From my readings about the behind-the-scenes negotiations among the western allies even before the United States formally entered the war in late 1941, I’ve always felt that the personal relationship between Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt was at least as important as the formal public proclamations and direct actions of the allies. It’s my belief that Churchill and FDR had a “wink and a nod” agreement for the US to continue supporting the British economy after the end of the war in Europe, probably in exchange for a gradual retreat from formal Imperial control over at least some of the remaining British colonies. This would have made Britain’s immediate postwar experience far less grim economically and politically and allowed the British economy to gracefully switch from full wartime production to fulfilling peacetime business and consumer needs.

Church services on HMS Prince of Wales, in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, during the Atlantic Charter Conference. President Franklin D. Roosevelt (left) and Prime Minister Winston Churchill are seated in the foreground. Standing directly behind them are Admiral Ernest J. King, USN; General George C. Marshall, U.S. Army; General Sir John Dill, British Army; Admiral Harold R. Stark, USN; and Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, RN. At far left is Harry Hopkins, talking with W. Averell Harriman.
US Naval Historical Center Photograph #: NH 67209 via Wikimedia Commons.

Of course, with Roosevelt dead (and Truman certainly not “read-in” on any unwritten promises to the British) and Churchill out of office (which was as much of a shock to the Americans as it was to Churchill himself), whatever they may have hoped to do was now so much wishful thinking. Britain had to not just continue wartime rationing after VE and VJ Day, but to actually make it more stringent for nearly a decade just to avoid national bankruptcy … and the withdrawal from imperial outposts had to be done as quickly and as cheaply as possible. This often meant corners were cut, cheeses were pared, and shortcuts availed of, so that the experiences of the former colonies were more fraught with civil disturbances and commercial disruptions than they should have been.

All of this is a very long-winded way to introduce Joshua Treviño’s post at Armas which considers how an American imperial decline may or may not mirror the postwar British experience of de-imperialization:

We can guess that American decline under the present regime will look much like Britain’s. The British case is taken as so normative — of course a nation will decline after its empire is gone — that the normativity goes unquestioned. But this is the worst sort of history, determinative in retrospect, as if the loss of imperium (or more properly, the loss of imperial fiscal stability) set in motion dominoes that fell unstoppably until the latest squalid episode of Keir Starmer’s thought police. That isn’t how human events work, however: all things are contingent. Britain was, in the eyes of several European powers, reduced to a mid-tier power after the catastrophic loss of America at the opening of the 1780s — and a generation later it was the indispensable nation versus French hegemony. There was not any particular reason a comparable recovery ought not have happened in the generation after 1945, even with the loss the of the empire, and even with the great postwar crisis of the pound sterling. This was in fact the high-Tory view as set forth by Enoch Powell, who evolved toward a belief that the empire was a burden on Britain, which could ascend to its destiny and fulfillment by means of the British themselves.

That this did not happen is plausibly much the fault of the Americans, who did two major things — one of them unwittingly — to forestall this sort of recovery. The first act, undertaken with deliberation, was the credible American threat to destroy the United Kingdom’s finances and economy in the 1956 Suez crisis: in no way the act of an ally, and one whose psychological effects upon Britain’s governing elites were as significant as the hard-power effects upon Britain itself. (Though I am not a particular fan of De Gaulle, for reasons that may be discussed here later, he was unquestionably a better steward of the nation than his U.K. counterparts in his conclusion — admittedly coalescing a decade earlier — that a European state could be a major power, or it could be a junior partner to the United States, but not both.) The British regime’s reaction to the episode — to draw so close to the Americans as to abandon the nation’s strategic independence — thereby contributed powerfully to Britain’s subsequent diminishment. That diminishment was not simply in the realm of hard power: it was accompanied by a profound social and governmental malaise that has fluctuated across the decades but has yet to lift. Philip Larkin’s 1969 Homage to a Government captures it well:

Next year we are to bring all the soldiers home
For lack of money, and it is all right.
Places they guarded, or kept orderly,
Must guard themselves, and keep themselves orderly
We want the money for ourselves at home
Instead of working. And this is all right.

It’s hard to say who wanted it to happen,
But now it’s been decided nobody minds.
The places are a long way off, not here,
Which is all right, and from what we hear
The soldiers there only made trouble happen.
Next year we shall be easier in our minds.

Next year we shall be living in a country
That brought its soldiers home for lack of money.
The statues will be standing in the same
Tree-muffled squares, and look nearly the same.
Our children will not know it’s a different country.
All we can hope to leave them now is money.

The superficial read of Larkin here is that he laments deriving purpose from other things closer to home. There is a baseness in the imperialist’s love of mission, and he misses the sublime in, say, the National Health Service. It is a dumb atavism: if the “tree-muffled squares … look nearly the same”, then why does it matter that “the soldiers [are] home”? This interpretation is wrong. What Larkin laments is the loss of the common and noble purpose in the civic partnership that makes the nation, as defined at the outset of Aristotle’s Politics — without which the nation fails to cohere, even if its regime persists. Despite the strenuous efforts of the left and progressivism across the past century, that virtuous end to which the nation has been directed has never been supplanted in its old forms — religion, glory, strength, creation — by any new ones of social programs or millennialist materialism. When Clement Attlee wrote in his 1920 The Social Worker that the Protestant Reformation was to blame for the moral degradation of charity, his solution was not the obvious one (which is to say, the restoration of Catholic England or at least its mores), but to interpose government where religion and its purposes used to be. His 1945 general-election invocation of building “Jerusalem” in England, directly quoting William Blake, logically followed.

But that is not how Jerusalem is built. It remains unbuilt, and the civic effects of the American fixation and what it facilitates redound across time. Nick Cohen accuses the modern British right of Americanizing itself, and that is largely accurate, but contra his indictment, the British left does the same in different ways. What the Americans did in 1956 was not a singular event — rather it was a punctuation on a process that had been unfolding in stages for the preceding forty years or so — but their objects got a vote too. That vote was to submit, a preference shared across right and left alike. That no American regime ever had Britain’s interest fully at heart (a truth with ample reminders, not just at Suez, but in Northern Ireland, in the Falklands, in Grenada, in Iraq, and in Afghanistan) did not alter this course, thereby making a triumph of theory unmoored from fact.