Tom McTague | The Atlantic

Revenge of the Brits

2024-06-18T12:35:00-04:00

Why have the British come for America’s media? Not only is Emma Tucker shaking things up, to howls of indignation, at The Wall Street Journal, but Mark Thompson is running the show at CNN, John Micklethwait at Bloomberg News, Keith Poole at The New York Post, and Daisy Veerasingham at the Associated Press. None of these appointments, however, caused the kind of grief that we are now witnessing at The Washington Post, where the British CEO, Will Lewis, recently announced the appointment of a longtime Fleet Street hack, Rob Winnett, as the paper’s new editor.

The British media invasion is causing considerable consternation—see, for example, the Post ’s lengthy exposé about its own incoming editor, detailing Winnett’s alleged connections with the shadier figures of the U.K. press world when he was a reporter at The Sunday Times and The Daily Telegraph. Putting aside the accusations, the tenor of the investigation is melancholic: Is the newspaper of Watergate fame really about to import the discredited morals of Fleet Street? Do its owners not understand the constitutional importance of the newspaper’s endeavor? The same air of dismay has run through much American reporting since Winnett’s appointment, focusing on the “rough and tumble” nature of the Brits lately arrived in the metropole, with their backward ways, as if they resembled Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games. It was one thing having the late Christopher Hitchens louchely lecturing America on how to run the imperium, but to have Brits actually in charge, bringing their standards and their culture—intolerable.

The fact that Lewis and Tucker both stand accused of insulting their staff by not being adulatory enough is an indication of the culture clash at work beneath—and it raises the question of whether the two very different journalistic traditions can successfully be bridged. Lewis reportedly infuriated the Post’s staff by informing the newsroom that the paper had lost half its audience since 2020 and more than $1 million a week in the past year. They replied, Yes, but look at how many Pulitzers we’ve won. I can imagine Lewis biting down hard on his tongue at this point, the instincts of a lifetime in British newspapers hurtling to the surface. When Tucker unveiled plans to cut eight jobs, meanwhile, her staff protested by posting scores of brightly colored Post-it Notes on her office wall.

A belief seems to pervade American media that whatever the merits of Britain’s ability to produce the odd figure of worth—Hitchens, Evelyn Waugh, George Orwell, say—Fleet Street is a fundamentally corrupt and tawdry place. Of course, the U.K. media can be as serious and self-regarding as any U.S. outlet—think David Attenborough, father of the nation, savior of the planet. And it’s not hard to imagine the BBC, which is endlessly self-involved, running an exposé about itself.

[Helen Lewis: The British prime minister bowed to the inevitable]

But on the whole, the U.K. press does contain an element of unseriousness alien to most U.S. newspapers. My own story is a case in point. As a trainee at the tabloid Daily Mirror, I dressed up in a giant yellow chicken outfit to chase Conservative politicians around London as an election stunt. I would often think of this with a wry smile when, years later, I was subjected to an Atlantic fact-checker asking whether I was sure the painting in Boris Johnson’s office was hanging over the fireplace rather than above his desk.

Britain’s tabloid culture may seem strangely foreign, an image from a Monty Python sketch, but it can be understood as a product both of Britain’s wider media environment—which is small by American standards and entirely centered on a single city, London, the financial, political, and cultural capital rolled into one—and of our national culture more generally, which is allergic to that core of American news culture: earnestness. In the U.K., this has created a hypercompetitive world of partisan magazines, tabloids, broadsheets, and broadcasters, in which the most highly prized traits are speed, wit, and savvy. This is the world that made not only Hitchens and Waugh, as well as Tucker, Lewis, Winnett, and Thompson, but also as diverse a range of figures in recent decades as Mehdi Hasan, Piers Morgan, Harry Evans, David Frost, Andrew Sullivan, and Tina Brown, to name just a few. It is a world where power, privilege, friendship, and access all overlap to a degree that American journalists might find unacceptably compromising, but that on occasion enables British journalists to turn on those in power with a fraternal fury that is rarely seen in American print.

British and American media cultures are different, just as our national cultures are different. Yes, Brits who are journalists are less likely to consider ourselves an important part of the constitutional order (unless you happen to work for the BBC). And there is a preternatural horror of being earnest that simply does not seem to exist in Puritan America. Speed, wit, and fluency may be admired in America, but they are our obsessions. American culture has been invading Britain for decades. The British invasion of American media is the empire striking back.

A telling sign of these times is that CNN’s Mark Thompson is intent on bringing the BBC’s long-running satirical quiz show to U.S. television. Do the Americans know what’s in store for them? Have I Got News for You is not just a show but a staple of British life; a constant amid the turmoil of the past few decades, reflecting something essential in our national soul.

Whereas America’s populist revolt was led by the man from The Apprentice, ours came from the man made famous for goofing around on Have I Got News for You: Boris Johnson. The show first aired in 1990, but is still going. The premise is that two teams compete to answer questions about the week’s news, but the real contest is for laughs in an arena where caustic humor is prized above all.

When Johnson first appeared on the show, in 1998, he was a rising columnist for the right-of-center broadsheet The Daily Telegraph. In that debut, Johnson was mercilessly tormented by the opposing team’s leader, Ian Hislop, the editor of the satirical magazine Private Eye, over an embarrassing incident in Johnson’s past, in which he had been caught on tape apparently agreeing to hand over to an old Etonian school chum the home address of a journalist whom the friend wanted beaten up. “Ha ha, ha ha, richly comic,” Johnson said, squirming, and conceded that his friend had made a “major goof.” The cringeworthy episode was notable as an early instance of many such moments when, rather than destroying his career, Johnson somehow succeeded in cementing his public image as “a lovable, self-mocking buffoon,” as the novelist Jonathan Coe later described it.

[Read: Hitchens remembered]

And yet, the very next year, Johnson was appointed editor of The Spectator magazine, a post in which he continued after being elected a Conservative member of Parliament in 2001, and even after becoming his party’s spokesperson on the arts. Yes, this really happened: To appreciate the oddness of it, try imagining The New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, having a side hustle as the minority leader of the New York State Assembly. In Coe’s assessment, Johnson’s appearances on Have I Got News for You showcased his unique political skill in being able to turn a joke on himself and so neuter its power. The headline of Coe’s piece in the London Review of Books summed up his argument: Britain, he argued, was “Sinking Giggling Into the Sea.” Britain had stopped taking itself seriously, and so had its voters. Is this now the American fate?

The vision of Britannia sinking below the waves, giggling as she did so, has always stuck with me. If we must decline, we shall do so with an eyebrow raised and a gin and tonic in our hand, not taking ourselves too seriously. The comedian Spike Milligan captured something of the national soul with the Gaelic epitaph on his gravestone, which translates into “I told you I was ill.”

In Britain, Johnson’s gift of self-satire took him all the way to prime-ministerial office—before his unseriousness during the pandemic lockdowns brought him down. But as Johnson’s career also amply illustrates, British journalism has a certain pragmatism about connections and proximity to power. One irony of Johnson’s career is that he was eventually dragged out of political office by Fleet Street’s investigative efforts into a scandal, which, in a nod to the Post’s finest hour, was dubbed “Partygate.”

Johnson’s saga, mixing journalism and political power, might seem alien to an American audience, though it is anything but in Britain. Another young journalist who rose to prominence at The Spectator was James Forsyth, who became the magazine’s political editor. In 2022, Forsyth left the post to become political secretary to his friend, the current prime minister, Rishi Sunak. The pair are godparents to each other’s children and were best man at each other’s wedding. Forsyth is married to another political journalist, Allegra Stratton, who served for a time as Boris Johnson’s press secretary.

Examples of this revolving door abound. Johnson’s predecessor as prime minister, Theresa May, employed as her director of communications Robbie Gibb, a former BBC journalist—who now sits on the board of the BBC. The most glaring example may be Evgeny Lebedev, the son of the KGB spy chief Alexander Lebedev, who in 2009 bought the London newspaper The Evening Standard, and made David Cameron’s former chancellor, George Osborne, its editor. After Osborne’s tenure, Lebedev appointed Cameron’s sister-in-law Emily Sheffield as his successor in 2021. That same year, Johnson raised Lebedev to the peerage, guaranteeing him a lifelong seat in the British legislature as Lord Lebedev of Siberia. Again, all of that actually happened.

Such stories have helped establish in the American mind an image of Fleet Street as a lawless place where morally dubious newshounds play fast and loose with the facts, mixing high society and low ethics with a certain sleazy brio. Tom Wolfe captured this caricature in his 1987 novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, through the character Peter Fallow, an amoral British hack who has arrived in New York to join his countrymen in taking over New York’s leading tabloid, The City Light. Fallow delights in the “gutter syntax” of the British-occupied tabloid’s headlines, relishing “the extraordinary esthétique de l’abattoir that enabled these shameless devils, his employers, his compatriots, his fellow Englishmen, his fellow progeny of Shakespeare and Milton, to come up with things like this day after day.” This idea of the British hack lodged firmly in the American mind.

In Wolfe’s portrait, a sense lingers that these Brits still somehow look down their noses at the Americans for taking themselves so seriously, as if they were little more than social climbers pretending to be better than they are. Wolfe describes Fallow and his compatriots at The City Light seeing themselves as “fellow commandos in this gross country.” I wonder whether such condescension is also part of the response to the British invasion sweeping across the American media?

[Tom McTague: The worst, best prime minister]

As with most caricatures, Wolfe’s portrait contains a grain of truth. In my experience in British and American newsrooms, I have seen the real cultural differences. American journalism has stricter codes about sourcing—placing greater emphasis on getting briefings on the record, for example. U.S. newsrooms also tend to be less hierarchical than those in Britain, where the editor is king and all below him must bend the knee. At both Politico and The Atlantic, I remember watching with some amazement as staff aired grievances openly to the editor—rather than moaning to friends in the pub at the end of the day. Americans really believed in this democracy business. Only The Guardian in Britain has such a culture, but its journalists are notoriously odd fish.

This goes some way to explaining why Lewis and Tucker have come in for criticism from disgruntled staff at the Post and Journal who haven’t taken kindly to being told some hard truths about the state of the industry and their own publication. The flip side is that the average British hack would see American newspaper copy as turgid, self-serious, and slow—topped by notoriously bad headlines. I don’t know a British editor who does not feel they could make American news more readable, to the point, fluent, and fun. Something about storytelling also differs between the two cultures. In Britain, the line is king—the explosive fact or story that is the crux of a piece—regardless of whether it might have been discovered in ways seen as disreputable. In the U.S., meanwhile, “the narrative” is sovereign and means scrupulously sourced facts are arranged into a satisfying order, even if, to my mind, the resulting story does not always stand up to full scrutiny.

There are other differences, too. In the United States, access to power is cherished, as is a sense of gravity about the mission. In Britain, we prefer our columnists to cast a scornful eye over the country from afar, reveling in their lack of political contacts—even if, in fact, they are themselves scions of the elite. Our most high-profile writers—such as Giles Coren, Jeremy Clarkson, Quentin Letts, Camilla Long, and Marina Hyde—are acerbic, funny critics. This is our culture and the culture of Have I Got News for You.

But in almost every other way, the Wolfe caricature of the booze-drenched British hack is passé, as is the notion of Fleet Street as a den of iniquity. First of all, the boozing has largely disappeared. When I joined the parliamentary lobby in 2010, the older correspondents could still remember when they would adjourn to the pub after a morning briefing at Downing Street. No more. Although Hislop’s Private Eye might still nickname Will Lewis “Thirsty” (code: He likes a drink), the British expats now running some of America’s newsrooms bear no resemblance to Wolfe’s lampoon.

Tucker is a serious, sober, distinctly modern journalist, much closer in kind to the super-successful, hard-charging American business executive than Wolfe’s dilettante. Winnett, despite—or perhaps because of—the image presented in the Post, carries probably the best reputation of any journalist in U.K. news media that I know. His greatest hit—a 2009 exposé of dodgy parliamentary expenses—has caused some consternation in the U.S. because his newspaper at the time, The Daily Telegraph, paid the whistleblower for his information. The revelations produced panic around Parliament, as a national outpouring of fury over the revelations threatened to sweep away the entire political class. Those who worked on the story insist that the source was paid only to cover his legal fees, and say that almost all such journalism comes with ethical dilemmas. The expenses scandal is, in fact, a good example of how, despite the sometimes-cozy relationship between the press and politicians, uncompromising news reporting can induce the British to turn on their political class with a ferocity rarely seen in the U.S. The British press relentlessly pursued Johnson until he had to resign; the American press did not prove so powerful with Donald Trump, despite the clearly more serious charges.

[Helen Lewis: The British right’s favorite sex offender]

Although British newspapers certainly are more irreverent and more partisan than their American peers, that is not the whole story either. In some respects, America reserves its toughest political coverage and best satire for television. Living in the U.S. in the mid-2000s, I remember watching The O’Reilly Factor and Jon Stewart’s The Daily Show and thinking that we had nothing like them back home in the U.K. The same is true today of, say, Joe Rogan, who combines comedy and politics in a populist-conspiracist way that has no real equivalent in Britain.

Ultimately, though much has been made of the British invasion, the reality is that U.S. media are now also U.K. media, and vice versa. Despite British cynicism about the earnestness of American reportage, there is also plenty of reverence for American journalism, just as there is for American culture generally. We may mock, but then we take the knee—and continue doing so long after America has stopped. This is the irony today. Britain is awash with American culture, norms, politics—and media. When Wall Street was occupied, so too, inevitably, was the City of London. When the tents started popping up for Gaza at Columbia, they soon followed suit in Cambridge. Like the ancient Britons adopting the customs and costumes of the Romans, so now the modern Britons match the habits of the new imperium.

Throughout my time covering British politics, our two governing parties have battled to hire American celebrity politicos to tell us how to appeal to our own voters. In journalism, Britain now has a cult of the U.S.-style long read. Patrick Radden Keefe’s recent New Yorker story “The Oligarch’s Son” was widely acknowledged in London as a piece of exemplary reportage that no British outlet could hope to match, because of its scale, ambition, and sheer labor. In fact, The New Yorker and The Atlantic are status symbols in London, just as the New York Times app is on every British media executive’s phone. In U.K. newsrooms, U.S. media websites are displayed on big screens as prominently as their British rivals.

This—and what started as the phone-hacking scandal at Rupert Murdoch’s News International, which rocked Fleet Street in 2011 and led to a government inquiry that came close to imposing mandatory state regulation—has changed the nature of the British press. It is no longer the world of Tom Wolfe’s imagination, but a more sedate, earnest, and ultimately American environment. Only without America’s money.

In reverse, The Guardian, The Spectator, and my own publication, UnHerd, have growing American readerships and seek to address U.S. news in ways those readers will find accessible. Even if American editors have yet to take over British newspapers, the size of The New York Times’s London bureau now rivals that of any British publication, producing occasionally brilliant reporting and occasionally ludicrous reflections of a Britain more aligned with what its American audience wants to read than with the reality. The truth is that we already live in an American world. The internet is merely melding our media together as well—in ways that seem to be setting alight the vanities that still dominate both of our newspaper cultures.

Qatar Won

2022-12-16T18:52:00-05:00

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“The thing with the royal family is that for most of the time, it’s just a slightly tawdry soap opera,” a friend of mine reflected when we met up in the days after the funeral of Queen Elizabeth earlier this year. “But then, occasionally, it rises to become pure opera.” The extraordinary spectacle of the old sovereign being laid to rest, all drums and costumes, was one of those moments of high art, the perfectly choreographed finale to a 70-year drama. I now think something similar is true of soccer and, in particular, the World Cup, which draws to a close this weekend.

The World Cup is the biggest sporting event in the world, the last act in a four-year drama building to its conclusion. There is nothing like it. Not even the Olympics comes close. And, I’m sorry to say, neither does the Super Bowl or the World Series. The World Cup is an event that fuels such passion that kings join crowds in the streets in celebration of a national victory, riots erupt across Europe, and entire nations are brought to a standstill. It is an event that produces moments of the purest unscripted joy, desperation, human folly, and individual brilliance. In 1990, the Italians even had the genius to set the whole production to music, and not just any old music, but, fittingly, opera. No one from my generation—outside the U.S., at least—is able to hear “Nessun Dorma” without seeing the image of Italy’s Salvatore Schillaci turning in wild-eyed exultation after seeing the ball he struck hit the back of the net, the apparent embodiment of his entire nation at a single moment of release.

This particular World Cup has been packed with many such moments of operatic tension, tragedy, joy, and relief. It has seen the mighty Germany crashing out in the group stages, brought low despite displays of bravado; the first African nation to reach the semifinals, uniting the Arab world in support of Morocco; the hegemonic Brazil and its talismanic star, Neymar, falling short, forever destined to be the nearly man of his country. It has seen Saudi Arabia defeat Argentina, Japan beat Spain, and England fail once more—only this time, somehow, with a sense of redemptive freedom from the purgatory of fear and expectation in which the national team has been trapped for so long. All great theater.

But as we reach the climax of the competition, the main story line now reveals itself in all its dramatic clarity. On Sunday, the greatest player of his generation, Lionel Messi, will line up in his last game at a World Cup, 90 minutes away from soccer immortality. Should he win, his status in both Argentina and the rest of the world would grow into something approaching that of a sporting demigod, his final labor complete. At home, he would finally be able to sit alongside the great Diego Maradona as an equal. In the rest of the world (other than Naples, home of Maradona’s long-time club team), it would all but end the debate: Messi, the greatest of all time. All the World Cup heartache leading up to this moment of glory would form part of his own epic.

Lose, however, and his life story changes. No longer will he be the victorious hero, the Argentine Hercules, but a tragic-romantic figure, destined to be denied at the last: Napoleon trapped on St. Helena always dreaming of what might have been.

In Messi’s way lies the might of France, the reigning world champions who are—plot twist—led by his Paris Saint-Germain teammate, the dashing Dauphin of world soccer, Kylian Mbappé. Should France win, it would become, indisputably, the greatest national team of the modern era. In fact, it would become the first nation to win the World Cup back to back since Brazil did so in 1962. Mbappé would have won two World Cups by the age of 23: the new Pelé for the new Brazil. Perhaps, one day, he could even eclipse Messi. A new story would begin.

One of these narratives will reach its culmination in Doha, Qatar, this weekend. We will see tears and tension, human weakness and inspiration. In Argentina, we will witness a nation brought to a point of almost religious fervor, its attention gripped by the TV, while a small corner of the Gulf turns into a neighborhood of Buenos Aires. In France, we will see a country brought together in support of its boys from the banlieues, the children of immigrants claimed as the embodiment of the republican ideal, the French dream conquering all once again.

The problem is that, unlike my friend’s royal-family observation, all the high drama of the World Cup covers not only an underlying soap-opera tawdriness, but something more sinister. These story lines are not merely the ones much of the world wanted, but also very much the story lines Qatar had hoped for. The final is being played out between the two superstars of world football who ply their trade at the club Qatar itself owns: Paris Saint-Germain. The final, in fact, feels like the perfect finale for everything Qatar has been building toward over the past decade. It bought a football club to promote the image of Qatar and steadily acquired the best players on the planet, before hosting the World Cup itself.

Despite all the backlash over Qatar’s human-rights record at the beginning of the tournament, the conclusion is hard to avoid that, actually, everything has worked out rather well for the ruling House of Thani. As the tournament has gone on, the protests about LGBTQ rights and the bad press about labor conditions seem to have dissipated as the other, soccer-centered narratives took hold: Saudi Arabia’s remarkable victory over Messi’s Argentina, Morocco’s astonishing triumph over its European neighbors, the peaceful coexistence of fans from all over the world happy to be in Qatar.

Suddenly, the cry has gone up for more tournaments to be held outside the usual Western countries of Europe and the Americas. Perhaps Morocco itself should finally be given the right to host. Or Egypt. Or Saudi Arabia. “Imagine the atmosphere,” one commentator said, as he noted the scale of fan support Morocco had managed to send to Qatar to support its team. And he’s not wrong.

Across the news channels, there have been snippets of conversations with expats who live in Qatar, full of praise for the country, and visitors delighted with the experience. Little by little, the soft power of hosting a World Cup, of spending hundreds of billions of dollars to host a sporting event in the desert, started to make sense.

The story on Sunday will be whether Messi or Mbappé triumphs. The drama of the contest will burn into our memories, another chapter (perhaps the final chapter) in the legends of these modern heroes. For Qatar, though, who wins hardly matters: Both superstars represent Qatar.

The subliminal conclusion has crept up on me that the emirs of Qatar have subtly shifted global perceptions of their country and of the wider Arab world. All the corruption and migrant labor necessary to host the event, all the Western criticism that came with being awarded the tournament, might actually have been worth it. All the world’s a stage. But with this World Cup, it does not feel as though we are actors, but mere spectators, while the directors are in the wings, happy with their production.

