministry of Defence, to expanding its military presence in the Indo-Pacific. In 2021, Stevenson tells us, Britain agreed to spend £7.6 billion ($9.4 billion) on the HMS Elizabeth and HMS Prince of Wales, two aircraft carriers for which it did not have enough planes or supply ships. Likewise, AUKUS, the trilateral security partnership between Australia, the United States, and UK, seems to be a similar act of insanity — pitting two nations up against a major trading partner in the interests of bolstering American grand designs in the Indo-Pacific.
Someone Else’s’ Empire drives home the point of the United States’ overwhelming military and geopolitical supremacy, but it leaves uninterrogated the question of whether some alternative path was possible for its chief stooge, Britain.
While the first two-thirds of Someone Else’s Empire focus on these big-picture questions — geostrategic alliances, the prospect of a war in space, nuclear proliferation — the last offers on-the-ground reportage from the Middle East, where Stevenson previously worked as a foreign correspondent for the Financial Times. The same clinical prose, punctuated by bursts of moral disgust, is here on display. Here, he reproduces a style of reportage, highly literary yet historically informed, that harkens back to a bygone era of journalism. In his dispatch from Libya, we follow a cast of armed thugs policing the lawless state in the aftermath of Western intervention. Bands of men, with no pretense to political purpose, police a Libya broken into city-states. He describes these scenes evocatively and without self-indulgence:
There are oases of wealth, tidy streets that could be in some dull part of urban France, but turn the corner and you encounter others as squalid as anything in the poorest quarters of Niamey. Countless posters of martyrs plastered on roadside billboards in the heady afterglow of victory are faded now, nearly to white.
The account Stevenson provides is of a nation that was, in terms of the structure of power within it, what the political scientist Peter Mair would describe as “hard and hollow.” At its head, an authoritarian government led by Muammar Gaddafi, but lacking the trade unions and strong civil society institutions that would make the challenge to dictatorship more of a threat to Western hegemony in Egypt. “Here it was only ever ‘Let’s get rid of Gaddafi,’” an activist tells Stevenson. The popular challenge to Libya’s government, backed up with Western bombing, created a power vacuum and a state of lawlessness.
Absent in this account is any moralism; instead Stevenson confines himself to describing the scale of Western incompetence and hubris and how this led Libya to descend into a state of chaos. Stevenson produces a similarly terrifying dispatch from Egypt, where he describes the treatment of inmates held within jails by a police force whose cruelty strains credulity. Indefinite detention without trial and routine torture, carried out by guards without the aim of procuring information, are the norm in post-Mubarak Egypt.
Continuity in the approach of Western powers to managing world affairs is one of the general themes of Someone Else’s Empire. Even Donald Trump, who establishment Democrats and Republicans accused of isolationism, practiced an entirely conventional foreign policy: hawkishness against Russia, bombing campaigns in the Middle East, and hostility to China were its hallmarks.
As the political scientist Patrick Porter has observed, the chief reason for this was the intransigence of the foreign policy establishment, or the Blob, which effectively organized a strike against the president, threatening to deprive him of expertise unless he fitted his cabinet with personnel willing to maintain the status quo. His appointments of his son-in-law Jared Kushner and the antiglobalist Steve Bannon were largely exceptions. Both figures remained marginal throughout his presidency; establishment hawks like Mike Pence, Rex Tillerson, and Jim Mattis were prominent.
Someone Else’s Empire drives home the importance of the United States’ overwhelming military and geopolitical supremacy, but it leaves uninterrogated the question of whether some alternative path was possible for its chief stooge, Britain. This is understandable. The essays that comprise this collection are hardly systematic — although they share a series of realist assumptions about how the world works. However, closer examination of Britain’s development within the twenty-first century reveals that an independent strain of foreign policy thinking emerged in response to the disasters of Iraq and Afghanistan. The shame is that it has only been the Conservative Party, led by David Cameron and his successor Theresa May, that has attempted to think seriously about these issues, albeit with very little efficaciousness.
The New Left Review editor Oliver Eagleton has written clearly about these developments. Writing in 2021, he observed that the Cameron government embarked a decade prior on a series of military budget cuts, which it euphemistically referred to as “streamlining” exercises, for which it was harshly rebuked by the United States. With this flight-footed army, it launched bombing missions in Syria, Libya, and Somalia but also engaged in rapprochement with China, visiting the People’s Republic and signing up for Xi Jinping’s Asian Investment Bank. Part of the aim of this alliance was to use China’s vast reserves of capital to improve Britain’s ailing infrastructure, moves that led to a hysterical response from the Right. “No economy in the West is as open to Chinese investment as the UK,” declared then chancellor of the exchequer George Osborne. Under his successor, Theresa May, Britain planned to embrace the Belt and Road Initiative, seeking to find international solutions to a decades-long pattern of underinvestment.
With May’s downfall came an end to the vision of an Anglo-Sino partnership and the resurgence of a bellicose anti-China sentiment. Returning to form, Johnson, upon taking office, hired John Bew, a right-wing Labour Party Atlanticist and author of a hagiographic study of Clement Atlee, to draft a military Integrated Review that realigned Britain with the United States. Seen in this context, the wars in Ukraine and Palestine are signs of a resurgence of muscular American leadership in Eurasia and the Middle East. This has had the effect not only of stamping out the tiny independent streak within British foreign policy thinking, but also of bringing the whole of Europe to heel. Germany, which had developed an economic model in which its industries relied heavily on cheap Russian imports of oil, has replaced much of this with American liquid natural gas; within just over a month, solidarity with Palestinians suffering under several decades of occupation has been cast by European leaders as support for terrorism.
Among the writers and academics interested in foreign policy, concern with the excesses of American power is widespread. Every five years, it seems, the American academic Christopher Layne writes an article warning that overreach will lead to the end of US hegemony. (In 2012, he penned an article entitled, “This Time It’s Real: The End of Unipolarity and the Pax Americana.”) However, the fact that within the UK the only serious challenge by a party in government to the dictates of Washington has come from the Right does not inspire confidence. Foreign policy has traditionally been an occupation of elites, which goes some way toward explaining this fact. However, the causes of this are undeniably the absence of an antiwar movement, capable of drawing connections between indefensible war abroad and terrorism and poverty at home.
On the latter, the task of the Left must be to insist that maintaining an empire is an occupation of elites uninterested in improving the standards of living of the majority, whether in the UK and United States or abroad. While Britain has followed America’s lead in bombing Africa and the Middle East and investing billions on an impotent navy to patrol the Pacific, the average height of a British child has shrunk since the Thatcher premiership; so too has the average life expectancy. Similar patterns can be observed in the United States. But as foreign policy elites fantasize about grand strategies, Britain and the United States have embarked on a process of what looks to any unbiased outside observer like intentional de-development. Both nations would be lucky if they could call themselves a “greater Sweden.”