Britain Does Not Exist – The American Conservative

British Grand Strategy in the Age of American Hegemony, by William D. James. Oxford, 272 pages, $100.00

You may not care about grand strategy, but grand strategy cares about you. 

That’s the upshot of a new-ish academic book, British Grand Strategy in the Age of American Hegemony, by the political scientist William D. James.

James seeks to show that the United Kingdom, though it has acted in America’s shadow since the mid-1940s, remains a “grand strategic actor.” Britain’s state planners, James contends, have lately forgotten that fact. Some have convinced themselves that modern democracies cannot act grand-strategically, since their foreign policies are the output of messy and often contentious domestic politics rather than centralized decision-making. And some London leaders have come to believe that only great powers such as America, China, and Russia possess the agency to formulate and execute a grand strategy.

Scholars of international relations, for their part, have collectively produced a dizzying array of interpretations and criticisms of the concept of grand strategy, judging by James’s adroit review of the literature. Many political scientists reject the concept entirely, convinced that the messiness of world events does not permit the kind of coherent, long-term planning that the concept of grand strategy implies. James’s intervention into this morass constitutes an effort (by no means the first) to rehabilitate the concept for scholars and statesmen alike. 

James offers a no-nonsense definition of grand strategy as “the highest level of national security decision-making, where judgements over a state’s overarching objectives and interests, its security environment, and its resource base, are made.” He concedes that statesmen put up with a great deal of uncertainty and ambiguity but maintains that they must, nonetheless, get on with the business of marshalling public resources in pursuit of the national interest. And he eschews the “prescriptive approach” that first endorses a particular grand strategy and then evaluates foreign policies based on how well they live up to it. 

That doesn’t mean the book is devoid of evaluation. Among James’s conceptual contributions is the notion of proportionality, a yardstick by which to measure grand-strategic performance. A proportionate grand strategy sustainably matches means and ends in pursuit of prudently calculated national interests. Yardstick in hand, James surveys the historical record to see how Britain has stacked up. “Whether the British do grand strategy should not be in question,” James writes. “Put bluntly, the real question is: have they been any good at it?”

James’s answer: They’ve been okay at it, overall. Or rather, they used to be quite good, then they were mediocre, and by the early 2000s, they were catastrophically bad. 

That, at least, is the impression one gets from the middle chapters of James’ book, devoted to three case studies: the decision in the Second World War to delay the “second front” and, in the meantime, wear down German power in peripheral theaters; the Cold War decision to withdraw from military bases “East of Suez” and concentrate on defending Europe; and the decision not only to join the U.S.-led Iraq War in 2003 but to commit heavily to it. James judges the first decision to be proportionate and even wise, the second to be well-formulated but too hastily executed, and the third to be a grand-strategic disaster.

These conclusions are not exactly earth-shattering, but the textured historicizing that informs them is well-done, often riveting, and sometimes humorous, as when James recounts an act of impromptu personal diplomacy. After Japan’s attack on the U.S. Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor, Prime Minister Winston Churchill visited Washington to build rapport with President Franklin Roosevelt and ensure that the U.S., as it entered the war, would adopt a Germany-focused grand strategy favorable to British interests. James writes: 

During his lengthy stay in the White House, the president and prime minister spent many hours in each other’s company. On one occasion, the presi- dent caught the prime minister as the latter emerged from a bath. A fully exposed Churchill quipped that ‘the prime minister of Great Britain had nothing to hide from the president of the United States’. The two men evidently enjoyed a jovial working relationship. Roosevelt would later remark to Churchill: ‘it is fun to be in the same decade with you’.

As the passage makes clear, James, to his credit, thinks and writes more like an historian than a political scientist (indeed, he seems to be in the midst of a disciplinary switch), exhibiting an impressive capacity to get inside the minds and personalities of statesmen. Contra revisionist histories, Churchill, for example, is persuasively depicted as a serious, resilient, and patient grand strategist who could find an opportunity to advance British interests even when caught with his pants off.

James does, in at least one instance, succumb to an occupational hazard of political science, namely, rendering a truism as an academic discovery and law of politics: “The cases bear out the prediction that domestic political actors would play a marginal role when the state faces an existential and pressing threat.” In political science, the “prediction” game often amounts, as here, to rigorously proving the obvious. At the same time, it makes inevitable the future dilution of one’s proof with ad hoc caveats to account for exceptions. (Do domestic political actors, such as independent media and oppositional parties, play a major role in North Korea, whose only pressing threat is its own political insanity?) 

Nevertheless, on the whole, James does not treat politics as a closed mechanical system that admits of scientific theorizing, but as a realm of contingency, prudence, and (at its best) artful statecraft.

One of James’ purported discoveries is genuinely surprising: that one less-than-artful statesman, Prime Minister Tony Blair, wasn’t President George W. Bush’s “poodle,” as many critics have called him. 