Empires of Soccer

2022-11-25T11:50:00-05:00

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Day six of the World Cup and it’s the United States versus England, big Satan versus little Satan in the great battle of the evil imperialists. At stake, a place in the next round of a competition that would likely never have existed without the soccer-spreading British empire, taking place in a country that is unlikely to have existed without it either. And yet the very fact that it is taking place in Qatar has become one of the great symbols of our age—not as a marker of Western cultural power, but of the challenge to its global supremacy. How’s that for irony?

In fact, I find it hard to think of a global event that could be more à la mode than this World Cup, a tournament so deeply steeped in contradictions and challenges. Here we have a great global bonanza for a onetime British sport hosted by a onetime British protectorate that has now insured its independence by becoming the host for the new military superpower, the United States.

One way to understand this World Cup is as another chance for this tiny and vulnerable Arab nation to showcase its independence in a dangerous region of wannabe hegemons (read: Saudi Arabia). Yet, in the face of mounting Western hostility to the very fact that the tournament is taking place in Qatar, the event has become something of a symbol of Arab unity against the old Western imperialists who are once again trying to impose their values where they shouldn’t. Hence the spectacles of Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, waving the flag of Qatar before the host nation’s opening match and the emir of Qatar reciprocating by clutching the Saudi green during his neighbor’s famous win over Argentina.

Nothing has come to embody the clash of values more than the dispute over the LGBTQ Pride rainbow. The England captain, Harry Kane, had wanted to wear an armband bearing the symbol during the tournament to showcase his opposition to the laws in Qatar that criminalize homosexuality, but was dissuaded from doing so by a threat of sanctions from FIFA. The American team had gone a step further, redesigning its national crest to replace the red-and-white stripes with rainbow colors. This was banned. The German national team then got around this problem by posing with their hands over their mouths ahead of their match against Japan on Wednesday, signifying their anger at what they saw as their freedom of expression being silenced. Even spectators with multicolored hats have been told to take them off.

In response, some have said the World Cup should never have been allowed to go ahead in Qatar. Others have said the players should have ignored the authorities and worn their rainbow colors, regardless of the consequences. My own view is that the decision to hand the tournament to Qatar is the greatest absurdity in the history of the sport, because the country is so spectacularly unsuited to hosting the event.

Yet the charge of moral imperialism is not entirely without merit. Qatar is a Sunni Arab monarchy that bases its laws on Sharia—which makes it hardly surprising that the country is not as liberal on matters of sexuality as New York, Berlin, London, or Paris. Even in the West, LGBTQ rights remain contested. Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, the great icon of liberal internationalism, voted against gay marriage as recently as 2017. Bill Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act as U.S. president, which blocked the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriage. The point is that attitudes toward gay rights, let alone transgender rights, have developed at an extraordinary pace in the Western world. The last time England hosted the World Cup, in 1966, homosexuality was still illegal. When the U.S. hosted the tournament in 1994, gay men and women could serve in the miltary only if they didn’t tell anybody about their sexuality.

I’m struck that the symbol of protest the West has chosen to foreground in Qatar is one so central to the debates still taking place in its own societies. Western nations’ players are not wearing symbols to protest Uyghur concentration camps or Russian butchery in Ukraine. They are not wearing green in support of the women of Iran currently being killed for daring to uncover their hair. Nor, indeed, are they doing anything to protest the treatment of women in Qatar, where, just as in Saudi Arabia, they cannot leave the house without a man. These players are instead choosing—for perfectly defensible reasons—a symbol that has reemerged as a contentious issue in their own countries, principally because of arguments over trans rights.

But what price are Western soccer players prepared to pay to defend their values? How many of these players unhappy about Qatar, I wonder, nevertheless take holidays in similarly repressive Dubai? Not a single Western team has gone ahead with a show of support for LGBTQ rights after the organizers of the World Cup said that doing so would be met with the mildest of punishments—a yellow card—a penalty equivalent to that often imposed for a foul such as a clumsy tackle.

No Western player has made any gesture that could result in real-life consequences for them or their families comparable to the action of the Iranian players who refused to sing their national anthem ahead of their game against England. The contrast is sobering.

None of that is to say that the English, American, or German players are shallow or hypocritical people. In my decades supporting England, I have never seen such a group of evidently decent, well-rounded, socially responsible people—more likely to talk about the challenges of poverty, mental health, and gay rights than to disgrace themselves in a strip club or voice reactionary views.

Soccer used to be laddish, even boorish, and marred by booze-soaked hooliganism. Now it is woke.

I’m not sure this is a bad thing. Obvious, though, is that today’s generation of Western soccer stars are utterly of their own time and place: the products of a society in which a very culturally specific idea of moral virtue is to be not only praised but demanded, and that seems saturated in whatever debates are currently foremost in the U.S.

Occasionally, this can be jarring. Ahead of Iran’s game against England, while the Iranian players solemnly refused to sing their national anthem, the English players concentrated on taking the knee in support of the Black Lives Matter. For England’s young, multiracial squad, this has become an important declaration of who they are and what they stand for, ever since the movement sparked by the murder of George Floyd in 2020. And why not? Many in the England squad are Black and have suffered racist abuse themselves; they have every right to show their anger.

Soccer might be a legacy of the British empire, spread around the globe via shipping lanes and commercial interests, but we are now very much in an American world. The United States, not Britain, now projects its values around the world. One paradox of the situation is that this is happening in soccer, the global sporting obsession that still faces some resistance in the U.S. itself.

Today, we may well have the confounding spectacle of the English soccer team getting down on one knee to support a movement that began in the United States, while the American team stays standing, waiting to get on with a game that began in England but has now become the property of the world—even as the Arab countries of the region, and many other nations besides, look on with little interest or mild antipathy.

What is so troubling for many about this World Cup in Qatar is how unavoidable the fact that although soccer might now be the undisputed global game of our era, no undisputed set of values can unite us all. The way we handle this fact will play a big part in the century to come.

Listen to staff writer Franklin Foer on a special episode of “Radio Atlantic”:

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The Qatar World Cup Exposes Soccer’s Shame

2022-11-19T08:00:00-05:00

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Qatar hosting the soccer World Cup is like Donald Trump becoming president of the United States. It should not have happened, but the very fact that it has only exposes how bad things have become. Once this famous old tournament kicks off in Doha tomorrow, the fact that it did can never be unwound: Qatar will forever have been the host of the 22nd FIFA World Cup, the greatest absurdity in the history of the sport.

Even to recite the details of the backstory feels darkly grim. In 2010, soccer’s world governing body, FIFA, awarded the right to host the world’s most popular and prestigious sporting event to a tiny Middle Eastern autocracy with a population of barely 3 million. Qatar had never even played in a World Cup before, let alone hosted one, and it made a singularly unsuitable venue: In summer, when the tournament has always been held, the temperatures are so hot, soccer cannot safely be played at all. To hold 90-minute matches in the desert at the height of an Arabian summer is self-evidently ludicrous.

This is why, for the first time ever, the tournament is taking place in November and December, which is midway through the European soccer season. This is as preposterous as running the World Series over Christmas week—in Jeddah. They might as well have handed Dubai the rights to the Winter Olympics.

[Clint Smith: Life goals]

But this idiocy glosses over the true ignominy. Qatar might now be home to about 3 million people, but the proportion of actual Qatari citizens who live there is little more than 10 percent. The rest comprise some very rich expatriates of other nations and a huge army of poor migrants who do most of the work. When Qatar won the tournament, it did not have the infrastructure, weather, or fan base to justify being awarded the World Cup. But it was very, very rich.

The whole saga is rather like Dave Chappelle’s cynical take on Trump. Just as the former president acted as the “honest liar” who revealed something important about American politics in Chappelle’s view, Qatar seems to me to have done something similar for soccer. Until now, the sport’s world governing body was able to at least partially hide its sheer awfulness because everyone had a stake in the charade. If handing the tournament to Russia in 2018 might have looked bad on a democracy and human-rights index, it was at least a big country with a proud soccer history. But Qatar?

Not even FIFA’s disgraced former boss Sepp Blatter now feels able to defend the decision—a “mistake,” he recently admitted. That Qatar was able to beat rival bids from the United States, Australia, Japan, and South Korea to win the right to host the event was so indefensible, so in-your-face ridiculous, that it is impossible not to conclude that the whole system is rigged. Which, in essence, it is.

[Franklin Foer: A spectacle of scoundrels]

More than a one-off scandal, the World Cup in Qatar is a fable of the world we live in—and not just the world of soccer. Qatar 2022 is what happens when a corrupted international organization with huge power and little accountability is put in charge of things that matter; when democracies are willing to sell themselves, their institutions, and even their culture to the highest bidder; and when whole economies become dependent on the exploitation of cheap, globalized labor and unregulated capital. Qatar is like an extra shot of vodka in this cocktail of shame, a distillation of all that is wrong, which is usually masked by other ingredients.

European club soccer is already rife with plutocratic backers from the Gulf and beyond. Three of the top five best-paid athletes in the world are now soccer players: Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo, and Neymar, each of whom earns more than $100 million a year in wages and endorsements. A fourth player, Kylian Mbappé, is likely to join this exalted group when Forbes releases next year’s list, after he recently signed a three-year contract worth $650 million. Of these four superstars, three are currently employed by one club, Paris Saint-Germain, which is owned by, yes, Qatar.

But Paris Saint-Germain is not alone in its dependence on Gulf wealth—just the most brazen. The English club Manchester City has been owned by an investment arm of the Abu Dhabi state since 2008 (an organization that also has the largest stake in the U.S. Major League Soccer franchise New York City F.C.). Another English Premier League side, Newcastle United, was bought last year by a consortium that includes the Saudi Arabia sovereign wealth fund. With seemingly bottomless budgets, enabling them to buy up all the top talent, these clubs are now—surprise, surprise—winning far more than they used to.

Soccer is simply an extreme example of a wider phenomenon. The world of golf is currently embroiled in a civil war over a new LIV Golf tour, funded by the same Saudi wealth fund that now owns Newcastle United. The Formula 1 motorsport franchise has a long history of coziness with petrostate plutocracies: It already held grand prix races in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—and last year added a fourth Gulf circuit in, of course, Qatar.

[Read: Where FIFA’s power stops: protecting workers]

Everyone understands the deal here. Qatar and the other Gulf states want to diversify their economies to survive the day the spigot of their oil-and-gas wealth runs dry. And they want to do so while protecting their autocratic regimes. To achieve this aim, they invest in sport, entertainment, tourism, and transport—in the hope of becoming sunny, low-tax centers of a future global economy, where the rich come to live, work, shop, and relax away from the cumbersome burdens of democracy, serviced by an army of poor migrant workers. Their investment in sport is merely one part of this broader strategy. We just choose to look away from the grimness.

We in the West have gone along with it because it has meant getting our hands on some of their wealth. Delighted soccer fans in England have started turning up to club games in traditional Arab dress to showcase their joy at their club’s newfound riches. My own club, Liverpool, is now on the market. Can I really say, with a straight face, that I wouldn’t quietly rejoice if some huge sovereign wealth fund bought the club so that it could continue competing at the top level, recruiting the best players and paying the highest wages? By its very nature, the cash is corrupting. Can any of us turn around and complain when we discover the World Cup has similarly been sold off?

Underlying the shame of the World Cup in Qatar and the petrostate ownership of European soccer is this banal reality: These states are our diplomatic and commercial allies. We in the West not only accept their money for our sports teams, but we buy their fossil fuels and in return sell them arms. And we seal the deal by placing our hands on weird glowing orbs in the desert to profess our friendship. To expect sports to act as some honorable exception while the rest of society is trying to make as much money as possible—regardless of the morality or long-term security of their countries—is ridiculous.

[Franklin Foer: Cancel Qatar]

The fact is, Europe has been selling itself to the highest bidder for years. Germany’s entire geopolitical strategy has been to tie itself to Russia and China—two states considered strategic threats by NATO—to create mutual dependency. Britain has auctioned off core infrastructure and assets, whether that’s meant giving China a stake in the U.K. nuclear industry or providing Russia with financial services and real-estate opportunities to wash its money. Even proud France, which once regarded yogurt as a vital national asset, is happy for its sports teams to become playthings of foreign owners.

The West is neither as rich nor as dominant in the world as it once was. It must make difficult choices that involve trade-offs. But if the plan was to maintain national wealth, security, independence, and integrity, the past couple of decades have been a disaster.

“I’ll tell you what,” Donald Trump claimed in a Republican primary debate on the way to his party’s presidential nomination in 2016: “With Hillary Clinton, I said, ‘Be at my wedding,’ and she came to my wedding. You know why? She had no choice! Because I gave.” Well, Qatar—just like Saudi Arabia, UAE, Russia, and China—has been giving to the West for years. And now we are going to the wedding.

Boris Johnson Is Still Afloat

2022-10-24T09:40:00-04:00

Rishi Sunak, not the floating man of chaos Boris Johnson, is Britain’s next prime minister. Sunak is calm, capable, controlled, and very, very rich: everything Johnson is not. Johnson’s extraordinary attempted comeback—in a bid to regain the leadership of the governing Conservative Party and the prime ministership—has ended in humiliation. Yet I’m not convinced we’ve seen the last of him.

On Saturday, Johnson flew back to Britain from his Caribbean holiday in the Dominican Republic in the hope of somehow resuming his premiership as if it hadn’t all blown up in disgrace a few months ago. Just six weeks after formally handing power over to the ill-fated Liz Truss, Johnson seems to have believed he could walk back into Downing Street like a latter-day Napoleon escaped from Elba to take command of his old troops, who, having previously mutinied, would now renew their pledge of allegiance to l’Empereur. Then came his Waterloo, but without the romance. In fact, the denouement ended up being a bathetic and banal affair: He flew home, hit the phones, discovered he didn’t have the numbers, and quit.

Of course, Johnson claimed he did have the numbers and could have become prime minister this week if he’d really wanted to. In other words, he hadn’t actually lost to his onetime protégé. Sunak, the former chancellor of the Exchequer, will today be appointed Britain’s new prime minister—a remarkable career trajectory now threatens to eclipse Johnson’s.

Sunak is a Brexit-supporting, second-generation British Indian, a practicing Hindu, and a multimillionaire tech bro with dreams of turning Britain into a low-tax, globalized Silicon Valley outside the European Union. Think of him like a more right-wing British Macron. Unlike Johnson, Sunak has the discipline and managerial know-how to make a fist of this job—at least potentially, though given the tumultuous past few years under Johnson and Truss, he starts from a weak position. The Tories in Parliament are deeply split and at their most unpopular in 30 years, seemingly headed for electoral oblivion whatever they do.

[Read: For Britain’s Tories, the answer is always Margaret Thatcher]

By claiming he did have the numbers to beat Sunak, Johnson is posing as the bigger man. In a typically bombastic statement, he portrayed his decision to pull out as a grand gesture of statesmanship. “There is a very good chance that I would be successful in the election with Conservative Party members—and that I could indeed be back in Downing Street on Friday,” he declared, unabashed. “But in the course of the last days I have sadly come to the conclusion that this would simply not be the right thing to do.” Why so, you might ask? That is not the kind of thing that Donald Trump would say. “You can’t govern effectively unless you have a united party in Parliament,” Johnson explained. And this he did not have, he implied, because the dastardly Sunak (whose resignation from the cabinet back in July had precipitated Johnson’s own exit) would not fall in behind him. Unlike Johnson himself, we were to infer, Sunak had put his ambitions before party and country. And then the kicker: “I believe I have much to offer, but I am afraid that this is simply not the right time.”

Evidently, Johnson thinks there will be a right time. “Death is nothing,” Napoleon declared, “but to live defeated and without glory is to die every day.” This is where we’re at now with Johnson. His first political death was almost bearable for him. He had—in his mind, at least—“came, seen, and conquered,” only then to be assassinated by those tiresome, moralizing little people who would one day regret having removed him from power. There was a certain glory in being denied his time in power not by defeat at the ballot box but by party machinations.

But now he has tried to overturn that judgment of his peers—and lost. He has been bested. He must live defeated without glory, something that will burn away at his very self. For Johnson, I think such a defeat will be intolerable.

[Helen Lewis: Boris Johnson’s terrible parting gift]

Unfortunately for Sunak, there is no Saint Helena equivalent on which to exile such an adversary. He will have to live haunted by his old boss. “Although he has decided not to run for PM again,” Sunak said on Sunday night, “I truly hope he continues to contribute to public life at home and abroad.” “Abroad” was quite a touch. Oh, how he must long to be able to dispatch Johnson to some foreign capital, as Winston Churchill sent his Tory rival Lord Halifax to Washington. Or perhaps to head up NATO. Or as some kind of Western envoy (read: mascot) to Kyiv. But I cannot see Johnson accepting any role of the sort. Like the former prime minister Edward Heath refusing the same gig as Halifax that the new leader, Margaret Thatcher, had offered him, Johnson will surely never lower himself to work for another leader.

A note of caution for Sunak, his party, and indeed the country: Johnson’s route back to power does not seem entirely closed off yet. The fact that Johnson was the second-most-popular choice of Conservative members of Parliament to return to the leadership suggests a reservoir of support in the House of Commons, even if it has dried up considerably from his zenith after the 2019 general-election victory. More important, Johnson remains very popular with ordinary party members, who still have the final say on who will be their leader. This time, the party managers tilted the contest by mandating a threshold of parliamentary support that Johnson could not surmount, in one day of working the phones, to get his name on a ballot of the membership; but a next time cannot be ruled out.

[Read: Britain’s guilty men and women]

These twin facts of his support mean that Johnson retains a plausible route back to the leadership of the Conservative Party, should Sunak lose the next election, which must be held between now and January 2025. By pulling out of the race while claiming, however implausibly, the moral high ground, Johnson will have a story he can sell to however many Conservative members of Parliament remain—and then to party members. It will go something like this: You got rid of an election-winning leader half way through his first term in office. I gave the party elites a chance to correct their mistake, but the backroom fixers made that impossible. And then the other chap lost power. It is time to let me finish the job.

So here’s the scenario for those desperate to see Johnson permanently flushed from the British political scene. If Johnson does return as party leader sometime after a Tory election defeat, his baleful presence could be with us until the end of the decade. Much rides on what Sunak can do to turn around the Conservatives’ divisions and dire polling numbers.

Britain’s Guilty Men and Women

2022-10-21T06:30:00-04:00

In July 1940, three journalists published a short, anonymous polemical attack on the failures of British statecraft that forever shaped Britain’s understanding of the Second World War. Guilty Men, by the pseudonymous Cato, accused 15 of Britain’s senior political figures during the interwar years of leading a once prosperous and secure empire “to the edge of national annihilation.” The war may have broken out in 1939, Cato charged, but the genesis of Britain’s misfortunes could be dated to 1929, when the world economy imploded and a monstrous regime of little men took over in London.

Something similar has happened again. And once again, it is time these culprits quit the stage.

Today, Britain is very much not on the edge of national annihilation, whatever the hyperbolic coverage of the past few weeks might suggest. But it is in the grip of chaotic mismanagement that has left the country poorer and weaker, having lost its fourth prime minister in six turbulent years since the Brexit referendum and with an economy pushed close to its breaking point. The next prime minister, whoever that may be, will face an extraordinary set of challenges largely of their Conservative Party’s own making. But when did this era of the small people begin? What was its genesis?

All such start dates are unsatisfactory—calamities are always seeded by events that came before. Some will argue it was the 2016 vote for Brexit, but that lets off the hook those who legislated for it without any plan to enact it. At the other end of the spectrum from that too-recent convulsion, 1990 offers a deeper origin story. That was the year Margaret Thatcher was pulled from office and replaced by John Major, a man no one thinks of as a giant. Major inherited a country in a stronger position than at any time since the 1960s, yet handed over power to Tony Blair having frittered away the Conservative Party’s reputation for economic management.

He had also signed up to a new European treaty that left a fatal tension at the heart of Britain’s membership in the European Union. Major’s European compromise left Britain inside the European Union but outside its single currency. In time, the inherent tension in this position would reveal itself in disastrous fashion—the historian Niall Ferguson has called it “Brexit 1.0.”

Still, all of the blame for today’s problems cannot be laid at Major’s door; his successors had time and options for how to deal with the problems he left. A second origin date, then, might be 1997, when Tony Blair came to power. Blair proved unable to change Major’s compromise and pursued instead a series of radical constitutional changes that slowly undermined the unity of the country he thought he was building.

[Brian Klaas: What happened to Liz Truss can’t happen here]

When Blair left office in 2007, the country was still relatively unified and prosperous. It fell to Gordon Brown, Blair’s replacement, to watch everything explode in the great financial crisis. All of these milestones—1990, 1997, and 2007—have legitimate claims to be the genesis of the current crisis. Yet none quite fits. The regime of little men had not begun. That came in 2010.

