Sound The Trumpet : Forget the Great In Britain

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“Forget the Great In Britain”
by Newsweek
August 3rd, 2009

Its fall was inevitable, but the economic crisis will shrink the last pretenses of empire faster than anyone expected.

Even in the decades after it lost its empire, Britain strode the world like a pocket superpower. Its economic strength and cultural heft, its nuclear-backed military might, its extraordinary relationship with America—all these things helped this small island nation to punch well above its weight class. Now all that is changing as the bills come due on Britain's role in last year's financial meltdown, the rescue of the banks, and the ensuing recession. Suddenly, the sun that once never set on the British Empire is casting long shadows over what's left of Britain's imperial ambitions, and the country is having to rethink its role in the world—perhaps as Little Britain, certainly as a lesser Britain.

This is a watershed moment for the United Kingdom. The country's public debt is soaring, possibly doubling to a record high of 100 percent of GDP over the next five years, according to the International Monetary Fund. The National Institute for Economic and Social Research forecasts that it will take six years for per capita income to reach early-2008 levels again. The effects will cascade across government. Budgets will be slashed at the Ministry of Defense and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, affecting Britain's ability to project power, hard and soft. And there's little that can be done to reverse the trend, either by Prime Minister Gordon Brown or by the incoming government of David Cameron's Conservatives, assuming they win a general election that must be held within the next 10 months. As William Hague, Cameron's deputy and shadow foreign secretary, said in a recent speech: "It will become more difficult over time for Britain to exert on world affairs the influence which we are used to."

History has been closing in on Britain for some time. The rise of giant emerging economies like China and India always meant that Britain would have a smaller seat at the increasingly crowded top table of nations. It also meant that the United States would recalibrate the so-called special relationship as it sought new partners and alliances, inevitably shrinking the disproportionate role Britain has long played in world affairs. Brown's predecessor, Tony Blair, made a final stab at greatness with what amounted to a 51st-state strategy: by locking Britain into America's wars—on terror, in Afghanistan, and in Iraq—London achieved an importance it hadn't had since Churchill and the war. But whatever advantage Britain gained in the short term was wiped out by the political damage Blair's strategy caused at home. Ordinary Britons and even members of the British establishment grew increasingly critical of what they saw as London's subservient relationship with Washington. Blair's authority was diminished, his political agenda at home suffered as a result, and it became clear that Britain's geopolitical default setting would no longer be to automatically follow America's lead. In fact, Blair may merely have postponed the inevitable: a lesser Britain is a consequence of world events, not unlike the slow relative decline of the United States, which finds itself today where Britain was at its apogee.What makes the British case stand out even more is that it is the only country of its size in recent history that has sought such a disproportionately large role on the world stage. During the Cold War, Margaret Thatcher saw herself as second only to Ronald Reagan as a leader who helped to bring down the Soviet Union and make the world safe for capitalism. During Blair's decade in office, from 1997 to 2007, Britain fought three wars—in Kosovo, Afghanistan, and Iraq—in which its military participation was right behind that of the United States. Now that's changing. "Although we are a relatively wealthy country and we have a seat on the U.N. Security Council, we are a power in decline," says Ian Kearns of the Institute for Public Policy Research, which recently conducted a British security review. Paddy Ashdown, a former leader of the Liberal Democrats who took part in the IPPR study, recalled the gibe by the late U.S. secretary of state Dean Acheson in 1962: "Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role." Britain found its footing for a while, but Acheson's words sting again today. "If you were to say we haven't found a role," says Lord Ashdown, "it's true."

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