In James’s telling, Blair, in choosing to deploy 46,000 British troops to Iraq in March 2003, acted on the basis of the prime minister’s own judgments about the national interest. Blair genuinely believed that the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein posed a profound threat to Britain, and he determined that joining Bush’s war would give London influence over Washington on important matters, such as the need to secure approval from the United Nations and to resolve the Israel–Palestine crisis. This analysis of Blair bolsters James’s contention that the UK, rather than being a mere American satellite, has possessed the autonomy to act grand-strategically.

James’s treatment of Blair’s motivations and miscalculations is illuminating, but the “poodle” point is less than convincing. The slur, after all, was a piece of political rhetoric offered by critics of Blair’s approach to British-American relations. To appraise its accuracy according to standards of empirical scholarship misses the point.

Moreover, James himself shows that Blair, though he hoped to gain influence over the White House in return for British military support, promised to give that support no matter what. When the British Defense Secretary Geoff Hoon advised Blair to notify U.S. leaders that Britain would join the war only if certain preconditions were met, the prime minister demurred. Blair instead destroyed his own leverage, promising Bush in the opening sentence of a July 2002 letter, “I will be with you, whatever.” I don’t have a poodle, but if my oversized mutt acted with such deference, our leash-free hikes would go much more smoothly.

Poodles aside, British Grand Strategy in the Age of American Hegemony is an impressive debut book from a manifestly erudite young scholar. James achieves his main objective: demonstrating that British statesmen from the 1940s to the early 2000s made foreign policy decisions at a level above and beyond battlefield strategy, where generals hold sway.

Moreover, James shows that better grand strategizing is badly needed in London today. In one alarming passage, James assesses Britain’s military preparedness in light of the ongoing Russia–Ukraine war. “The British have fewer than twenty frigates and destroyers and are reducing their tank fleet to 148 units…. Ukraine reportedly destroyed over 1,000 Russian tanks in the twelve months after February 2022.” The disconcerting data offer just the latest evidence that President Donald Trump, who is pushing Europe to boost defense spending, is a blessing in disguise for the old continent. 

Still, a glaring omission compromises the practical utility of James’s book, for Europe—and the entire Western world—suffers from a problem more fundamental than even defense-industrial deficits. After waves of mass migration, Western nations have ceased to be nations at all, or at least, they have ceased to be the nations they were. 

That James waves away the profound relevance of national identity to foreign policy is surprising, since on the final page of the book he quotes George Orwell’s observation that it was “of the deepest importance to try and determine what England is, before guessing what part England can play in the huge events that are happening.”

The quote comes from Orwell’s essay “England Your England,” a reflection on the distinctiveness of peoples and the charming characteristics of the English people in particular, such as their “love of flowers.” The preconscious solidarity of Englishmen, Orwell wrote, brought advantages “in moments of supreme crisis,” when “the whole nation can suddenly draw together and act upon a species of instinct, really a code of conduct which is understood by almost everyone, though never formulated.”

In England today, as in other Western nations beset by rapid demographic transformation, such organic unity has been jeopardized if not already lost. Prime Minister Keir Starmer seemed cognizant of the crisis in May when he warned that out-of-control migration was turning Great Britain into an “island of strangers, not a nation that walks forward together.”

James, by contrast, evinces little awareness of the problem, though after quoting Orwell, he does signal some concern about the most conspicuous reaction to it: “rising nationalism.” No single book can address every issue, of course. But fundamental political problems, almost by definition, impinge on virtually all political matters. And the death of the West surely impinges on the matter of British grand strategy. After all, a state will have trouble calculating its national interests if the population it represents comprises multiple nations with disparate interests. And the myriad national groups visible on the streets of London today make the English, Scots, Welsh, and even the non-British Irish seem indistinguishable by contrast. 

A prime minister may be able to craft a workable grand strategy amid disagreements in Parliament and despite disorderliness beyond Britain’s maritime borders, but can he do so when within those borders the country is growing ever less coherent and more distrustful, when the nation has swapped the virtue of patriotism for xenophiliac political correctness, and when Britons feel themselves to be strangers lacking common purpose rather than citizens with inherited duties to king and country? Within our lifetimes, I fear, we will find out.

In the 20th century, as James carefully shows, British grand strategy survived America’s rise to superpower status, but in the 21st, it may not endure the demise of Britain as a distinct historical community. In an era when globalism has obliterated the boundaries that constitute the multiplicity of cultures, what Western statesmen govern are not nations, but jumbled patches of a cosmopolitan blob. And it’s hard to see why anyone, whether statesmen or regular citizens, would sustain the passion to defend the patches for much longer.

British Grand Strategy in the Age of American Hegemony deals with a very different, more patriotic, and more united Britain than the discordant medley we see on the Isles today. The book’s contributions to our historical knowledge are real and meaningful. But as a guide to the present and future of Britain, it suffers from a rather serious limitation: Britain no longer exists.