For the past 12 years, Britain has been led by a succession of Conservative prime ministers—each, like Russian dolls, somehow smaller than the last—who have contrived to leave the country in a worse state than it was when they took over. By the time Liz Truss assumed office last month, she evidently had no conception of the damage done by this period of Tory rule, how exposed Britain had become, how fragile, how vulnerable. Without Truss realizing it, Britain had become too weak to cope with a leader so small.

The cast list of guilty men and women who left Britain in this position must, therefore, include the unwitting Truss and her hapless chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng. But they were merely the clowns ushered in at the end of the performance. The stars of the show were the three prime ministers before her—Boris Johnson, Theresa May, and David Cameron—with supporting roles for the former chancellor George Osborne and former Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg. Each of these men and women helped break down the country’s immune system before Truss and Kwarteng sent it into a state of paralyzed shock. In this absurd hospital drama, there were also walk-on parts for two former Labour leaders, Ed Miliband and Jeremy Corbyn. And Boris Johnson is now attempting a comeback!

These are the guilty men and women of today.

The story begins in the Rose Garden of 10 Downing Street on a spring day in May 2010. The Conservative Cameron and the Liberal Democrat Clegg, seemingly best buddies, stood hailing the creation of the first peacetime coalition government in Britain since that of Stanley Baldwin and Ramsay MacDonald in 1931, coming together in the national interest to tackle the once-in-a-century economic crisis that had left a giant hole in the public finances. Here were the two golden boys of their parties: calm, confident, educated, rich. They were moderate and modernizing, the impeccable products of their impeccable backgrounds, the new Blairs for a new era. And on they marched to calamity.

Both Cameron and Clegg had been elected leader of their respective parties through American-style primaries. Back then, such votes were lauded as “democratization,” much-needed medicine to treat an ailing old constitution. They were no such thing. Rather than injecting more democracy into the process, they did the opposite—empowering tiny caucuses to send their minority tribunes to challenge parliamentary rule.

After the election, Labour tried its own version, elevating Ed Miliband, against the wishes of Labour members of Parliament. In time, Miliband would further “modernize” the process with rule changes that would send the party careering toward populist extremism and electoral annihilation under Jeremy Corbyn. In time, such institutional vandalism would have dire consequences for both the Conservative and Labour Parties, and therefore the country.

Meanwhile, Cameron and Clegg went to work hacking back public spending with extraordinary severity. The result was that Britain experienced the slowest economic recovery in its history, which meant that the coalition government failed to balance the books as it had hoped—exactly, in fact, as Labour had warned would happen. Britain had bailed out the bankers and then watched them get rich while the rest of the country got poorer. No wonder people were angry. Even though Cameron and Clegg would later rail against the pro-Brexit populists who dismissed the “experts” who warned against leaving the EU, they themselves ignored the economic-expert consensus that warned against such deep levels of austerity.

By the time Cameron became prime minister, the global financial crisis had morphed into a European crisis that threatened the very existence of the euro. At this point, the tension built into Britain’s European compromise by Major two decades earlier finally snapped. Faced with a potentially fatal crisis, the euro-zone countries clubbed together to force through emergency reforms to help stabilize their currency. As they did so, Cameron began to panic about the threat to British interests from a more cohesive euro-zone bloc—which was an inevitable consequence of Major’s compromise. After Cameron’s demands for new safeguards to those interests were ignored, he vetoed the euro zone’s reforms. The euro zone went ahead with them anyway. One year into Cameron’s premiership, in 2011, the nightmare of British isolation within the EU had come true.

For the next five years, the British prime minister took a series of gambles that ended in disaster. Alarmed by his veto failure, Cameron concluded that Britain needed to renegotiate its membership entirely—and put it to voters in a referendum, which he promised in 2013. By then he had also agreed to a referendum on Scottish independence. Britain’s future was on the line not once but twice.

[Helen Lewis: Liz Truss fought the lettuce, and the lettuce won]

The first of these contests, the Scottish referendum in 2014, Cameron won—but by only the slimmest of margins. When, a year later, he campaigned for reelection warning English voters of the danger of domination by the Scots, the result was a Tory victory that guaranteed an EU referendum, a defeat for the Liberal Democrat coalition partner Clegg, and a revolution in Scotland as the pro-independence nationalist party swept the board. Britain is now permanently under the threat of breakup.

A year after his election victory, Cameron had to keep his promise of a referendum on Europe, lost, and resigned. As with the Scottish case, he had refused to countenance any preparations for the possibility of a winning Leave vote. Cameron left behind a country divided and a Parliament that did not want Brexit but was tasked with delivering it without any idea how. By any estimation, it was a catastrophic miscarriage of statecraft.

With the departures of Cameron, Clegg, and Osborne—to the comfort of corporate jobs or consultancies—the next set of characters took the stage for Act II. When the chief protagonists of the Leave campaign, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, fell out, the task of delivering Brexit became Theresa May’s. May was a serious, qualified, thoughtful Conservative who had opposed Brexit but now assumed responsibility for it. But she was simply not up to the job. Being prime minister requires not just diligence and seriousness but political acumen and an ability to lead. She had too little of either.

And so, she failed in the one overarching purpose of her premiership: to enact the result of the referendum. She set contradictory redlines, failed to stick to them, struck agreements Parliament would not accept, prevaricated to the point of obstinacy, and finally lost the support of her party and Parliament. On top of all this, she called an election she did not need to hold, in 2017, and in doing so exposed her limitations for all to see.

May was hampered throughout her troubled final years as prime minister with a leader of the opposition in Jeremy Corbyn, who was ideologically hostile to any conciliation or compromise with the Tories, empowered by both his own sense of righteous purity and the mandate he had twice received from Labour Party members. He, after all, had a mandate outside Parliament.

And once again, when everything fell apart, the leadership passed along with the country in a chaotic stasis far worse than before.

In 2019, Boris Johnson finally grabbed the long-sought crown—only to find a way to lose it in disgrace three years later. Despite his brief tenure, Johnson remains one of the most influential—and notorious—figures in postwar British history. Without him, the country likely would not have voted for Brexit in the first place, let alone seen it pushed through Parliament.

For his first six months in the job, Johnson thrashed around, threatening, cajoling, bargaining, and eventually accepting the terms offered him. As the price of “getting Brexit done,” he accepted the economic division of the U.K., carving off Northern Ireland from Great Britain. Yet it was not his policies that led to his downfall but his moral incontinence, attending parties in Downing Street while putting the country in lockdown, defending indefensible colleagues, lying and avoiding all responsibility. In the end, Conservative members of Parliament had enough and got rid of him, paving the way for the smallest guilty person of all: Liz Truss.

Something about Truss was immediately dispiriting. Faced with an extraordinary moment in the nation’s history, when Queen Elizabeth died after 70 years on the throne, Truss’s stilted eulogy was the equivalent of sending a condolence card from Hallmark.

[Read: The Liz Truss travesty becomes Britain’s humiliation]

And then her premiership exploded—and she had mined it herself. Truss had won the crown by promising to retain what was good about Johnson’s administration but to go further and faster than he’d dared. Her only success was to make Johnson look like a model of prudence.

In their first act in power, Truss and Kwarteng blew up the British government’s reputation for economic competence—and with it went the household budgets of Middle England. Together, they must take their place in the cast of final guilty men and women in our tawdry modern morality tale. In her departure, Truss offered little defense and no apology, confirming her unfitness for office. The fact that she got there at all only reveals the smallness of the regime that awarded her the role.

So now Britain is once again looking for a new prime minister. Boris Johnson is said to be flying home from the Caribbean to enter the fray, dreaming of a Churchillian redemption. The two men who declared him unfit for office—Rishi Sunak and Michael Gove—now also have another shot at power. A fourth contender, Penny Mordaunt, is also auditioning as a Thatcher impersonator. In this company, only Sunak, who warned of the idiocy of Truss’s crash economic program, has much credibility.

To some, the Guilty Men of the 1930s were unfairly maligned. Even one of the pamphlet’s true authors, the journalist Michael Foot—decades later a singularly unsuccessful Labour Party leader himself—subsequently admitted to the polemic’s “unrelenting crudity.” Guilty Men was indeed something of a character assassination of Neville Chamberlain, Baldwin, and MacDonald, among others. Many historians now say these appeasers of the 1930s bought their country much-needed time.

Perhaps a similar revisionism will emerge about the years of Tory misrule. Cameron inherited an economy battered by the great financial crisis and an unmanageable tension with Europe. May was squeezed into an impossible position by domestic and European intransigence. And Johnson did the best he could to rescue a bad situation. Even Truss might be explained away as a symptom of a deeper malaise.

Perhaps. But each, unquestionably, left their country poorer, weaker, angrier, and more divided. Over the past 12 years, Britain has degraded. A sense of decay fills the air, and so, too, a feeling of genuine public fury.

In 1940, Cato demanded that the Guilty Men leave the political stage of their own accord “and so make an essential contribution to the victory upon which all are implacably resolved.” Now, surely, it is time for the party that enabled the guilty of today to heed Cato’s advice: In the name of God, go!

Don’t Blame Brexit

2022-10-19T07:00:00-04:00

Even before Britain left the European Union, and certainly after it finally did in 2020, half the country warned of impending doom. And now the country is in the grip of an economic crisis. The pound is falling. The prime minister is a joke. Europe must be the answer!

No, in fact: The extraordinary political and economic crisis unfolding in Britain is not Brexit’s fault. But neither is Brexit entirely innocent. This is the unpalatable truth that Britain’s pro- and anti-Brexit tribes both need to face up to, if the country is to stand any chance of climbing out of the extraordinarily deep hole it has dug for itself. Given Britain’s postwar history, I’m not holding my breath.

Put simply, things were bad in Britain long before Prime Minister Liz Truss blew up the economy. They were bad before Boris Johnson came to power and bad before Theresa May took charge. And they were bad long before the country voted to leave the EU in June 2016. Indeed, one of the reasons people voted to leave the EU was because things weren’t very good. The truth is that Britain’s economy has been struggling to recover from the global financial crisis that began in 2008—and with it, the political settlement that underpinned the country’s apparently golden years of Tony Blair’s premiership. From that point on, wages stagnated, public services deteriorated, and voters—understandably—got ever more angry.

In politics, though, a lot of things can be true at once. Frustrated Brexiteers can remind people that all was not rosy in Britain before Brexit. They can argue that leaving the EU did not require a future prime minister to slash taxes with no indication of how she planned to pay for those cuts. And they can point out that Britain’s first post-Brexit prime minister, Boris Johnson, did the opposite from 2019 to 2022, when he raised taxes to pay for extra spending on elder care and the National Health Service, having promised—in the campaign that led to the biggest Tory election victory in 30 years—an end to austerity.

[Read: The Liz Truss travesty becomes Britain’s humiliation]

Yet pretending Brexit has nothing to do with the country’s current woes is equally self-serving. About half of the giant fiscal hole that now exists as a result of Truss’s tax-cutting madness is attributable to the permanently lower economic-growth forecast caused by Brexit. In other words, “Trussonomics” would have been less foolhardy inside the EU than out. Also true is that Brexit helped create today’s modern Conservative Party, which in turn created a prime minister who promised to do stupid things.

The point is, doing stupid shit, as Barack Obama might say, remains stupid whether you’re inside or outside the EU. You can pursue a balanced budget inside the EU, as Germany does, or not, as Greece didn’t. And Britain was perfectly capable of disastrous acts of self-harm before Brexit came along. The closest parallel to Truss’s absurd self-immolation, after all, is “Black Wednesday,” in 1992, when John Major’s government tried to keep the pound inside the system that preceded the European single currency. This was the last time Britain tried, and failed, to defy economic reality, and it wasted billions of pounds in the process—in pursuit of pro-European policies that didn’t make sense. Today, the opposite is the case, but the result is the same.

Even if Britain has been languishing in the economic doldrums since the global financial crisis, laying the blame there seems too reductive. The harder truth is that Britain has been failing for longer still. Since the turn of the century, in fact, Britain has been lamentably mismanaged. The serial failures encompass its military missions in Iraq and Afghanistan, its regulatory regime in the great financial crisis, its political elite during Brexit, and its institutional machinery during the pandemic. Westminster devolved power to Scotland in the hope of neutering secessionism, only to see the reverse happen. It gave voters a referendum on leaving the EU without any idea of how it would do so if they voted yes. And when it found itself outmaneuvered during the Brexit negotiations, it signed up for the economic division of its own country, knowing that this would imperil the fragile political settlement in Northern Ireland. In short, Britain has done a lot of stupid shit.

[Read: How Europe will take on Britain after Brexit]

Of course, other countries have also struggled during the pandemic, but the U.K.’s vaccine-research program will have saved millions of lives worldwide. Unlike some backsliding democracies, Britain does not have leaders who seek to overturn the results of elections. Despite the recent turbulence and humiliation, the country remains as wealthy as France. But the bigger picture is unflattering: Unlike in France, secessionist nationalisms are only one referendum from success, and the governing elite no longer seem to have a coherent strategy for what to do next.

When faced with such challenges, the impulse to reach for simple, populist explanations—it’s all Brexit’s fault!—is understandable. To believe that the country’s problems can be explained by a single act of stupidity, rather than by structural issues much harder to rectify, is, after all, comforting.

A quick look at Britain’s economic growth since 1945 shows that claims of decline and resurrection, before and after Europe, before and after Thatcher, are not all they seem. In figures provided to me by the Centre for European Reform, a London-based think tank, Britain’s average GDP growth rate (in real terms) from 1945 to 1973—outside what was then called the European Common Market—was 2.8 percent. From 1974 to 2008—with Britain a full member of the European Economic Community, as it became before its final form as the EU—this fell to 2.3 percent. From 2009 to 2019, between the financial crisis and Brexit, this dropped further to 1.3 percent. Britain’s growth rate, in other words, has shown a long-term slowdown irrespective of membership in Europe, much like that of the rest of the West. When compared with the growth rate of other countries, however, Britain’s performance looks better in Europe than out. Outside, its economy grew about half as quickly as France’s and Germany’s did. Inside, up until 2016, it grew at roughly the same rate; after Brexit, it slowed slightly. Which figures are more significant? That depends on what story you’re trying to tell about in or out.

[From the July/August 2021 issue: The minister of chaos]

The research for a book I am writing on Britain’s troubled relationship with Europe has clarified for me that delusion is the consistent strand uniting almost all U.K. governments since 1945, whether enthusiastically pro-European or skeptically anti-European. Throughout this time, Europe has hovered in the public mind as either the great savior or the great Satan, but always as the catch-all explanation. If only Britain would join Europe, some said. If only Britain would leave Europe, others later said. Now some are back to thinking, If only Britain would rejoin.

Each explanation is easier than settling in for decades of boring good government supported by effective institutions, sound money, and wise investment. Even so, Europe might still be part of the answer—or it might not. But Europe alone will not be the answer. That lies within Britain itself. If the country wants to succeed, it needs to stop obsessing about its reputation beyond its borders and the magical powers of Europe, and start obsessing about the systemic failures that are Britain’s alone and no one else’s. History does not make me optimistic that it will.

The Liz Truss Travesty Becomes Britain’s Humiliation

2022-10-14T12:06:00-04:00

For the first time in my adult life, there is a genuine sense of decay in Britain—a realization that something has been lost that will be difficult to recover, something more profound than pounds and pence, political personalities, or even prime ministers. Over the past three weeks, the U.K. has been gripped by a crisis of crushing stupidity, one that has gone beyond all the turmoil of Brexit, Boris, even the great bank bailouts of 2007, and touched that most precious of things: core national credibility.

Today, we had the absurd spectacle of a prime minister, barely a month into the job, abandoning the central tax-cutting purpose of her premiership and sacking her closest political ally, who had implemented this vision. This all in aid of a vain and surely doomed attempt to cling to power, after the markets concluded that her policies were insane. Never before has Britain found itself in such a humiliatingly risible position. It is the stuff of nightmares: the national equivalent of getting caught short onstage in front of your entire school because you chose not to go to the bathroom when you had the chance.

As hard as it is to get across the sheer scale of idiotic farce now unfolding, let’s try. Just last month, on September 6, Liz Truss replaced Boris Johnson as prime minister. Johnson had been forced to resign because Conservative members of Parliament decided he was unfit for office, after, among other things, he had been fined by the police for attending his own birthday party during lockdown. Truss won the race to replace Johnson by presenting herself as both the continuity candidate—the loyal follower who did not kill Caesar—and the new guard who would do away with all the boring bits of Johnsonism, such as raising taxes to pay for things.

What Britain needed, Truss argued, was a tax-cutting bonanza to set it free. Her rival for the leadership was Johnson’s chancellor, Rishi Sunak, who argued for fiscal responsibility and warned that such a reckless policy would lead to a run on the pound and a calamitous series of mortgage-rate rises. Given this choice, the electorate for the Tory leadership—the roughly 170,000 members of the Conservative Party—preferred the magical money tree.

So, on September 23—two and a half weeks after taking over as prime minister—Truss and her new chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, announced an extraordinary array of tax cuts without any indication of how they would be paid for. They called this their “plan for growth.”

And then there was a run on the pound and a calamitous series of mortgage-rate rises.

The reaction to Truss’s plan was immediate and savage. The markets responded with horror at the sudden gaping hole in Britain’s budget. The pound collapsed against the dollar, almost reaching an unprecedented parity, and the cost of government borrowing rocketed. Huge interest-rate increases by the Bank of England began to be priced in as the only way to protect the currency, which, of course, meant stepping on the brakes after Truss had put her foot on the accelerator.

[Helen Lewis: Boris Johnson’s terrible parting gift]

This, in turn, led ordinary banks to start hiking their mortgage rates in expectation of what was coming, just as Sunak had warned, which then sent the property-owning middle classes into a tailspin as they rushed to lock in new rates before the numbers spiked even further. Suddenly, the tax-cutting budget to get Britain growing again had turned into a massive hit on Middle England. Even the International Monetary Fund departed from protocol to issue a sharp rebuke to Truss’s government.

Naturally, Truss’s poll ratings—already low—took a nosedive, sending her to unheard-of levels of unpopularity (currently, a minus-55-point net approval rating). The Labour Party, led by the reassuringly dull Keir Starmer, surged to a 30-point lead. In a single act of folly, Truss had destroyed her premiership and her party’s reputation while resurrecting Labour’s, which had only just been recovering from its own bout of insanity under Jeremy Corbyn.

In a desperate scramble to save herself by reassuring the markets that Britain had not gone mad, Truss began abandoning bits of her “mini budget.” First went the decision—spectacularly unpopular at a time of runaway inflation squeezing everyone—to scrap the top rate of tax for those earning more than £150,000. Then she brought forward the date when the government would reveal how it was going to pay for all its tax cuts, which created the obvious concern that a fresh round of austerity was on its way. And then, today, she went the whole hog, sacking her chancellor and abandoning even more of her plan.

In a single act of stupidity, Truss managed to blow up Johnson’s markedly redistributive election-winning platform—and therefore his coalition, which included disaffected Labour voters from the poorer north of England. Instead of spending more on public services, Truss detonated an economic bomb under the middle classes—first, by lifting the cap on bankers’ bonuses and cutting taxes for the rich, and then, faced with market turmoil, by scrambling around for new spending cuts. It would be hard to design a more catastrophic act of political self-immolation.

Truss’s plan turned out to be like one of those booby traps in an Indiana Jones movie, triggering the collapse of a roof covered in deadly spikes. Whichever way she now turns, she seems destined to be impaled on a spike of her own creation. Having given up on much of her plan for growth, she has removed the very point of Liz Truss. But Liz Truss remaining prime minister means that the markets are likely to continue their squeeze. She has nowhere to go but political death.

[Tom McTague: For Britain’s Tories, the answer is always Margaret Thatcher]

Parallels for such an extraordinary demise of a prime minister’s authority are all but impossible to find. In the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, one prime minister after another lost power after failing to achieve the central purpose of their government, or experiencing a policy fiasco so dreadful that it sapped their will to carry on in the job. Anthony Eden left office a few months after the catastrophe of Suez, too ill to continue. His replacement, Harold Macmillan, turned things around but left under a cloud after failing in his mission to take Britain into Europe. Harold Wilson held himself up as a man with a plan who would get Britain moving out of its stasis, but was defeated in 1970, having abandoned his failed plan for growth. Edward Heath followed suit, taking Britain into Europe but abandoning his central economic policies when things got tough in the ’70s. One after another, prime ministers came and went, none achieving all that they wanted.

But Britain has never had so epic a collapse as this, nor a prime minister as deeply, painfully unimpressive—the worst prime minister ever, as the historian Dominic Sandbrook put it. When the Queen died, it fell to Truss to speak for the nation. She couldn’t, and she will never get another chance. Her downfall is different from those of her predecessors, for both its speed and what it reveals about Britain.

Britain has been broke before. It was in this position after the war when it needed U.S. assistance, and then again in the late ’70s when it was bailed out by the IMF. It was battered by the markets in 1992 when John Major’s economic strategy collapsed.

What’s happening now is entirely new: the very real prospect that the markets will force a change of prime minister before an election. They have already forced a change in policy. Truss’s problems are so acute that Tory MPs are discussing removing her as a serious option, perhaps their only one. If Truss is removed any time soon, hers would be the shortest premiership in British history, beating George Canning’s 119-day tenure in 1827. And he died in office.

Those considering this drastic course are doing so, in large part, to restore calm and confidence to the markets, not simply to voters. This has not happened before and would surely act like a knife to the body politic, leaving a permanent scar on the country’s reputation.

[Read: The hobbit king]

An old friend who died recently once told me a story about economic decline that stuck with me. He had traveled the world as a journalist for Reuters and said Argentina was the best place he’d ever lived. But that was before its collapse into chaos, populism, and crisis in the late 1990s. I last saw him in 2019; he was living in Brussels then, but told me that he worried some similar decline was happening in Britain.

Back then, I dismissed his fears. I’d lived through the turmoil of Afghanistan and Iraq, the global financial crisis and Brexit. I’d seen Scotland coming close to seceding from the country, David Cameron’s austerity leading to calamity, Boris Johnson’s turbulent administration, and Jeremy Corbyn leading Labour to electoral oblivion. But through it all, Britain had plodded along, not exactly prospering as it once had but inching forward nonetheless. Its institutions did their job, the constitution held up, people’s lives went on much as they always had.

And then Liz Truss came along.

Now I think of my friend, and I begin to wonder. We are now almost 15 years past the seismic financial crisis of 2008 and on to our fifth prime minister. Britain was once a rich country, seemingly well governed with institutions that sat like sedimentary rock on its surface, solid and everlasting. Today it is very obviously not a rich country or well governed, but a poor country, badly governed, with weak institutions. In trying to reverse this reality, Truss has made it visible for all to see.

The Hobbit King

2022-09-18T06:00:00-04:00

The Queen is dead. Long live the King. How strange this process, how archaic and theatrical, moving and melancholy, mixing the worlds of King Arthur and Netflix. We are often told that it is this connection to the deep past that gives monarchy its meaning. But as the world prepares for the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II in London tomorrow, the unchanging continuity is less significant than the subtle evolution of the nation that it conceals.

In burying its longest-serving monarch, Britain buries a part of itself too: the country it once was but is no more. And this is how it should be. When the Queen’s father, King George VI, was laid to rest in 1952, Britain said goodbye to its last imperial monarch, the man who had been the emperor of India. With his death—followed 13 years later by Winston Churchill’s—passed the imperial age. Elizabeth’s inheritance in 1952—despite much of the U.S. commentary over the past week—was the first postimperial crown in British history. Elizabeth was the monarch not of an empire but of a loose, global commonwealth sitting awkwardly in a distinctly American imperium. And yet hers was still a global role. Queen Elizabeth, the Queen, was a totem of this global Britain, erected at the very moment that the tide of British power began its long turn toward the shore.

Tomorrow’s ceremony in London, then, marks not just the end of a reign, but the passing of an age. It is hard to imagine that London will ever witness such a gathering of world leaders again. In 1952, after all, President Harry Truman did not feel it necessary to turn up at King George VI’s funeral, despite the connection forged during the Second World War. Today, the American Caesar himself will arrive, alongside the emperor of Japan, the president of France, the king of Spain, and countless other royals, dignitaries, and prime ministers. Like the Japanese maple tree that filled Clive James’s imagination at the end of his life, the funeral of Elizabeth offers “a vision of a world that shone so brightly at the last, and then was gone.”

[Read: The queen of the world]

The Queen leaves behind an altogether different crown than the one that she inherited: not global, but national. Charles is the head of the Commonwealth, like his mother, and the King of Australia, New Zealand, and Canada as well as the United Kingdom. But in 1952, when Elizabeth was crowned, the Australian prime minister, Robert Menzies, felt no shame declaring himself British. That world has gone.

Some will see only shame in this shrinking of Britain’s horizons. To them, perhaps, Charles is an embarrassing emblem of Brexit Britain, of a country that has turned in on itself—no longer the country of Elizabeth, but that of a drab new provincialism made all the more absurd by Britain’s apparent desire to cling to lost grandeur. I’m afraid I see almost the exact opposite.

Far from resisting such royal parochialism, Britain should embrace Charles as the emblem of its new normal age. Very few people in the world know the names of the Dutch, Danish, or Norwegian monarchs, but their citizens are much more prosperous and their kingdoms more settled. If Charles joins them in comparative anonymity, that should be celebrated.

In 1962, a decade into Britain’s second Elizabethan age, the American grandee Dean Acheson caused real hurt and anger in London by declaring that Britain had lost an empire but had yet to find a role. The entire reign of Elizabeth was filled with her chief ministers searching for the answer to this challenge. But with her passing, Britain can cease its search. Not playing a central role in the great game is a perfectly noble aspiration, a liberating opportunity—and one that King Charles is well suited to symbolize.

(Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Image)

There is a poignant image of the young Queen Elizabeth arriving home from Kenya following the sudden death of her father in 1952, of the stiff, somber backs of Britain’s greatest generation of leaders waiting on the tarmac at Heathrow to greet their new sovereign. From right to left, we see Winston Churchill, the Labour leader Clement Attlee, and Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, each an ardent monarchist committed to maintaining Britain’s power and influence in the world. By 1956, none was in power. Harold Macmillan was prime minister following Britain’s humiliation at Suez, the lion’s last roar.

[From the December 1943 issue: The education of a queen]

Macmillan was the first of Britain’s prime ministers who concluded that the answer to Acheson’s famous question was Europe. If Britain could only force its way into the grand new federal project under way on the continent, it would be able to protect its global influence. From the very beginning, then, joining Europe was motivated not by some Damascene realization that decline was inevitable—an acceptance of postimperial reality—but by the belief that such decline could be averted. It was the same belief that led Charles de Gaulle to block British entry, for he, too, saw Europe as the means to protect national grandeur. If Europe has been the means for any country’s resurrection, though, that country is Germany, not Britain or France.

In the 1960s and ’70s, Europe was seen as the answer to Britain’s problems, the spur for economic reform and the solution to its lost role in the world. Every prime minister who followed Macmillan shared that conclusion—until Boris Johnson. Each placed the maintenance of British influence at the center of their foreign policy, just as Churchill, Attlee, and Eden had. Even today, Liz Truss’s government, like Johnson’s, promises to create a new Global Britain.

Brexit, like Queen Elizabeth, is often explained away as an artifact of latent British imperialism. While there are no doubt some Brexiteers who yearn for a lost age of British greatness, Brexit is far less an expression of imperial nostalgia than a reflection of the desire not to have a global role: to return to the hobbit hole and be left alone to conserve the Shire. It was those who favored Britain remaining in Europe who feared the loss of British prestige, power, and influence on the continent, and who spoke of disappointing the Americans and the country finding itself isolated.

“This was Frodo and Sam’s own country,” wrote J. R. R. Tolkien in the final chapters of The Lord of the Rings. “And they found out now that they cared about it more than any other place in the world.” He was talking about his own feelings, but also the deep feeling of old England.

In Tolkien’s epic, the Shire had been monstrously transformed while the hobbits were away on their adventure. “The pleasant row of old hobbit-holes in the bank on the north side of the Pool were deserted, and their little gardens that used to run down bright to the water’s edge were rank with weeds,” Tolkien wrote. “And looking with dismay up the road towards Bag End they saw a tall chimney of brick in the distance. It was pouring out black smoke into the evening air.”

This sort of localism is, I think, far closer to the animating impulse of Brexit than a longing for a return to global power is. It is the impulse that saw Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn, opposed to any and all British interventions abroad and committed to rebuilding the Britain that briefly existed in his postwar youth, come close to power in 2017. It is the impulse behind the desire to “take back control” in order to spend less money on the European Union and more on the national health service. It is the desire to conserve what exists at home, not the desire to conserve British power abroad.

[Read: How Britain falls apart]

Today, regardless of the rights and wrongs of Brexit, the instinct to return to the Shire seems entirely reasonable. Britain, like the Shire, has no shortage of problems requiring repair. Much of the country is poor by European standards. The nation itself seems to have lost the sense of collective identity required for any country to hold together for very long, and breakaway nationalists govern in two parts of the kingdom.

Returning to the hobbit hole does not mean that Britain must stop caring about the world beyond the Shire. It can carry on arming and training Ukrainians, using its voice at the United Nations Security Council and NATO. But it does mean making decisions free from the incessant desire to protect influence.

“When things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them,” Frodo declares after deciding that he must leave the Shire. Perhaps the same is true with Elizabeth.

In many respects Charles is remarkably well suited to the role of Hobbit King that now lies open to him. Like George III, the man who famously lost America and embraced his image as “Farmer George,” there is something of the bluff country squire to Charles. He is far more interested in the benefits of traditional English hedgerows than the great, global glory of Britain. His orientation seems more national than international.

Today, Charles is more obviously the inheritor of British Tolkienism than of his mother’s Elizabethan globalism. Like Tolkien, Charles’s conservationism is both romantic and confounding, so Tory in its instinct that it ends up having far more in common with modern left-wing environmentalism than the free-market ideology of today’s right. The growth-at-all-costs Liz Truss yearns for more tall chimneys, not fewer.

In Charles’s first few days on the job, he gave an indication of the national role he clearly feels he must embody by visiting England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. The very fact that Charles’s first act was to visit each of the four home nations of his kingdom is an indication of that kingdom’s fragility. Even in his speeches, when he talks of his “realms” abroad, he is speaking not as a monarch who is equally Australian, but as one who is primarily British.

[Helen Lewis: The second Elizabethan age has ended]

Ultimately, it will not be Charles who defines his age. His crown sits atop a nation constantly being built and rebuilt by others. Britain’s voters and leaders will decide what sort of country Britain wants to be. Does it wish to be global, European, or national? Perhaps a bit of each. Does it wish to be British, though, or English, Scottish, Welsh, and Northern Irish? With the passing of the age of Elizabeth, Britain seems unclear as to the answer.

Should we find ourselves back here in 20 years, burying Charles, the age that takes his name will not be judged in reference to his reputation in the world or the number of presidents who turn up to pay their respects. Whether or not Australia has become a republic will be largely irrelevant. If the kingdom itself remains united, the Shire settled and prosperous, and the hedgerows well tended, the Caroline age will be judged a success.

For one more day, London is the center of the world; then Britain should embrace the beauty of its autumn days.

The Queen of the World is dead; long live the Hobbit King.

The Queen of the World

2022-09-08T14:46:00-04:00

Queen Elizabeth II’s longevity alone places her in the pantheon of royal greats. At the time of her death, at Balmoral Castle today, she had served 70 years as Queen—the longest of any sovereign in the English monarchy’s 1,000-year history. But it is not simply her longevity that marks her for greatness, but her ability to stay relevant as the world changed around her.

She was the product of ancestral inheritance but was more popular than any of her prime ministers and remained head of state in countries around the world because of public support. She was in a sense a democratic Queen, a progressive conservative, an aristocratic multiculturalist.

Queen Elizabeth was a constitutional monarch, not a political leader with real powers, and one who was required to serve an ever-changing set of realms, peoples, institutions, and ideas that were no longer as obviously compatible as they had been when she ascended to the throne. The Queen’s great achievement was to honor the commitment she made to an imperial nation and its empire as a princess even as it became a multiethnic state and a Commonwealth.

When the Queen devoted her whole life to the service of Britain’s “great imperial family,” she meant it and honored it. And she did so in a way that brought more harmony than discord. Even as her nation’s influence shrank, the world embraced her.

Queen Elizabeth II during a Commonwealth visit to the Caribbean, March 1966 (Express / Hulton Archive / Getty)

1. The Global Introduction

In October 1940, a teenage Princess Elizabeth gave the first of what would be a lifetime of public speeches designed to move, embolden, and steady the nerves of an imperiled empire. At the time, the British empire was standing alone against Nazi Germany: France had been crushed, the Soviet Union had made a deal with Hitler, and the United States remained aloof from World War II. Elizabeth and her sister, Margaret, had traveled with their parents to record a message for the BBC that would be broadcast to “the children of the empire,” as well as children in the U.S.

The recording offers a glimpse of a time and place that is gone, as well as the first look at this representative of a new age, the age of Elizabeth. Hers would be an age not of world war and European empires, but of imperial retreat and American expansion; of the Cold War and the apparent end of history; of nationalism and globalization; of the space race and the internet.

For the 14-year-old princess, none of this was visible that day in 1940. The world that existed then faced the prospect of a Nazi-dominated Europe. Ostensibly, her message was to the children evacuated to the British countryside and to the Greater Britain that then existed beyond the seas, to evade German aerial bombardment of cities. In her clipped but childish tones, the young Elizabeth marvels at the lives being led in these far-flung corners of the world. “All the new sights you must be seeing, and the adventures you must be having,” she says, as if reading an exciting bedtime story. But then she turns to the central thrust of the message: a plea. “I am sure that you, too, are often thinking of the Old Country. I know you won’t forget us.”

[Read: How The Crown, and its clothes, transform power]

Here was the vulnerability at the core of Princess Elizabeth’s address. The Old Country was in trouble and needed help. Princess Elizabeth had been enlisted to ask for it, to do her duty—a task she would perform for decades to come.

During her reign, she weathered an array of crises, from her clashes with Margaret Thatcher to her mishandling of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. In doing so, she became the focus of something akin to a secular religion, the royalist historian David Starkey has noted, a form of “British Shintoism,” according to others such as Philip Murphy, a professor of British and Commonwealth history at the University of London.

Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor was born on April 21, 1926, as a princess to not simply a king but an emperor. She became Queen to a multitude of realms. A child of empire, European supremacy, and the old order—even the old faith, Anglican Christianity—she came to see it as her solemn duty to represent all the peoples and religions of the Commonwealth.

This duty created friction during her reign, but it made her different from any other European monarch and, paradoxically, kept her modern. A great irony of Queen Elizabeth II is that the most penetrating criticism of her reign came not from the republican left but from the nationalist right, parts of which saw past her image of continuity and tradition to the deep change that her rule actually represented.

2. The Vow

On Princess Elizabeth’s 21st birthday, she delivered a radio broadcast that would define her life. Addressing all “the peoples of the British Commonwealth and Empire,” and specifically “the youth of the British family of nations,” she asked for their permission to speak as their representative. Delivered from Cape Town, South Africa, this was not a message to England, or Britain, or even the United Kingdom, but to the already fading empire.

The message was designed to inspire, but also to begin a transition. The princess declared that just as England had saved Europe from Napoleonic domination in the 19th century, the British empire had saved the world from Hitler in the 20th. The task now before the empire was just as pressing, she said: It needed to save itself.

“If we all go forward together with an unwavering faith, a high courage, and a quiet heart,” Elizabeth said, “we shall be able to make of this ancient commonwealth, which we all love so dearly, an even grander thing.” In doing so, the princess, with a politician’s sleight of hand, had endowed a relatively new construct, the British Commonwealth, with the myth of ancient roots. “I declare before you all,” she continued, “that my whole life whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.”

In 1947, such a commitment could still be made without embarrassment. Formally, India, the jewel in the British imperial crown, was not yet independent, though the legal process was under way and would become reality within months. The last vestiges of royal connection to Ireland had similarly not yet been cut. Soon, however, this apparently “ancient” family would undergo a revolution.

[Read: The first Brexit was theological]

In the early hours of February 6, 1952, King George VI, Elizabeth’s father, died in his sleep. She was in Kenya when she learned that she had become Queen. Prime Minister Winston Churchill broadcast the news, describing the Crown as “the magic link, which unites our loosely bound but strongly interwoven commonwealth of nations.” And yet, just five years after Elizabeth’s Cape Town address, the world had already changed to such an extent that to speak of a great imperial family, as Elizabeth had done, was no longer appropriate. By 1952, for example, India was not only independent, but a republic. This new Commonwealth comprised free and equal countries that voluntarily accepted Elizabeth as their symbolic head—a role with no real power for an organization with no real status.

She was Queen, then, but of what?

Her father had been crowned George VI of “Great Britain, Ireland and the British Dominions beyond the Seas,” as well as “Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India.” By the time the young Elizabeth was crowned, the title “Emperor of India” was obsolete. Yet even this did not go far enough. She was proclaimed Queen Elizabeth II, “Queen of this Realm and of all Her other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith.”

Although few paid much attention to the changes at the time, the new terminology caught the eye of one of the most influential and controversial British politicians of the postwar era, Enoch Powell. He had spotted that the new declaration contained within it imperial retreat and was dismayed. But this was not the real source of his fury—it was that Britain had been subsumed into a multinational structure that it no longer led. In Britain, Elizabeth would be “Queen of the United Kingdom,” but elsewhere she would have different titles, granted by different countries: Queen of Australia in Australia, Queen of Canada in Canada, and so forth.

What Powell had seen was that this marked a sea change not only for the Queen, but for Britain itself. What had been a single empire with a single sovereign was no longer—nor was it even a British Commonwealth. In its place was simply a Commonwealth with different peoples, each equal to the others, including that of the Old Country, whether or not they took the Queen as their monarch.

In 1947, Princess Elizabeth had declared that she would give her whole life to the service of Britain’s great imperial family. When she became Queen, it was no longer clear what that really meant.

Queen Elizabeth II meets with local children and residents of Malacca state during a Commonwealth visit by members of the British royal family to Malaysia in March 1972. (Rolls Press / Popperfoto / Getty)

3. The Revolution

The change to the Queen’s title was, in fact, just another logical step down a road already taken. In 1948, Parliament had passed legislation revolutionizing the nature of British nationality itself, creating several separate citizenships within the empire. What had been a Greater Britain around the world, singular and indivisible, loyal to the King and empire, was no more. It had shrunk, leaving space for Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand nationalisms to flourish as separate identities, just as a Scotsman today can also be British.

The Queen’s title, therefore, was a sign of the coming age, a beacon in the fog of the 1950s lighting the way to the postimperial world that exists today.

For the ordinary Brit at home, glued to the television to watch the Queen’s coronation, much of this passed unnoticed. As Vernon Bogdanor writes in The Monarchy and the Constitution, the feelings of attachment to Britain in its former dominions, such as New Zealand and Canada, were taken for granted. In 1953, Australia’s prime minister, R. G. Menzies, spoke of the Queen passing on “a crown that will always be the sign and proof that, wherever we may be in the world, we are one people.” Menzies had in 1948 even said that “the boundaries of Britain do not lie on the Kentish Coast, they are to be found at Cape York and Invercargill.”

[From the December 1943 issue: The education of a queen]

Indeed, on the occasion of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation, there seemed little reason to doubt the strength of this great global nation. The day before, the New Zealander Edmund Hillary had conquered Mount Everest with Sherpa Tenzing Norgay, planting the Union Jack on its peak. Welcoming the news, New Zealand’s prime minister declared how proud he was that an Englishman had been the ﬁrst to climb the world’s highest mountain. During the Queen’s first royal tour of the Commonwealth, in 1953–54, she visited 13 countries, including Bermuda, Jamaica, Sri Lanka, Australia, and New Zealand, covering more than 40,000 miles in six months. In Australia, 6–7 million people turned out to see her, amounting to about 75 percent of the country’s population.

Only now is it possible to see the slow unwinding of this Greater British identity during the age of Elizabeth. An early glimpse came during her first visit to India and Pakistan as Queen, in 1961. Despite being head of the Commonwealth, of which India was a member, the Queen was invited only in her capacity as Queen of the United Kingdom. To do otherwise might have implied “the existence in some degree of authority residing in Her Majesty over the Republic of India,” Philip Murphy points out in Monarchy and the End of Empire. When the Commonwealth bumped up against the hard reality of Britain’s place in the postimperial world, there was no question that the Commonwealth had to stand aside.

It was scarcely appreciated then, but the Queen’s coronation—that great triumph of Britishness at the peak of its powers—was what signified the retreat. A moment of deep continuity for the Old Country was actually a moment of quiet revolution, turning Britain inward and setting a course that it would travel for the rest of her reign, culminating in a threat to the very future of Britain by the time of her death, with support for secession growing in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

Britons did not know it at the time of her ascent, but they were once again an island people. Only their Queen was global.

4. The Reign

In retrospect, it was absurd to think that the Queen could be both British and global, sharing herself equally among her various realms. How can one person be Queen of the United Kingdom one moment and Queen of Australia the next, as well as head of a Commonwealth? In time, the practical reality revealed itself—the Queen was primarily Queen of the United Kingdom.

From 1952 to her death, she would meet 13 of the 14 U.S. presidents elected in that time (Lyndon B. Johnson being the exception). She did so as Britain’s head of state—in effect, Queen of the Old Country hiding in imperial clothes, representing a state that, in U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s infamous put-down, had lost an empire but not yet found a role.

[Read: The Queen Mother’s odd letters]

Through the 1960s and early ’70s, following Britain’s humiliation at Suez, the country sought to tilt away from the empire toward its special relationship with the United States and membership in the new European Community. Globally, this shift in priorities meant sacrificing imperial power for imagined influence over the new empire that had replaced Britain: the United States. In Europe, it meant sacrificing trade with the Commonwealth for markets on its doorstep. For many in Britain, this was a hard choice, given support for the old imperial connections, particularly to the Greater British dominions (or, more cynically, to the white Commonwealth) of Australia, New Zealand, and Canada.

Yet successive British governments knew which direction they wanted to go in. In Africa, for example, Britain, unlike France, encouraged its former colonies not only to become independent, but to become republics. The loss of the empire was seen as a price worth paying for greater influence, and the Queen supported recognition of African nationalism. In 1960, when British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan remarked in a speech from South Africa that the “wind of change is blowing through this continent,” signaling the inevitability of decolonization, Elizabeth “took the unusual step of indicating her personal approval of Macmillan’s words,” Murphy records. Shortly after the speech, Macmillan received a telegram with a message from London that “the Queen was very interested and much impressed by the Prime Minister’s speech.” Four years later, the process of decolonization in East, West, and Central Africa was largely complete.

However, tensions between her role as global Queen and national Queen were inevitable—and duly came. Because the Queen was atop neither an empire nor an international body with a constitution like, say, the European Union, her title as head of the Commonwealth was unclear, unwritten, and, crucially, unlinked to her position as head of state in Britain or anywhere else. What happened if her two roles clashed?

Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip wave to the crowd while on their Commonwealth visit to Australia, 1954. (Fox Photos / Hulton Archive / Getty)

In 1952, when the British dominions were part of an imagined Greater Britain or—outside the Indian subcontinent—the subjects of a still-vast empire, there was little scope for such a clash. By the 1960s, as the empire continued to be swept away, there was a very real prospect of friction.

The danger, as Powell had pointed out, was that in creating the fiction of the Commonwealth, the Queen risked losing the support of her people at home by appearing to have split loyalties. As the 1960s turned into the ’70s and ’80s, this prophecy seemed to be coming true. In an article in 1964, Powell spoke of the resentment of British people seeing their sovereign “playing an alien part as one of the characters in the Commonwealth charade.” The imperial monarchy, to which the Queen had devoted her life, appeared to be threatening the national monarchy.

Tensions really began to be felt when the Conservative Party in Britain elected as its leader a Powellite in the form of Margaret Thatcher, who seemed to have little time for the Commonwealth and even less sympathy for the policies of some of its more radical members. According to Murphy’s Monarchy and the End of Empire, Thatcher and her closest advisers joked that the acronym CHOGM—for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting—stood for “Compulsory Hand-Outs for Greedy Mendicants.”

In the Queen’s 1983 Christmas message, four years after Thatcher came to power, she appeared to champion the policies of India’s prime minister, Indira Gandhi, over those of her own government, adding that despite the progress that had been made on the subcontinent, “the greatest problem in the world today remains the gap between rich and poor countries, and we shall not begin to close this gap until we hear less about nationalism and more about interdependence.”

[From the magazine: How to write about royalty]

This was not a message from the Thatcherite script and its Cold War mentality. Powell said that the intervention suggested the Queen had “the interests and affairs of other countries in other continents as much, or more, at heart than those of her own people.”

Another clash between the global and national Queen came in 1986, when a number of countries were threatening to boycott the Commonwealth Games in protest of Thatcher’s opposition to sanctions against apartheid South Africa. Britain had been isolated on the issue, with the Queen notably avoiding taking Britain’s side. Sonny Ramphal, the Guyanese Commonwealth secretary-general, later recalled that “if the Queen hadn’t been there we might have gone on the rocks.”

Later that year, a series of articles began to appear in the British press revealing a rift between the Queen and her prime minister over the Commonwealth. A profile of Prince Charles in The Economist suggested that his views were considerably to the left of Thatcher’s. An article in the newspaper Today then suggested that the Queen was worried the division over sanctions could break up the Commonwealth, and had even urged Thatcher to change her views. Similar pieces appeared in The Times and The Daily Telegraph. Finally, The Sunday Times led its front page with the headline “Queen Dismayed by ‘Uncaring’ Thatcher,” calling her “The African Queen.”

Such revelations, which came close to constitutional-crisis territory, centered on the Queen’s split loyalties to Commonwealth and nation. Powell had warned that this split would make her look more concerned for the Commonwealth than for Britain. The Queen had become a champion of global multiculturalism at home and abroad. Almost by accident, she had become modern.

5. The Legacy

In some senses, Queen Elizabeth II leaves an ambiguous legacy. She stands above almost all of Britain’s British monarchs, but was one who oversaw a drastic shrinkage in the monarchy’s power, prestige, and influence. Such a legacy, however, does not do the Queen justice.

At the funeral of the former Israeli leader Shimon Peres in 2016, then–U.S. President Barack Obama likened him to some of the “other giants of the 20th century.” Obama, whose father was a Kenyan government official born in what was then part of the British empire, chose to name two figures: Nelson Mandela and Queen Elizabeth II.

The Queen’s role in the Commonwealth might have been a device to hide the reality of the British empire’s decline, but she did not believe so. The irony is that in doing her duty to this imperial shadow in the same way she did her duty to Britain, she was better able to symbolize a modern, multicultural Britain and the world of the 21st century than logic might suggest was possible for an aristocratic European princess. Indeed, she is more popular in many African Commonwealth countries today than the former white dominions, which may soon choose to become republics and long ago stopped seeing themselves as British.

Yet her death has given rise to a sense of unease. Her eldest son, Charles, seems an unlikely figure for the British Shintoism that built up around his mother. Whatever his merits, such has been the nature of his life, lived in the glare of the modern world—of Diana and Camilla, The Crown and the tabloids—that it looks impossible to re-create the kind of worship that attached itself to the Queen.

[Read: What Meghan Markle means for the royal family]

Generations have known nothing but the Queen. She became almost above reproach, an icon on a wall, a symbol. Charles, by contrast, is human and flawed and distinctly reproachable. With the Queen goes the monarchy’s protective shield. Can the next generation escape the tarnish of racism leveled by Harry and Meghan, or the scandals of Prince Andrew?

Beyond Britain, will Australia and New Zealand and Canada accept Charles as their King, as they did Elizabeth in 1952? And what of the Queen’s other great love, the Commonwealth? It has already agreed to let Charles inherit his mother’s leadership. But how long can such an institution really survive? In an era of Black Lives Matter and imperial guilt, can an African child once again be pictured kneeling before some distant European monarch, as happened for the Queen’s diamond jubilee, in 2012?

None of these questions is answerable for now. Much rests on Charles himself. Can he show the lifelong restraint of his mother, the dignity and duty, the reserve and careful calculation? Will events blow him off course?

When King George VI died, Winston Churchill paid tribute to him in the House of Commons, before turning to his new Queen. “So far I have spoken of the past, but with the new reign we must all feel our contact with the future,” the prime minister said. “She comes to the throne at a time when a tormented mankind stands uncertainly poised between world catastrophe and a golden age.” For Churchill, such a golden age was possible only with “a true and lasting peace.” He then concluded: “Let us hope and pray that the accession to our ancient throne of Queen Elizabeth II may be the signal for such a brightening salvation of the human scene.”

Looking back on her reign, it is clear that the age of Elizabeth really was golden: an age of extraordinary prosperity, European peace, human rights, and the collapse of Soviet tyranny. Queen Elizabeth II—the Queen—was one of the great symbols of that age, though not a creator of it, a servant rather than a master. But if her legacy is anything, it is that symbols and service matter, even as what they symbolize and serve bend and bow to meet the new reality.

What America’s Great Unwinding Would Mean for the World

2022-08-08T07:00:00-04:00

Updated at 10:40 a.m. ET on August 12, 2022

A peculiar cognitive dissonance seems to have taken hold in the world. The Western response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—led and propped up by the United States—has reminded the world that the international order is, if anything, more dependent on American military, economic, and financial might now than only a few years ago. Yet everywhere you turn, there is a sense that the U.S. is in some form of terminal decline; too divided, incoherent, violent, and dysfunctional to sustain its Pax Americana. Moscow and Beijing seem to think that the great American unwinding has already begun, while in Europe, officials worry about a sudden American collapse. “Do we talk about it?” Michel Duclos, a former French ambassador to Syria who remains well connected within Europe’s diplomatic network, told me, somewhat indignantly, after I asked whether an American implosion was ever discussed at the highest levels of government. “We never stop talking about it.”

Again and again, when I spoke with officials, diplomats, politicians, and aides in Britain and Europe over the past few weeks, the same message came back. “It’s weighing on people’s minds, big time,” one senior European Union official told me, speaking, like most of those I interviewed, on condition of anonymity to freely discuss their concerns. From outside the U.S., many now see in America only relentless mass shootings, political dysfunction, social division, and the looming presence of Donald Trump. All of this seems to add up in the collective imagination to an impression of a country on the brink, meeting all the conditions for a descent into civil unrest.

[Read: Why Britain changed its China stance]

Many Europeans have long considered American decline an inevitability and have looked to prepare themselves for such an eventuality. Pushed by Germany and France, the EU has sought out trade and energy deals with rival global powers, including Russia and China. The idea was that as the U.S. disengaged from Europe, the EU would step up.

But then Russia invaded Ukraine, and everything changed. Suddenly, Europe’s grand strategy was in tatters, and American strength seemed to reassert itself. Europe discovered it had not become more independent from the U.S. but more dependent on it. In fact, Europe was dependent on everyone: Russia for its energy, China for its trade, America for its security. In pursuing a slow, cautious disengagement from the U.S., Europe found itself in the worst of all worlds. And in a desperate bid to reverse out of the mess, it was forced to rush back into the arms of the very leviathan it fears might be not only slowly losing its power but in danger of suddenly imploding.

This, then, is the difficult situation of America’s protectorates today. Worried about the decline of the U.S., much of the American-led world has clung even more tightly to Washington than before. In Asia, the U.S. remains the only power capable of balancing against China’s bid for regional hegemony. In Europe, something similar is true with regard to Russia. To the continent’s eternal shame, as one senior British official told me, the apparently divided, dysfunctional, and declining power of the U.S. has still managed to send drastically more lethal aid to save a European democracy than any other NATO power.

Such is America’s continuing dominance, in fact, that the world’s fixation on the idea of its impending demise seems both a dramatic overreaction and a dramatic underreaction. The depth of America’s military-industrial complex and the scale of its imperial bureaucracy mean that they are simply too heavy for a single president or Congress to remove in one go. To an extraordinary degree, American power has been vaccinated against its own political dysfunction, as Trump’s time in office showed.

And yet the very weight of this Pax Americana means that if the vaccine ever stopped working, the consequences would be globally historic. In Poland and Japan, Taiwan and Ukraine, the very basis of the world order today rests on American supremacy. But besides talking about the fragility of these foundations, no one is actually doing anything to secure them.

Russia’s invasion has revealed the extent of Europe’s weakness, but this very weakness means that for most countries on the continent, the only rational thing to do is to avoid anything that might undermine American commitment. This, in turn, further increases Europe’s dependence on the U.S., and further entrenches the continent’s weakness, resulting in a vicious circle. “Ukraine has made it easier to read the writing on the wall,” as one senior EU official put it to me. “But it has also made it harder to do anything about it.”

In the five months since Vladimir Putin’s attempted colonization of Ukraine, two more European countries, Sweden and Finland, have begun the process of joining NATO, the American-led military alliance that guarantees European security. NATO has also moved to make sure that it remains relevant in Washington by listing China for the first time as a security threat. What’s more, since February, the U.S. has increased its military presence on the continent, and Europe has started importing American gas. Meanwhile, the EU’s proposed trade pact with China shows no sign of waking from its political coma, Britain has distanced itself from Beijing, and the G7 group of advanced economies has reemerged as the primary international forum for the Western world to coordinate its efforts. The euro has fallen so far in its value that it has reached parity with the dollar, French President Emmanuel Macron has lost his majority to govern, Mario Draghi’s government in Rome collapsed, Boris Johnson is on his way out, and Germany faces a winter of discontent with energy shortages.

[Thomas Chatterton Williams: ‘If Macron loses, Putin wins’]

Yet Europe is divided on the question of how it gets itself out of this mess, split between those who think the American order is the best and only hope, and those who see themselves as continental Cassandras, warning of the catastrophe but unable to persuade anyone to do anything about it.

Quietly, the EU is working on building European resilience in case of a sudden—or not so sudden—American unwinding. The bloc’s officials are developing a variety of measures, including creating a “European cloud,” a European semiconductor industry, European energy networks, and European military-industrial capacity. Officials I spoke with even talked about European moves into the Indo-Pacific region to help protect the current order should American efforts begin to falter.

Some of this seems sensible, some fantastical—and some dangerous. Attempts to produce a specifically European military-industrial capacity, for example, often just mean protectionism and making things harder for American defense firms trying to supply European militaries. Trump need not be president for one to foresee a political problem emerging if Europe were to continue to ask for billions of dollars in U.S. military aid to protect its borders while erecting barriers to American companies. Notions about the EU—unable even to protect its neighbors—stepping into even the mildest vacuum created by an American lack of interest in the Indo-Pacific are utterly ludicrous.

Despite this, there is an understanding within the EU about its own weakness. One official I spoke with, for example, said that building European autonomy was made harder not just by countries such as Hungary, with close ties to Moscow, but by “German irrationality,” which many now see as Europe’s real Achilles’ heel. Berlin doesn’t seem to want anything other than a world of open markets to sell its products. If this means dependence on other countries for security, energy, or other things, then so be it. Today, it is hard to see the unity of political will across the continent required to fundamentally change things.

For some in Britain, European panic about a U.S. withdrawal or collapse is little more than an avoidance technique, allowing officials to point to America while masking their own domestic shortcomings. “American decline is Europe’s comforting fantasy,” one senior U.K. official told me. “It’s a convenient way to avoid making any decisions of their own.”

Perhaps this is the source of Europe’s real panic: that it is becoming irrelevant. As Macron has warned, Europe’s real future may well be less that of a great power in a multipolar world than a geopolitical backwater, unable to develop its own autonomy, but also more and more inconsequential to the great battle for supremacy between the U.S. and China, in which it must play only a supporting role, forever America’s junior partner. No matter how civilized Europe remains, no matter how peaceful and liberal, it will be a place of secondary importance.

In 1897, Queen Victoria celebrated 60 years on the throne with a diamond jubilee that represented the high-water mark of Britain’s imperial power. The tribune of empire, Rudyard Kipling, composed two poems for the occasion. Instead of “The White Man’s Burden,” which he ultimately dedicated to America’s colonization of the Philippines two years later, Kipling published “Recessional,” which hit on a different note entirely—about the pride that comes before a fall.

Written in the style of a prayer, “Recessional” pleads with the Almighty—the “God of our fathers, known of old”—not to abandon Britain. “Be with us yet,” Kipling urges the “Lord of our far-flung battle-line, beneath whose awful Hand we hold dominion over palm and pine.” Kipling then adds his famous line: “Lest we forget—lest we forget!” The prayer is a warning to those celebrating Britain’s imperial supremacy that it could be taken away at any moment: Lest we forget! “Far-called; our navies melt away,” Kipling cautions. “On dune and headland sinks the fire: / Lo, all our pomp of yesterday is one with Nineveh and Tyre!”

[Read: America’s necessary myth for the world]

At the height of Britain’s global power, he warned that such things are fleeting and precarious. The poem caused a sensation, cementing Kipling’s place as the poet of empire, but also the prophet of its decline. Some 125 years later, the world is obsessing about the collapse of the new imperium.

The sense of foreboding now seems diffuse, everywhere and nowhere at the same time, not encapsulated in a single poem but out there nonetheless, in hushed diplomatic conversations happening all over Europe (as well as the regular Macron sermons), books, and even in the background of Hollywood movies.

With Russia being held at bay in the Donbas, China being cautioned against invading Taiwan, and the dollar supreme, the American order today looks dominant. And yet, lest we forget.

The danger is surely that everything can be true at the same time. The U.S. remains extraordinarily powerful, but that does not mean its domestic dysfunction and violent social upheavals are irrelevant, incapable of distracting it from ordering the world.

America today is both mightier than it was a decade ago and more vulnerable; the guarantor of the world order and the greatest potential source of its disorder. And as long as that is the case, diplomats, officials, politicians, and the general public outside America are going to both obsess about its collapse—whether out of genuine fear or hallucinatory projection—and be unable to do anything about it.

This article originally stated that Finland and Sweden have joined NATO. In fact, they are still in the process of joining NATO.

For Britain’s Tories, the Answer Is Always Margaret Thatcher

2022-08-04T07:00:00-04:00

After 12 years in power, Britain’s Conservative Party has hit a wall, unsure of what it is and what it stands for, what its mission is supposed to be, and how it’s supposed to fulfill it. Having replaced David Cameron with Theresa May, then May with Boris Johnson, it is now replacing Johnson with one of two candidates, both of whom are—once again—demanding a new direction for the party and, in turn, the country. Never has Benjamin Disraeli’s angry jibe that “a Conservative Government is an organized hypocrisy” seemed so apt.

During this Conservative era, Britain has become poorer, taxes have gone up, and wages have stagnated. And yet, during this time, the Tory party has been able to successfully reinvent itself thanks to Brexit, winning a once-in-a-generation majority to reform the country in the process.

So we find ourselves with the strange spectacle of Johnson’s two prospective successors—Rishi Sunak, the former chancellor, and Liz Truss, the current foreign secretary—trying to present themselves simultaneously as the candidate of change and of continuity: the defender of Johnson’s great realignment in 2019, when millions of former Labour supporters voted Conservative, and the embodiment of the party’s traditional values that came before.

Both Sunak and Truss are promising to return the party to its core beliefs of low taxes and competence, certainty and seriousness—the party, in other words, of Margaret Thatcher. Both Sunak and Truss have declared themselves Thatcherites. For Sunak, that means adhering to fiscal conservatism to tackle inflation; for Truss, it means cutting taxes to go for growth. Each claims that their Thatcherism is the true Thatcherism—Truss even seems to be dressing up as the party’s great heroine to make the point.

In many ways, the whole spectacle is profoundly absurd. Here we are in 2022, with a host of new problems to address: war in Europe, the ongoing effects of a once-in-a-century pandemic, inflation at a 40-year high, an aging population, Brexit, and a bubbling political crisis in Northern Ireland. Economically, the country is falling behind its peers; politically, it appears chronically unstable; socially, it remains divided over issues of fundamental importance, including its very existence as a single state. Meanwhile, the great institutions of the nation are no longer functioning as they should, buckling under the strain of mismanagement, cuts, short-termism, and scandal.

But while the country is evidently not working, it is not not working in the same way that it wasn’t in 1979. Union power is no more. Unemployment is not a problem. There are few hulking nationalized industries to privatize, few marginal tax rates to slash, and less money to be “handbagged” out of Europe.

[Read: The search for a Brexit-era Margaret Thatcher]

Presented with a chance to renew itself in government for the third time in six years, however, the Conservative Party has chosen instead to put on a kind of schoolhouse production of a time gone by, donning the same costumes and deploying the same battle cries, as if to reassure supporters that it still has something to say.

In times of great upheaval, political leaders offer parallels with past glory (or ingloriousness) as reassurance that the nation can once again rise to the challenge. There is a difference, though, between conjuring up the spirits of the past to smuggle a revolution in time-honored disguise, as Karl Marx put it, and simply grasping for the past because you’ve run out of things to say about the present.

In Disraeli’s great novel Coningsby, the 19th-century titan took aim at that awful new invention, “conservatism.” Disraeli was a firebrand radical, fiercely opposed to the first ever “Conservative” prime minister, Robert Peel, who had split the Tory party by supporting free trade over tariffs. Disraeli, in contrast, was in favor of protectionism because it maintained the established order, which he believed served all those in society—the monarch and the multitude. The dispute between Disraeli and Peel continues to play out today—the former the father of moderate “one nation” conservatism, the latter the hero of many modern Brexiteers.

In Coningsby, Disraeli demanded to know what this new Conservative Party wished to conserve beyond whatever resources and policies it had inherited when it took office, given that it did not seem to be concerned with the principles that supported the old order. The Conservative Party, he wrote, was a rudderless body devoid of principle, buffeted by the whims of public opinion.

“Whenever public opinion, which this party never attempts to form, to educate, or to lead, falls into some violent perplexity, passion, or caprice,” he blasted, “this party yields without a struggle to the impulse, and, when the storm has passed, attempts to obstruct and obviate the logical and, ultimately, the inevitable, results of the very measures they have themselves originated, or to which they have consented.”

I find it hard to come up with a better description of what has happened to the Conservative Party over its 12 years in power. It offered a referendum on Britain’s membership to the European Union but did not know how to follow through on the result; it negotiated, signed, and ratified a Brexit divorce deal whose consequences it now disavows; and it won its biggest majority in 30 years on a pledge to rebalance the country’s economy and rip up the old orthodoxy—only to now balk at the costs of doing so.

Disraeli warned that in such a moment, when the party faced the consequences of its own choices, its leaders would be forced to choose between “Political Infidelity and a Destructive Creed.” The strange thing about Truss and Sunak today is that they seem to offer us a perfect combination of the two.

[Read: Britain’s Conservatives agree on everything but Brexit]

Truss has chosen political infidelity: Once a supporter of the Liberal Democrats and of Britain’s membership in the EU, she is now a hard-line conservative who says she was wrong to have ever backed Remain, pursuing Brexit with the zealous certainty of a convert. Sunak, having found himself badly trailing Truss in the polls, has fallen on the destructive creed, ramping up his rhetoric on core conservative issues such as immigration, China, and economic nationalism in hopes of winning.

Disraeli offers us a handy guide as to why this old party of reaction and conservation is able to somehow be one of the most meritocratic in the Western world.

Despite being an obvious outsider who suffered anti-Semitic abuse throughout his career—he was of Jewish heritage—Disraeli was a Tory who supported what he called England’s “aristocratic principle.” Disraeli wrote that this did not mean rule by an unchanging elite, but an aristocracy that “absorbs all aristocracies, and receives every man in every order and every class who defers to the principle of our society, which is to aspire and to excel.” This, as George Orwell once much more skeptically pointed out, was how England was able to maintain order, creating “an aristocracy constantly recruited from parvenus.” And no party has more parvenus than the Conservatives, from Disraeli himself to Thatcher—the country’s first female prime minister—to John Major, Thatcher’s successor, who was drawn from the working class. That this year’s Conservative Party leadership contest was among the most ethnically diverse of any held in the West is less of a break with the past than it first appears.

Disraeli also offers us a guide to how the Conservative Party has been able to renew itself—but also why it often doesn’t. In 1867, still years away from the premiership, he gave a speech in Edinburgh in which he set out the challenge for a party seeking to conserve the established order in a world that was always changing.

In a progressive country, Disraeli declared, change is constant: “The great question is not whether you should resist change which is inevitable, but whether that change should be carried out in deference to the manners, the customs, the laws, and the traditions of a people, or whether it should be carried out in deference to abstract principles.” This, he said, was the essential divide in politics: “The one is a national system, the other […] a philosophic system.” In this divide, he argued, the Tory Party was the national party; its opponents were the philosophers in favor of abstract creeds.

The problem the Tories now face is that they are stuck in a rut trying to be both. Brexit, in its most essential sense, is an expression of a nation, a cry against the change happening within the EU undermining the traditions of a people. It is a conservative revolution to protect and preserve, not an expression of a universal ideal. Yet both Sunak and Truss are competing to show how much they believe in the creed of Brexitism and its forerunner, Thatcherism.

[Helen Lewis: Here lies Boris Johnson]

Both candidates, in fact, are really liberals, not Tories—Truss ideologically, Sunak pragmatically. Truss is a believer in liberty, markets, global free trade, and capital. In recent years, these have been confused with conservative values, but they are certainly not Tory in the Disraelian understanding. For Sunak, the challenge is that underneath his belief in sensible, sound management, there are no real beliefs at all, other than those Disraeli so loathed as conservative. This is the issue that dogs Sunak, the source of leaks from the cabinet about his skepticism over spending billions to support Ukraine and his willingness to cut a deal over Northern Ireland. These policies might seem pragmatic, but are they rooted in principle?

The candidates and the party are no longer focused on the true vocation of the Tory: the careful stewardship of the nation and its institutions, upon which the Tory believes rest the country’s wealth and freedom. Instead, what they offer is a drive for ideological purity as the institutions of the state wither.

“Whenever the Tory party degenerates into an oligarchy it becomes unpopular,” Disraeli wrote caustically. “Whenever the national institutions do not fulfil their original intention, the Tory party becomes odious.”

This is the situation the party now finds itself in.

Why Britain Changed Its China Stance

2022-08-02T07:00:00-04:00

As recently as 2015, Britain boasted of being China’s “best partner in the west.” It had become a founding member of Beijing’s controversial Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, against American opposition. While still a member of the European Union, its diplomats pushed for the EU to agree to a formal trade-and-investment deal with China. And Xi Jinping had even been honored with a lavish state visit to London. For Britain, the future was unmistakably Chinese.

From 2020 onward, however, Britain transformed itself from China’s best partner in Europe to its harshest critic, sweeping away decades of foreign-policy consensus in the most drastic such shift in the Western world. Britain became the first European power to formally block Huawei from its 5G telecoms network, led the global condemnation of Beijing’s barbaric treatment of its Uyghur minority in Xinjiang, revoked the U.K. broadcasting license of China’s state-controlled CGTN, and offered a route to British citizenship for millions of people in Hong Kong who want to flee Beijing’s political repression.

The reasons for this turn were many: Brexit meant that Britain, having cut ties with its closest economic partner, the EU, could not afford to risk its relationship with its closest security ally, the United States, as well. The pandemic then entrenched public concern about Western reliance on China. And perhaps most important of all was Donald Trump. Even as he imposed steel tariffs on allies and belittled their leaders, the American president demanded that they stand with the United States against China.

Whereas Britain’s future had once seemed Chinese, it was back to being American. But in recent months, something strange started happening: London began softening its stance toward China again. Outgoing Prime Minister Boris Johnson this year approved a reopening of trade talks with China, and his government approved the sale of a microchip manufacturer to a Chinese company (though this is now in doubt).

Britain’s diplomatic back-and-forth in recent years has offered among the most extreme examples of how states are dealing with the wider geopolitical upheaval that has been taking place in response to China’s rise, a problem that no one yet seems to know the answer to. In Washington, a bipartisan consensus has formed around the notion that “engagement” with Beijing has failed, and that China is the only great rival to American supremacy in the 21st century. For continental Europe, Beijing is less an adversary than a risk to be accommodated, managed, and recognized, and the growth of its power an opportunity to carve out more “strategic autonomy” from the U.S. For Britain, trapped between the U.S. and Europe, it is a mixture of all of these things.

[Read: What returning to China taught me about China]

To understand what was going on, I spoke with more than a dozen senior government officials, diplomats, foreign-policy analysts, and lawmakers across the U.S., Britain, and Europe. (Many spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive government deliberations.) From these conversations a picture emerged of Britain clinging tightly to the new U.S. consensus, partly through judgment of its best interests and partly because of American pressure, while seeking to ensure its economic priorities with China are kept alive as much as possible as it faces up to the reality of the 21st century. Britain’s example shows how the widening standoff between Washington and Beijing will transform midsize powers that seek to avoid being drawn into a new cold war—and, more important, how the U.S. will not easily be able to maintain its grip on the world order that it created.

For decades, Britain followed a fairly consistent line in its policy toward Beijing, trying to balance security concerns against economic opportunities but typically erring on the side of engagement.

As early as 2003, Britain’s main telecommunications company approached Tony Blair’s government to seek permission to work with what was then a little-known Chinese company, Huawei, to upgrade the U.K.’s network. The partnership was waved through by officials who were more concerned with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, terrorism, and Russia than some harmless Chinese firm.

By 2008, however, British intelligence agencies were warning that the Chinese state could use Huawei to gain access to Britain’s telecoms network. Soon after, the government—then led by Gordon Brown—established a watchdog to monitor Huawei, creating a first-of-its-kind arrangement involving a group of security-cleared former British officials and experts who would keep an eye on Huawei from inside the company on behalf of Britain. In effect, Britain had become sufficiently concerned about China spying on it that it demanded a special unit be created within Huawei to spy on the Chinese, but was insufficiently concerned to cancel Huawei contracts.

This was the environment in which David Cameron took over as prime minister in 2010—one in which cautious partnership with China had yielded concrete benefits for the U.K., but with hard-to-gauge costs. Over his six years in charge, Cameron would expand the relationship in an attempt to upgrade Britain’s infrastructure and open new markets for its financial-services industry. In 2014, London became one of the first international clearing centers for Chinese currency, before racing ahead of its competitors to become the major offshore center for renminbi trading. The following year, Cameron welcomed Xi to London for a state visit during which the British leader declared the beginning of a “golden era” in relations.

This was no one-off, but the culmination of a British strategy stretching back to at least the turn of the century. Britain was using its membership in the EU to turn itself into China’s financial gateway to the continent. Then came Brexit.

Following the referendum, Cameron was replaced by Theresa May, a more security-conscious China hawk who had spent the previous six years in the Home Office and was responsible for the domestic-intelligence agency MI5. In one of her first acts, she paused a decision on the construction of a British nuclear plant that was to receive Chinese investment. Then, in early 2018, on a three-day trip to China, May refused to sign off on a deal in which Britain would offer formal support for Xi’s infrastructure-building (and influence-generating) Belt and Road Initiative.

Once again, economic interests squashed political concerns. May’s early caution over China gave way to the same pressures that had pushed Cameron, Brown, and Blair: In April 2019, news leaked that May was preparing to give the go-ahead for Huawei’s involvement in building the country’s 5G network. By then, she had put aside her concerns about Chinese involvement in Britain’s nuclear industry as well. And then, once again, Brexit intervened.

May was replaced by Johnson, a far more liberal figure when it came to security and China. Immediately, Johnson slipped back into the old British policy, announcing that despite furious opposition from the U.S., the U.K. would allow Huawei to play a part in Britain’s 5G rollout. It was, in essence, a continuation of the Mayite policy—which itself was little more than a continuation of the cautious engagement that had been in place for decades.

[David Frum: Why Biden is right to end ambiguity on China]

The morning after Johnson’s Huawei decision, however, a Chinese student in Britain rang an emergency health line complaining that he and his mother visiting from Hubei felt unwell. At 7:50 p.m. that night, two paramedics dressed in hazmat suits arrived at the hotel where they were staying to take them to hospital. They would be the first people in Britain to test positive for the coronavirus. More than 200,000 people would ultimately die of COVID-19 in Britain. China’s role as nation zero, and its initial attempts to suppress news of the outbreak, would spark denunciations across the democratic world and demands for retaliation.

Even before the pandemic, opinion in the U.S. had shifted sharply against China, thanks in large part to the ferocity—and centrality—of Trump’s attacks on the country. This discord was almost inevitable anyway, given the great-power competition between the pair, but Trump played his part in speeding this process up and giving it political fire.

By May 2020, the U.S. had increased pressure on Britain and other European allies by unveiling sanctions on Huawei that, in effect, stopped it from being able to use American technology, a move that meant the British security services could no longer guarantee Huawei’s safety, because the company would soon be using non-Western technology that the British did not fully understand. This, in fact, was the very reason the U.S. had imposed its sanctions, and they served as a hammer blow to Britain’s strategy of careful engagement with China. In July 2020, Johnson’s government became the first in Europe to announce that Huawei would be banned from Britain’s 5G network. Liu Xiaoming, the Chinese ambassador in London, said Britain’s decision on Huawei, as well as the U.K.’s policies toward Xinjiang and Hong Kong, had “poisoned the atmosphere” between the two countries and Britain would “pay the price.” The Chinese state media threatened “retaliatory responses.”

In the end, London’s long-held strategy thus collapsed not through its own proactive choice but because of choices being made elsewhere. British foreign policy was forced to adapt to a world it did not want, and had tried to avoid.

When I put this to British Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, she rejected (albeit somewhat unconvincingly) the idea that Britain had, effectively, been made to change its China policy.

Truss, the favorite to replace Johnson as prime minister, told me that the Russian invasion of Ukraine had brought together countries against Russia, some of which might not be liberal or democratic but that nevertheless did not want to see “a world where might is right.”

In reply, I suggested that, in part, might is right. After all, we live in an American world, where the U.S. uses its power to set the rules. “I don’t agree with that,” Truss replied. “We don’t live in an American world. We live in a world where there is a coalition of nations who … subscribe to the values of freedom and democracy.”

I cited the example of China. As late as 2019, Britain was trying to push ahead with the Huawei 5G deal. “We changed because the Americans changed,” I said.

“That was not the reason we changed,” she responded.

I pushed back. “The Americans changed the rules of the game, and we didn’t have the ability to guarantee the security” of the telecoms network.

Again, she was insistent. “That was not the reason we changed. We changed because it was the right thing to do. I was in the government when the policy changed, and we changed because it was the right thing to do.”

[Read: How China wants to replace the U.S. order]

I pointed out that the same government, made up of the same people, had made a different decision earlier in the same year about what was right before changing its mind.

“Well, that is true,” Truss replied. “Every government, Tom, has its internal discussions and I can’t reveal the internal discussions that took place on both occasions. However, we did it because it was the right thing to do.”

Whatever your conclusion, to look at British foreign policy now is to see almost a complete overlap with the U.S., whether on the Iranian nuclear deal, climate change, the importance of spending more on defense, NATO, the threat posed by Russia, or—now—China. One of the lessons of the Huawei policy shift, and Britain’s shift more broadly, is that the U.S. can still force its allies into line if it is prepared to take its gloves off.

But under the surface, things are not quite so simple.

There are signs that, actually, Britain’s old policy is once again being quietly rebuilt. Amid intense U.S. pressure, including threats to curtail transatlantic intelligence sharing, Britain changed tack, falling into line. Yet since then, Britain has drifted back toward its position of cautiously opening up to China as far as it feels is safe—in part spurred by a frustration with Washington.

In February, it emerged that Johnson had given the green light to reopen trade talks with China that had been paused for years. Then it was revealed that the U.K. government had apparently approved the sale of a British microchip factory to a Chinese-owned firm, only for that decision to be kicked into the long grass. On each occasion, the announcements sparked a backlash among China skeptics in London. May’s former chief of staff, Nick Timothy, who had pushed for stricter controls on any economic opening to China, reacted with resigned alarm. “It seems we will never learn,” he wrote. Tough policies over Xinjiang and Hong Kong remain in place, but the recent reports point to a softening of the hardest edges of Britain’s China policy. The reasons indicate the limits of Washington’s leadership in its confrontation with Beijing.

Today, some within the British government share a sense that Brexit and Johnson’s previous, seemingly warm relationship with Trump continue to be held against the U.K. by some in the Biden administration. Despite Britain’s being the most hawkish European ally on Russia and China, spending more than 2 percent of its GDP on defense, and supporting U.S. efforts on curtailing Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the U.K. believes it is treated as just another ally, criticized for its push to renegotiate its Brexit deal with the EU and ignored in its ambition to strike a free-trade deal with Washington. If this is the case, some in London wonder, why not be more independent where Britain’s core national interests are concerned?

In one sense, what does Britain have to lose from exploring deeper economic ties with China? The Biden administration has made clear there will be no trade deal with the U.S. anytime soon and, besides, the EU continues to pursue its own policy of engagement with China, despite continuing Chinese economic support for Russia during Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

The rationale that long drove British policy is reasserting itself: The size and wealth of China mean that Britain simply cannot afford not to engage. With Britain outside the EU, economic growth sluggish, debt high, and few other obvious alternatives to increase trade, will any future prime minister really be able to ignore what China has to offer?

[Michael Schuman: What Nancy Pelosi’s Taiwan trip says about China]

Britain’s apparent return to a more open China policy is a reminder of the difficulty Washington is going to have constructing and leading any kind of alliance—democratic or otherwise—to contain Beijing. Though it can use a policy of maximum pressure to force some countries into line, as it did with Britain over 5G—effectively removing London’s ability to sustain an independent policy—such a stance can go only so far. The U.S. remains powerful enough that its sticks can and do work, but without any carrots at all, this strategy will have limits.

Perhaps the main lesson of Britain’s experience with China is that core national interests are likely to reassert themselves in the long term, no matter which party, prime minister, chancellor, or president is in power in Britain, France, Germany, and elsewhere. In London, Johnson has pursued a policy that would have been familiar to any of the previous four British prime ministers this century, Labour and Conservative among them. The same is true of the EU. Such is the depth of economic entanglement with China today that it will take far more than talk of “democratic alliances” and threats to the rules-based order for Brussels, Berlin, Paris—and London—to seriously change course.

What does that mean for the U.S.? If it wants to construct a coalition behind its attempt to contain China, it will need to be prepared to threaten and cajole, yes, but also bribe far more effectively than it has until now. No longer is America the only dog in the pound, even if it still has the biggest bark.

The Work of Giants Crumbles

2022-07-26T11:27:58-04:00

Barely a month ago, Northern Ireland’s former first minister David Trimble and his old partner in peace, the Republic of Ireland’s Bertie Ahern, were sitting together in Belfast reminiscing about what they had built. With John Hume’s death in 2020, Trimble and Ahern were among the last of the island’s old giants. And now Trimble has gone too.

Trimble, the joint architect of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Hume for their efforts, died of cancer yesterday aged 77. With his passing, he leaves the inescapable sense of time escaping our grip, of an age ending and a generation departing, leaving us to stare disconsolately at what we have left in their place.

“Wondrous is this foundation,” begins the Anglo-Saxon poem “The Ruin,” marveling at the remains of the old Roman world whose debris was found strewn across the land. “The fates have broken and shattered this city; the work of giants crumbles.” This is how it can feel looking at the minnows in Belfast, Dublin, and London today as they walk around the ruins built by Trimble, Ahern, Hume, and the rest.

In those verses, too, lie the lessons from Trimble’s life. He exhibited the importance of stature, vision, and principled commitment to a bigger cause. With this, Trimble built something profound and lasting, which changed Northern Ireland for the better. The other lesson, though, is the danger in staring too long at the work of giants. In doing so, we can become lost in their age, dwelling in their achievements, ones that often reflect the problems of their time, not ours. As Trimble himself would show, it is possible for us to become too struck by the beauty of big legacies, unable to move on.

Without question, Trimble was a giant, the kind of driven, cultured, and intellectually rigorous politician we don’t seem to see very often at the moment. Like everyone, he was deeply flawed, as well as being severely limited as a politician, yet it is also inescapably true that he was brave and insightful during some of Northern Ireland’s darkest days—and ultimately profound. “Somewhere along the road,” his friend and adviser during the Good Friday negotiations, Paul Bew, told me, “he concluded, like Northern Ireland’s first prime minister, Sir James Craig: What are we going to do, fight these people forever? And that was it, that was David.” Upon this sentiment the new Northern Ireland was built, one that remains in the United Kingdom a quarter of a century later, having defeated and disarmed the Irish Republican Army. Whatever his flaws, and the flaws of his agreement, that is some legacy.

Trimble was a conservative unionist who believed in Northern Ireland’s place within the United Kingdom, bitterly opposing earlier attempts to impose power-sharing in the 1970s. He suffered badly in the years following the agreement, losing power and influence as his fellow unionists in Northern Ireland reacted with legitimate fury to his failure to stop the cynical gangsterism of Sinn Féin, as the IRA dragged its feet getting rid of its weapons.

In later life, Trimble supported Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union and was furious with those who, as he saw it, used his great constitutional achievement to impose a new settlement on Northern Ireland that he believed undermined his greatest achievement. By this time, however, politics seemed to have moved on. He was no longer seen as the giant of old, his views often dismissed as those from another age, an inconvenience for those who followed who claimed to worship his creation. Even those who admire him most share a sense that, so monumental was his achievement in 1998, it was hard for him to keep building thereafter.

“He created this beautiful vase,” as Bew put it. “And he kept wanting to look at it.”

We shouldn’t be blind to the enormous benefits of this approach. His fixation on the vase, so to speak, meant that Trimble remained focused on the big picture even during the most difficult times: as unionist anger rose in the years after the Good Friday Agreement’s signing, as support for his moderate Ulster Unionist Party drained away to more hard-line unionist groups. His attitude, according to those I spoke with, was often, Don’t they see they’ve won the big things?

And he was mostly right. Though unionists had made painful compromises, they also had won the big thing. The IRA had lost its war. The people of Northern Ireland would decide whether they wanted to remain in the United Kingdom with Great Britain. Yet “winning” the argument is only half the battle—the politics never stops. As one unionist critic of Trimble’s told me: “You negotiate before, during, and after a deal.” After the deal, he lost and the hard-liners won.

Today, we obsess about the Good Friday Agreement both for good and for ill, the answer to all questions in Northern Ireland, as if it is a static, unchanging place. As Trimble himself discovered, voters themselves quickly move on. And so they should. Northern Ireland is a different place than the one Trimble grew up in. A third force has emerged that is rightly challenging the sectarianism baked into Trimble and Hume’s agreement, in which power is shared between unionists and nationalists, often unfairly locking out those who sit as “nonaligned.” Today, once again, Northern Ireland is back in crisis, stuck with an insoluble constitutional dilemma caused by Brexit in which everyone claims the Good Friday Agreement as proof of the righteousness of their side.

Ultimately, Northern Ireland has a new problem to solve, requiring new solutions and new giants to step forward—none of whom seem to exist.

Bew was with Trimble and Ahern at that meeting a month ago, for the unveiling of a portrait of Trimble, and told me of the sense of loss he felt. “Where are the politicians who realize, like David, that we’re going to have to split this in the middle again somehow?” he said.

They’re not there. Politics moves on. And so the work of giants crumbles.

England Can’t Take the Heat

2022-07-20T02:00:00-04:00

England isn’t supposed to be this hot. Certainly not London. Contrary to popular imagination, it doesn’t actually rain that much here: We have fewer rainy days than Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, or Zurich. London is a city with a gentle, undulating climate; of wispy red sunsets and cloudy, gray days; where drab winters give way to soft springs and mild summers; and where drinking indoors almost always feels right and eating outdoors just a bit forced. It is not a city where the air itself is hot or the grass is parched. But it is now.

Being in London this week has been like having your home teleported somewhere else: You look around and everything is the same, but isn’t. The air is like Florida’s, hot and heavy to touch, the haze like a postcard of Los Angeles. My son went to school this morning in shorts, a vest, and a baseball cap that he turned backwards, as if he were actually in America. A mosquito buzzed in my ear as I sat in my darkened living room, the curtains drawn tight to keep the sun out. We don’t have air-conditioning in England, you see. That is the kind of thing people have in other countries, where the weather is extreme, where you go indoors to escape the heat—and where there are mosquitoes.

In some places, air-con is ubiquitous. In others, it is a status symbol. For most Brits, status usually means having a Victorian home, double-fronted if you can afford it, with as many touches of the countryside as possible, even if that means a cold, drafty house in the winter and a stifling one in the summer. Really posh Brits pretend they are country folk, dressing themselves in worn-out clothes. Air-con is a bit new money—a bit foreign, a bit American. Not for much longer, if this heat continues.

The weather is changing, and so will our children’s memories of England. To them, it may well be a place of air-conditioning, and vineyards. For the rest of us, this weather feels foreign and new, which, necessarily, stirs nostalgia for what has been lost. I remember being on holiday and putting my hand out of the window and the air being hot, which blew my mind. At home, I was accustomed to mild summer days spent playing on the village green, winter walks and a fire when I got home, and snow drifts in the fields behind the house. All of this sounds like some kind of John Major fantasy of bucolic England, but that’s largely because that England, a gentle England, did and does exist.

George Orwell said that when you come back to England from any other country, you immediately have the sensation of breathing in a different air. “The crowds in the big towns, with their mild knobby faces, their bad teeth and gentle manners, are different from a European crowd,” he wrote. But England is not one thing. Rather, he said, it is “the diversity of it, the chaos! The clatter of clogs in the Lancashire mill towns, the to-and-fro of the lorries on the Great North Road, the queues outside the Labour Exchanges, the rattle of pin-tables in the Soho pubs, the old maids hiking to Holy Communion through the mists of the autumn morning—all these are not only fragments, but characteristic fragments, of the English scene.” None of these things exists anymore, but England is still England, just as recognizable when you return from somewhere else—a land of the clatter of Pizza Express on a Friday night, the to-and-fro of new cars out of new housing estates, queues outside nightclubs, packed London parks, and joggers beating the heat in the early morning.

But is it really so gentle? Wildfires burning along the M25, the main highway surrounding London, suggest otherwise; the same is true of the extreme-heat warnings, 100-degree temperature, and bloodred weather maps. It doesn’t feel so gentle this week.

Has England changed, then? Of course it has—the climate is changing—but the truth is that nostalgic England has always existed with all the other Englands that are also there: the Englands of violence and poverty, of grime and ugliness. Gentle old England, that land of apparently mild, knobby-faced people with gentle manners, was also full of those who happily became members of the world’s richest and most powerful empire, colonizing lands far afield and subjugating others. It is a country whose history is one of rebellion and uprising as much as the gentle, “rational” stereotype that so many around the world (and many Brits) still like to believe.

London is the city that contains all of these Englands in one place. It is not New York or Paris, but a collection of towns that can often feel remarkably provincial and un-metropolitan given the size of the place—and therefore, for a provincial boy like me, really rather homey. Its nicest areas offer themselves up as visions of a gentle countryside, many calling themselves villages or even hamlets, which of course they are not.

This is a place that works in gentle temperatures and on gentle cloudy days. You might need to put on your coat, pack your wellies to go on a walk, or take a brolly with you. But that’s about it. It’s a place where dark pubs just work and life feels more pleasant than in most other giant cities. Yet today, I’m hunkering in a room, sweating, and worrying about how I’m going to keep my kids cool overnight.

It’s too hot. England can’t cope with this weather. We’re all going potty. Kids are being sent back from school only to sit around at home in the same temperature. Trains are being canceled. Our politicians are going crazy again, as if they are—for shame—Americans. Worst of all, walking through the park to sit in the pub doesn’t seem right. If we lose this, what is left? How can you be gentle, merry old England if it’s too hot to go to the pub? That, above all, is the warning sign that things are not right.

Ignore the Chaos. Britain’s System Is Working.

2022-07-15T01:00:00-04:00

In times of crisis, Britain’s arcane constitution seems absurd—often because it is absurd. Questions emerge to which no one ever seems entirely sure of the answer. What if, for example, Boris Johnson had not resigned last week but instead sought to cling to power by asking the Queen to dissolve Parliament to hold new elections? At this point, somebody is sure to cite some old but meaningful convention, only for somebody else to discover that the source of this apparently sacred but largely forgotten rule is in fact an anonymous letter written to a newspaper. This all actually happened.

So whenever Britain emerges from one of its political upheavals, calls emerge for the country to codify its constitution in a single, intelligible document like the United States’. Britain may have escaped this time, the argument goes, but it is still far too reliant on the “good chap” theory of politics—that in the end, good chaps in power do the right thing.

Over and over, Britain finds itself in this mess. Even today, Britain’s constitution seems entirely absent when it comes to the matter of who will replace Johnson as prime minister. Over the summer, 160,000 or so Conservative Party members will choose their next leader, and therefore the country’s prime minister, based on rules drawn up by something called the 1922 Committee, a Conservative grouping in Parliament that has no constitutional basis at all.

But here’s the thing: Britain does not escape its various political crises despite its constitution. Britain escapes these crises because of it.

Britain did not need a set of written instructions to get rid of Johnson. Even though he won the biggest Conservative majority since 1987, he lost power within three years because a majority in Parliament decided he was no longer fit for office. America’s written constitution failed to get rid of Donald Trump despite the fact that he tried to blackmail Ukraine and then incited an attempted insurrection to steal an election. In France, a written constitution did not stop Charles de Gaulle from essentially taking power in a coup in 1958.

When Scottish voters chose a party committed to independence from the United Kingdom, the British government did not try to imprison the Scottish first minister à la Spain when Catalonia did the same, but granted a referendum that would have dissolved the U.K. and pledged to honor the result. When David Cameron called—and lost—a second revolutionary referendum two years later, this time on Britain’s membership of the European Union, he resigned and was quickly replaced by Theresa May, who committed to delivering that result. When she proved incapable, she was replaced by someone who was, Johnson. But once that job was complete and Johnson proved incapable of doing anything else, he was replaced. Now a debate is occurring over what kind of country Britain wants to be after Brexit.

This is a system that is working, albeit in stops and starts, and lots of pained wailing from all concerned, responding to the changing demands of its electorate without the need for mass social unrest, violence, or revolutionary upheaval.

The carapace of the British constitution is certainly hilariously arcane and out of date. The head of state claims her position for life, citing God and her birthright as the reason (Dieu et mon droit is literally emblazoned on her coat of arms). In doing so, she is venerated by a large proportion of the public, who turned out en masse this year to celebrate the fact that only one person has been monarch for 70 years. To many, this might seem absurd. But which system has actually shown itself to be more adaptable: the British or the American? Today, the U.S. Constitution is worshipped almost as a sacral text, as if people have forgotten it was a messy and at times deeply immoral political compromise between a bunch of 18th-century British radicals, slave holders, and secessionists. It took a civil war to introduce the Thirteenth Amendment, banning slavery. And today, despite yet another wave of violent gun attacks, the Second Amendment appears unreformable. Over this same period, the British monarchy has essentially lost all its power.

The biggest problems in recent British political history have been caused not by sticking to the basic tenets of the British constitution but by injecting practices that mimic those of the United States. Take two examples to illustrate the point: the Fixed-term Parliament Act introduced by Cameron after being elected in 2010, and primaries to elect party leaders. Both have hampered the good functioning of Britain’s constitution.

The Fixed-term Parliament Act tried to impose order on Britain’s system, which traditionally awards the government of the day the power to call new elections at any time to seek a mandate from the country for whatever policy it decided was existentially important. This power meant that members of Parliament had to be careful when voting down a government’s most important policies, because they risked that government bypassing them and triggering an election. The idea behind Cameron’s legislation was to empower Parliament by restricting the government’s ability to call snap votes and setting U.S.-style “fixed” terms instead.

When it came to Brexit, however, this proved disastrous. May could not get her negotiated Brexit deal through Parliament, nor could she make the issue a confidence vote in her government and take it to the public instead, because the Fixed-term Parliament Act made this almost impossible. And so Britain limped on until Johnson took such radical (and unlawful) measures that Parliament essentially blinked and granted him an election, which he won, allowing him to pass a much harder version of Brexit than May had negotiated, and eventually scrap the Fixed-term Parliament Act.

The second import that has proved catastrophic for the governance of the country is the primary. Britain’s entire system runs on the premise that Parliament is sovereign. A government must command a majority in the House of Commons, whose members are chosen by the people. If the House of Commons withdraws its support for the government, the government falls and either a new government is formed or new elections take place. Simple.

For this reason, the leader of a political party was always chosen by parliamentarians from that political party. It did not matter whether a party leader was popular with members outside Parliament—he or she was not a tribune—but within Parliament. Whether they became prime minister was then dependent on whether the party they led could win a majority of seats in a general election. This all changed when both the Labour Party and the Conservative Party began to hand this decision to their members, in a direct lift from the U.S. The result, though, is not more accountability, but less. Jeremy Corbyn was directly elected by Labour’s members but could not be removed when he lost the support of his parliamentary party. A risk remains that something like this could now happen to the Conservative Party when it elects its next leader, chosen not by MPs but by party members. Whomever they select might not command the respect or support of Conservative members of Parliament, whose backing the new leader will need in order to be able to govern effectively.

The use of referenda, too, is an import that has, to some, undermined British democracy. There is much truth to this, in that such votes create competing mandates—public and parliamentary, setting up a battle for supremacy between the two. They have become, however, a legitimate tool to change the basic constitution of the U.K., whether that means breaking it up, or joining or leaving the EU’s jurisdiction. Referenda are far from ideal, but the fact remains that the parliamentary system has on each occasion eventually adapted to the reality of the public’s decision in a referendum.

That is the point: Britain’s system adapts. The country’s constitution is a permanently evolving creature, worming its way through time, surviving by changing. Nothing is sacred, except the one rule that no Parliament can bind the next. A democracy can change its mind, and so must the constitution change.

The British constitution is far from perfect—none are. And plenty of written constitutions function well. The British constitution was not flexible enough to stop the country from breaking apart in 1922 when the Republic of Ireland seceded. It may not be adaptable enough—or restrictive enough—to keep either Scotland or Northern Ireland in the Union either. Its electoral system might create a strong government from time to time, but it also creates problems of representation. More recently, the constitution has produced a string of governments that have not been very successful.

But let’s not pretend that the lack of written rules governing every foreseeable eventuality is the source of the country’s problems today. Over the past 10 years, the British constitution has done its job. It’s the political class that has failed.

The Worst, Best Prime Minister

2022-07-07T09:38:00-04:00

And just like that, he was gone. Well, ish. Boris Johnson finally gave up this morning and announced that he is quitting as prime minister following a tsunami of resignations from within his own government that have made his position untenable. “When the herd moves, it moves,” he said today outside 10 Downing Street. The “brilliant Darwinian system” of British politics, as he called it, had got him in the end. He will stay on until the Conservative Party has picked a new leader, who will then become Britain’s prime minister.

The events of the past 24 hours are a sordid and quite extraordinary almost-end to a sordid and quite extraordinary career, one that was profoundly inane in one respect and incontestably historic in another. He is perhaps the worst prime minister in modern British history but also the most consequential, leaving a legacy without an -ism or a following, but one that will outlast anything bequeathed by his recent predecessors.

In the few short years since the 2016 Brexit referendum, Johnson came, saw, conquered, and then collapsed in a heap of indignity—just as he seems to have always suspected he would. Johnson once wrote of the lead character in his novel, Seventy-Two Virgins, a comedic farce essentially about himself: “What a prat he’d been … He’d bungled it. He’d bogged it up. He could have been a hero. Now he had been proved right.” Proved right about what, exactly? That something like this was always going to happen.

That’s the thing with Johnson: He always seems to have known. “There was something weird about the way he had been impelled down the course he had followed,” he wrote. Well, quite.

A phenomenon known as the Phaeton complex seems to afflict many leading politicians who have suffered some childhood trauma. (In Johnson’s case, his mother experienced a mental breakdown when he was 10, and she had to be confined in London, away from the family in Brussels. This was when Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson was packed off to boarding school in England and became Boris.) The complex derives its name from the wayward son of the sun god in Greek mythology who persuaded his father to let him take the reins of the sun chariot’s fiery horses but then lost control, scorching the earth. In psychological terms, a person with the condition has a paradoxical yearning to flirt with danger in order to test whether he is as inadequate as he fears he is and to prove wrong anyone who thinks he really is inadequate. Think Bill Clinton. In her 1970 study of British prime ministers, the writer Lucille Iremonger defined the Phaeton complex as “the desire to possess everything in order the better to convince oneself that one has nothing.” Well, Johnson certainly had everything—and now he has nothing.

When I last saw Johnson, at 10 Downing Street in May, I asked him about this recurring premonition of disaster. The Brexit revolution, I pointed out, came with enormous risks. Why was he so sure everything would be fine? His novel suggested otherwise, I began to say before he interjected:

“Which one?”

Er.

“Oh, the only one I’ve written.”

Yes, that one.

“The novel turns out all right, doesn’t it?”

Yes, I replied, before telling him that his lead character, as he writes, does have a death wish of sorts.

“Does he?” Johnson said. “Isn’t he called Cameron? No, that’s the girl. I can’t remember what happens.”

Johnson’s claim that he’d forgotten was as ridiculous as it was unbelievable. The truth is that he just couldn’t resist the joke that the character with the death wish was called Cameron—as in David, his old university friend and the prime minister whose career he helped end, before proceeding to finish off the next prime minister, Theresa May. Johnson has a dark, cynical view of human life, which is only partially covered by the jokes.

The endless jokes. The problem is that, finally, Britons felt the joke was on them. And they were right.

When I pressed him about the not-very-hidden message in his book, Johnson sidestepped again. “I tell you what I think about that novel,” he said. “I always feel slightly depressed … Have you seen the film Four Lions? It’s basically the same idea.” In Four Lions, a group of absurd British Asian friends from Yorkshire try to become suicide bombers but are defeated in grimly ironic ways.

“It all falls apart in comedy circumstances at the end,” I noted.

“It does, yeah,” Johnson replied.

In one sense, then, Johnson’s departure leaves little trace of his brief hegemony over British politics. There will be very few Johnsonites in the Conservative Party to honor his legacy and call for a return to Johnsonite principles, as happened with Margaret Thatcher. Johnsonism, if it ever existed, will disperse into the political wind almost as quickly as his own premiership over the past six months.

One reason for this is that, Brexit aside, Johnson is no radical. Unlike Thatcher, he does not want to slash the size of the state. Nor does he want to expand it. He wants no revolution either in social attitudes or in Britain’s foreign policy. His main policy agenda is to “unite and level up” the country, but this is uncontroversial. The best one can say is that his success brought the issue of regional disparities more into the center of British politics.

[Read: The Brexit revolution that wasn’t]

“Economics is the method,” Thatcher declared. “The object is to change the soul.” Even passionate detractors had to concede that she had succeeded in this over her 11 years in power. She had not only reformed the economy but altered the way the nation saw itself. Even after Tony Blair took power, in 1997, and gradually restored the size of the state, her legacy remained secure. Such was her influence that Blair, and every prime minister since, has felt obliged to mimic Thatcher’s iron will, especially toward Europe. Even in Johnson’s final appearance in Parliament as prime minister this week, he was bleating about the power of “union barons”—almost 40 years after Thatcher destroyed their power.

[Read: Europe’s Ireland problem is here to stay]

Johnson leaves no such legacy—though some will say that he has done irreparable damage to the British body politic by breaking conventions that tie together Britain’s unwritten constitution. I’m not convinced by this argument. Johnson had an 80-seat majority in Parliament, with demographic trends that meant he should have held power for a decade, yet he has been forced from office. The system remains pretty formidable: The press revealed his bad behavior, the public decided he was not fit for office, and enough Conservative members of Parliament either agreed with the public or felt that it was in their interest to remove him. The spectacle that ensued this week was unseemly and chaotic. But it was no January 6.

And yet, Johnson leaves one legacy more consequential and long-lasting even than Thatcher’s: the Brexit revolution. Johnson led the campaign for it, helped block Theresa May’s attempted “soft exit,” and then negotiated a much harder alternative—and won a decisive electoral mandate to enact it. In doing so, he permanently transformed Britain—not perhaps its soul, but its place in the world, its sense of itself, and its future. Britain is in a weaker position today than it has been in decades, and much of this is because of Johnson. To be fair, it was in a weakened position when he took over: divided, stuck, unable to leave the European Union as the referendum demanded. His one major achievement was to enact the result of that poll, an important moment for British democracy, whatever its costs.

Within about six months of becoming prime minister, Johnson completely undid the complex, imperfect, and specifically British version of EU membership that had taken 50 years to construct. Whether Johnson was right to argue for Brexit, ever believed in it at all, or used it only for personal advancement is beside the point. In place of that membership, he negotiated a thin trade agreement with the EU and an internal trade border within the United Kingdom itself. This settlement is now part of international law, and is cemented in domestic politics by the Labour Party’s confirmation that it would not challenge its fundamental tenet. If a future government proposed to take Britain back into the EU, it would have to do so from a position of weakness; no status quo ante is available.

Johnson has not changed the soul of the nation, but he has left a scar that will endure. His successor will now have to see whether the Johnsonian whirligig was all worth it. Johnson lost control because of a series of idiotic failings and misjudgments summed up by that most tawdry and bafflingly pitiful scandal, Partygate, when he became the first prime minister in history to be fined for breaking the law, by attending his own birthday party.

“In the great scheme of things his extermination was about as important as the accidental squashing of a snail,” Johnson wrote in his novel. “The trouble was that until that happy day when he was reincarnated as a louse or a baked bean, he didn’t know how he was going to explain the idiotic behavior of his brief human avatar.” Explaining it is still hard, to be honest.

The Game Is (Probably) Up for Boris Johnson

2022-07-05T19:06:00-04:00

Don’t stop me just because you’ve heard this story before, but Prime Minister Boris Johnson is once again fighting for his political life. And once again, this time it might be the end. After yet another scandal, once again made worse by an absurdly stupid cover-up, two very senior members of Johnson’s government—his finance minister and his health minister—quit in disgust.

Is the game really up, then? For anyone else, the answer would surely be yes. For Johnson, a man impervious to shame, who knows? The answer is probably, though there remains a slim chance that he finds a way to ride it out. Either way, the point is this: Britain is no longer being governed.

The U.K. today is a country without direction, without an idea, and without a government capable of governing. It is a country run by a man whose sole purpose is to remain in his post, supported by people whose sole purpose is to stick around, either because they would not make it into any other government or because they have decided that sticking around is the best way to get Johnson’s job themselves.

All of this is happening less than three years after Johnson won a general-election victory that should have put him in power for a decade, a new Margaret Thatcher able to remake the country in his image, embedding a new economic and social model along with Brexit. Instead, Johnson has thrown it all away with a series of pathetic lies about pathetic decisions that have exposed his own pathetic weakness.

The truth is, Johnson didn’t want to order the country into lockdown during the coronavirus pandemic but did so reluctantly and late—only to not bother following the rules he didn’t believe in. When he was found out, he lied. When he got into trouble because of these lies, he desperately promoted people he shouldn’t have, which he knew because people told him not to. When this was found out, he lied, only to be found out once again. On and on we go, a never-ending carousel of corruption.

[Tom McTague: The minister of chaos]

Now Britain is back to where it was only a few years ago, when, riven by Brexit and the failure to implement the result of the referendum, the country seemed utterly ungovernable. This, remember, was how Johnson managed to rise to the premiership in the first place: He presented himself as an agent of chaos who would break the rules to end the chaos caused by those who should have known better (himself included, of course; he vacillated the whole time over what to do).

Today, once again, after a brief moment of calm, the chaos has returned and Johnson, once again, is at the center of it—a malevolent Mr. Bean, leaving a trail of destruction wherever he goes.

What Britain has is a prime minister with instincts, sometimes good, sometimes bad, who almost as a point of principle refuses ever to temper or abrogate them in any way. To do so, in his mind, would be a crime against the thing he thinks is most important in the world: the greatness of Boris, that comedic personification of his dreams and desires. Johnson’s refusal ever to dilute this character has been the source of his success, his superpower in a world of caution and calculation. And it will be his downfall.

On the way up, Boris was a mocking, disdainful jester able to poke fun at the British political class, which had been failing for years even as it patted itself on the back. In power, Boris was occasionally helped by his disdain for the rules of this political class, bulldozing his way through the conventions deployed to stop Britain from leaving the European Union, for example.

His instincts have even occasionally helped after Brexit as well. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Johnson became one of the most popular politicians in that country after throwing billions of pounds’ worth of military equipment at the crisis, more than any other ally of Ukraine in Europe. Although it is true that any other British prime minister would have acted to support Ukraine, Johnson’s rejection of caution meant that Britain was quicker than others to send lethal aid, and it has continued to do so at a much higher rate.

[Helen Lewis: Britain is fraying. Why did Boris Johnson get reelected?]

Yet these same instincts now look as though they will cost Johnson his job. He continually disregards official advice, and attempts to bypass the rules or ignores them altogether, seeing them as little more than officialdom’s devices to control him. The latest scandal is over the appointment to a senior parliamentary position—responsible for enforcing party discipline—of a Tory lawmaker named Christopher Pincher, who had been accused of sexual impropriety. Johnson had been alerted to Pincher’s misconduct but ignored the warning, and then claimed he hadn’t known about it when Pincher resigned after being accused of further impropriety. Johnson seems pathologically unable to condemn anyone else for personal failings, most likely because he sees in others’ failings a mirror of his own, and he so hates to be on the receiving end of others’ judgment. If this Tory-politician sex scandal proves his undoing, the irony will be that it wasn’t a scandal of his own.

Johnson governs by instinct, because he is governed by instinct. He wants to spend money on schools and hospitals and police and infrastructure, because that would make him popular. And when he is popular, he is happy to increase taxes to pay for it all. But then, when he is unpopular, he calls for tax cuts to ease the pain. He wants a Thatcherite low-tax, free-market economy and he wants a social-democratic society protected by tariffs, high taxes, and big spending. He wants a wife and he wants a mistress, responsibility and freedom, power and popularity.

Boris Johnson will not change. As he said recently—his one honest utterance in weeks—following demands from colleagues that he change his behavior to stay in office, “If you’re saying you want me to undergo some sort of psychological transformation, I think that our listeners would know that is not going to happen.” This is the great paradox about Johnson: He is both the most self-aware political leader I’ve come across, a leader who seems to genuinely reflect on his character flaws, and the one who seems most determined to do absolutely nothing about them. And so Britain bounces from scandal to scandal, instinct to instinct, without direction or purpose, unmoored and ungoverned.

America’s Necessary Myth for the World

2022-07-04T06:00:00-04:00

For European officials and politicians, a great fear gnaws at the back of their minds when they look at the ongoing war in Ukraine: What happens if the United States loses interest?

Despite the war being in Europe, involving European powers, with largely European consequences, America remains the essential partner for Ukraine. For most of Eastern Europe, Scandinavia, and Britain, in particular, the reality that Ukraine would likely already be lost were it not for American military support has only proved the intrinsic value of living in an American world order. For others, including the French, such dependence is now a source not only of shame, but of long-term vulnerability. America might care enough to supply Ukraine today, but with Donald Trump limbering up for another shot at the presidency, it doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to picture a time when this is no longer the case.

And as French President Emmanuel Macron has warned, whichever American president is in office when this is finally all over, Russia will remain, its preoccupations, fears, interests, and myths the same as before.

Europe is thus trapped between an immediate calamity on its doorstep and the whims of an unhappy American electorate. The question is not whether the U.S. will still be capable of defending what was once called the “free world” under a future Trump presidency, but whether it will any longer have the commitment to do so.

To many American policy makers, it is axiomatic that the U.S. is a force for good in the world, an indispensable power. America, unlike the British empire that came before it, supposedly embodies universal values, and it follows that what is good for America is good for the world. Yes, the U.S. might fall short of its values from time to time, and yes, it might occasionally have to do the dirty work of a superpower but, at heart, it is better than other superpowers—both current and former—because it is driven by what is good for everyone, not just for itself. Ukraine helps confirm this belief.

This idea is circular, powerful, and useful. It infuses the American order with a moral purpose as well as a justification, and in doing so drives the country to both greatness and calamity. It is an idea that convinces U.S. leaders that they never oppress, only liberate, and that their interventions can never be a threat to nearby powers, because America is not imperialist.

This fallacy, however, lies at the core of its most costly foreign-policy miscalculations. Bill Clinton really did seem to believe that China would one day settle into the American rules-based order, because he did not see it as an American order, but a universal one. He concluded—and much of the Western establishment agreed at the time—that China would become more like America if the two countries traded more. Similarly, George W. Bush really did believe that he could liberate Afghanistan and Iraq, and that such liberation would be good for everyone, if only they could just see it. Even the intervention in Vietnam was partly driven by this idea. American power was necessary to protect the Vietnamese from communism, which in turn was necessary to protect the world from communism.

Yet, regardless of the totalitarian horror of the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, the American centurions that toppled these regimes came to be seen as oppressors, just as they were in Vietnam. Equally, the arrival of American forces was not seen as benign by the powers bordering these countries, whether Pakistan or China or Iran.

No amount of money or troops could ever convince these countries that their national interest was the same as America’s. What’s more, in each of these wars, the U.S. could never care as much as the neighboring power, for whom there was never an option to cut and run. In each case, geography trumped interests.

For Ukraine, America is and will remain a force of liberation. Yet, it is not unreasonable for the rest of Europe to worry that history may repeat itself. What if Ukraine is not Greece or South Korea—where American might guarantees somebody else’s freedom—but Afghanistan where it tried, failed, and eventually gave up? Ukraine, too, has a country on its border that has decided on a policy that cannot be brought into line with America’s. Neither carrots nor sticks are likely to change Russia’s fundamental assessment of its interests.

Even the current U.S. administration is under no illusion that so long as Russia remains in conflict with Ukraine, even if Moscow is stuck and unable to achieve its goals, it will always be able to rain down missiles on Kyiv, making it almost impossible for the West to restore a settled free, democratic Ukraine, just as Iran was always able to destabilize Iraq, Pakistan likewise in Afghanistan. What then?

In 1988, the great scion of Irish America, Joe Kennedy, son of the assassinated presidential candidate Robert Kennedy, found himself in a heated row with a British army patrol in Belfast. Kennedy was infuriated that British soldiers were ordering him around and asked why they did not go home. One of the soldiers—who was from Northern Ireland—pointed out that he was home. Another soldier suggested that perhaps Kennedy might want to go home.

I thought of this after Representative Richard Neal’s recent visit to Ireland, leading a delegation of mainly Irish-American congressmen, during which he was intent, it seemed, on committing as many faux pas as possible in one trip. At one point, Neal, the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee and co-chair of the Friends of Ireland Caucus, declared that the dispute engulfing Northern Ireland over Brexit was “manufactured,” and that the division between the British and Irish was between “the planter and the gael.” Planter is a loaded term for British protestants in Northern Ireland, many of whom likely descend in one way or another from English and Scottish settlers, a not-so-subtle way of implying that they are foreign, though perhaps Neal didn’t mean it so bluntly. It doesn’t seem to have dawned on Neal that by his own logic, he—along with almost everybody in America whose ancestors were not already there, or who were taken there against their will—is a planter.

The thing about Neal’s clumsiness is not simply that it reveals his own prejudices, which of course it does. It lifts the lid on something more profound about the great American delusion that underlies many of its foreign-policy problems.

The U.S. still seems to think of itself in contrast to the British empire—even as it has seamlessly stepped into London’s shoes. America believes that it is a superpower, but an anti-imperial one, founded in opposition to arbitrary force, monarchy, foreign domination, and the like. Its supremacy, unlike other imperial powers, is good for everyone.

The reality, however, is that we live in what the German historian Friedrich Meinecke identified as the “Pax Anglo-Saxonica”—an empire created by Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman, but inherited from William Gladstone and Winston Churchill. The essential features of the American order remain strikingly similar to the British one that came before it. America, like Britain, is a commercial power that rules the waves and keeps trade flowing, ports open, and waterways clear, while jealously guarding any encroachment on its spheres of influence. More than this, though, the U.S. inherited from Britain a similar idea.

In Meinecke’s classic text, Machiavellianism, he showed how London gained global supremacy through brute force only to then claim that it was using its power for the benefit of all. In doing so, Britain talked not of its interests, but of preserving international law (which it had created). At first Meinecke and others were dismissive of such claims, but they later realized that these statements actually helped Britain amplify its power. It was, in fact, the most effective kind of Machiavellianism, unconsciously turning a policy of power into something of “pure humanity, candour and religion.”

This is what Henry Kissinger later called the “convenient form of ethical egoism” deployed by both the British and Americans. In the 19th century, London believed that “what was good for Britain was best for the rest.” Today, Washington feels the same about itself.

This “ethical egoism” has been shared by all American presidents from Truman to Joe Biden—apart from one. Until Trump came along, it was accepted a priori that the U.S. had a special duty to maintain the global order for the benefit of everyone. Without such a sentiment, there would not have been the Truman Doctrine or the Berlin airlift, or a free Greece or South Korea. This same sentiment underlies Biden’s decision to arm Ukraine in its battle for survival today.

Trump, in contrast, believes American interests and the world’s interests can, and do, clash. And, ironically, he’s not alone.

The great paradox in the world today is that the “dumb simplicity” of America’s self-perception, as one senior European government adviser put it to me, is both obviously bogus and fundamentally true. The story that America tells about itself is both the source of many of its foreign-policy disasters and the necessary myth without which much of the world would be a more brutal place.

The dumb simplicity of the idea means that the U.S. will continue going around the world offending people and annoying them. It will continue to make catastrophic mistakes, causing much more than offense, overreaching, and being resisted by rival powers. And it means that the U.S. will carry on pulling back when it realizes its myth has bumped up against a different reality. But, as the same government adviser put it to me, “show me a foreign minister in the West who really wants less America.” Certainly not the Ukrainian one.

Here is a country that is not in NATO, not covered by an American security guarantee, and without almost anything of central importance to the U.S., and yet is able, so far, to resist Russian colonization in large part because the U.S. has decided that it is in the West’s interest for Russia to fail. For Ukraine to carry on surviving, the West, led by the U.S., cannot step back from this calculation, or from America’s idea of itself.

Over and over again this myth of American exceptionalism, of benevolent American power, worms its way into the minds of its presidents and plenipotentiaries, so powerful that it took Richard Holbrooke to Bosnia, convinced of his mission to save the world, even after he had witnessed the spectacular failure of American power in Vietnam. The same myth later sent Holbrooke to Afghanistan, convinced once again of the righteousness of his mission, only to see it this time ground in the dust.

The dumb simplicity of America’s interventions is often infuriating and obtuse, or even disastrously naive and destructive. It exists in people like Neal and Holbrooke, Bush and Biden. And yet if America stops believing in its myth, if it scurries back into the safety of its continental bunker, having decided it is now just another normal nation, then a cold wind might start to blow in places that have become complacent in their security. When the dumb simplicity is removed, the complexities of the world start growing back.

This is what Ukraine fears and others in Europe expect. In the end, though, what really matters is which story America believes, and for how long.

The Accidental Trumpification of NATO

2022-07-02T06:00:00-04:00

If Donald Trump returns to power in 2025, he will find a world starkly different from the one he tried to construct while president. All hopes of normalizing relations with Russia have been obliterated in the slaughter of Ukraine. China is more powerful than ever. Iran is closer to acquiring nuclear weapons. And Kim Jong Un is still behaving like Kim Jong Un.

But, in a narrow yet important sense, the world has become more Trumpian since he left office. The NATO that met in Madrid this past week to agree on a new strategy to defend the West has started to resemble the kind of organization Trump and his wing of the Republican Party said they always wanted.

NATO’s European members are paying more for their own defense, the alliance is more Eastern European in its outlook and positioning, and, for the first time, it is explicitly focused on America’s great-power rivalry with China. Trump is not primarily responsible for these changes—for that he can thank Vladimir Putin—but they nevertheless signal an important moment for the West, as Europe moves to more closely align itself with American domestic political concerns. Europe’s shift is part of a bid to protect the status quo that has existed since NATO’s founding, but which is now threatened both by Russia’s aggression and by the U.S.’s growing focus on its great-power rival in the 21st century: China.

As well as NATO becoming more American in outlook, the grand strategies of countries that Trump so obviously distrusted—Germany and France in particular—have never been more irrelevant. Germany has been forced to abandon its long-held reticence to increase defense spending as well as its planned Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline with Russia. France, which has long sought a greater role for the European Union rather than NATO, today faces a continent that wants more NATO, not less, which, as France well understands, means support for U.S. primacy.

A similar reprioritization is taking place in the G7, another international organization Trump seemed to loathe, and that also met this past week, transformed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine into a body that more obviously serves the American interest.

Notably, President Joe Biden has consciously rejected President Barack Obama’s prioritization of the wider G20 group of advanced economies, which included developing democracies such as India and Indonesia, but also Russia and China. In one of Obama’s first forays onto the world stage, he said that the G20 would from then on be the more important international format, better representing the 21st century than the kind of world where “there’s just Roosevelt and Churchill sitting in a room with a brandy.” His vice president has decided to reverse course and return the G7 to its former role, an organization that looks much more like a group of wealthy Western powers deciding how to get their way.

If Trump regains power, then, he should have far less to complain about than he did during his time in office, when Europe was clearly failing to share the burden of its own defense with the U.S., while striking independent trade and energy deals with both China and Russia. Then, it was legitimate for Trump to ask whether Europe was taking the U.S. for a ride. That grievance looks a lot less real today, even as Europe doubles down in its dependence on the U.S.

Together with bipartisan support in Congress for America’s military backing of Ukraine and its economic sanctions on Russia, many have taken solace in the notion that NATO—and support for it—is growing stronger than ever. And yet with Trump, there is always an “and yet.”

The first is that there remains an obvious, growing, and valid American grievance with Europe that Trump will almost certainly pick up should he return to the White House. Led by France, Europe is erecting barriers to protect its defense industry: New rules mean that the moment a European defense firm accepts a single euro from the EU, partnering with non-EU companies becomes almost impossible because of strict restrictions on intellectual property, a kind of poison pill.

This kind of protectionism was already being noticed by Trump toward the end of his first term, according to one senior NATO official I spoke with, but it has moved on several steps since. The idea behind these regulations is to build up Europe’s own military industrial capacity so that it can defend itself better—a form of burden sharing. And in some senses this would be good for the West collectively. However, such a move only emphasizes the bigger problem: Why should the U.S. pay for Europe’s defense if Europe is building obstacles to American defense firms? If the West is worth defending collectively, then how can it continue raising walls between its members? As one European government official told me: “Putting barriers around the West is fine. Putting them within the West is not.”

The second “and yet” is both shallower and potentially more important: Trump himself. It is naive to think that his problems with Europe will ever be solved, that once Europe answers his criticisms, all will be well. Trump’s issues with Europe are instinctive rather than specific. Where he has policy differences, they are surely mere expressions of his “American first” mentality and a deeper philosophical rejection of his nation’s Western allies. At heart, Trump does not really believe in the American-led Western order, convinced that it imposes too many burdens on the U.S., which America does not need or benefit from. In essence, he believes that the U.S., as the strongest nation on Earth, would be better off in direct competition with everybody else, not subsidizing its supposed allies, who then go on to compete with America for business.

As Fiona Hill, Trump’s former Russia adviser, told me, what he really wants is for Europe to completely open itself up to American industry—and for America not to open itself up to Europe in return. When Trump looks at NATO and the G7, he sees a protection racket, not an American order wherein power brings responsibility.

In private, as the NATO official I spoke with admitted, Europeans are already in a state of depressed panic about a possible second Trump term, which many of them now see as inevitable. If his first term and the direction of policy since he left office are anything to go by, there is no need for melodramatic worry in Europe. During his term, NATO did not collapse and the American presence in Europe actually increased. His cajoling, threats, and insults—however coarse and undiplomatic—did create a sense of urgency among European leaders that forced them to answer his concerns. Strategically, though, Europe did not change course. Germany and France continued to push for separate relations with Russia and China, and greater European autonomy from America. What really changed things was not Trump, but Putin’s megalomania.

And on this point, it is important to recognize that Trump was no oracle. In 2018, as he wrapped up the NATO summit in Brussels, he declared himself happy, but fired a pointed warning shot at Germany over its gas pipeline with Russia. “Frankly,” he said, “maybe everybody is going to have a good relationship with Russia, so there will be a lot less problem with the pipeline.”

Trump might not be a brandy-drinking statesman like Churchill and Roosevelt, but does anyone seriously think that just because much of the Western world has become more to his taste, he no longer yearns to sit like those grand figures in a room with Putin and Xi Jinping, deciding things alone, far away from America’s pesky allies? For Trump, Europe can become less annoying, but the West is not the world he wants to lead.

Britain’s Unbridgeable Divide

2022-06-20T01:00:00-04:00

Britain today is a poor and divided country. Parts of London and the southeast of England might be among the wealthiest places on the planet, but swaths of northern England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland are among Western Europe’s poorest. Barely a decade ago, the average Brit was as wealthy as the average German. Now they are about 15 percent poorer—and 30 percent worse off than the typical American.

The great project of Boris Johnson’s government is to “unite and level up” the country, bringing the rest of Britain into line with the southeast. This is a mission explicitly tied to Brexit and the threat of Scottish secession, the two great revolutionary challenges facing the British state.

Johnson is not alone in believing that the division between the south and the rest is so big that it threatens the very integrity of the United Kingdom. Yet for him, Brexit was both an expression of Britain’s great divide—a vote against the status quo—and an opportunity to fix it, by giving the government new “freedoms” that it did not have within the European Union.

In the 2016 Brexit referendum and then in the 2019 general election, Johnson offered voters the chance to “take back control” of their destiny, to rebalance the country and to pull it together again. On both occasions, he won.

Six years on, however, we can safely say his project is failing. His government is busy trying to wrest back more control rather than exercising what it has regained. It has not united the country. It has not even begun to level it up.

The truth is, this government won’t accomplish any of that. Until Britain stops trying to restore a vanished past—whether the one imagined by its pro-Brexit Leavers or its anti-Brexit Remainers—and begins to construct a viable future, the country as a whole never will.

“So now, tell me how was Yorkshire?” Cardinal Wolsey asks Thomas Cromwell in the opening pages of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, her fictionalized biography of Cromwell. “Filthy,” Cromwell replies. “Weather. People. Manners. Morals … Oh, and the food. Five miles inland, and no fresh fish.” Appalled, Wolsey asks what they do eat up there. “Londoners,” Cromwell says. “You have never seen such heathens.”

In much of the self-excoriating public debate since the referendum, the image of the heathen northerner has once again risen in the national consciousness, blamed by liberal Remainers for dragging the country out of the EU. Today’s northerners might be able to find fresh fish, but they dwell in “left behind” towns, apparently voting for revolution out of desperation because they have so little to lose. Never mind that the bulk of Brexit supporters were comfortable older people, many of them in the prosperous south; the image of the poor Brexit-backing northerner, said to have been conned by clever salesmen like Johnson, is the one that has stuck. The implication is that the 48 percent who voted to remain were smart enough to see through Johnson’s lies and promises.

In some important senses, however, the pledges made by the Vote Leave campaign—the official movement calling for Britain’s withdrawal—have been delivered. In its pitch to the country, Vote Leave claimed that Brexit would achieve five key things: It would save Britain £350 million a week that it could spend on its own priorities; reclaim control of the country’s borders, as well as its immigration system; and leave it free to strike trade deals independently of the EU, and to make its own laws. Of these, only the £350 million figure remains contentious as an outright “lie.” (The real amount Britain contributed to the EU was lower, once various deductions were taken into account.) The other pledges, however, have been largely fulfilled: Liberated from the EU’s “freedom of movement” principle, Britain now operates its own border outside the EU and its own immigration system; no longer part of the EU’s trading bloc, it operates its own trade policy and manages its own internal market, governed by its own laws; and, of course, it no longer contributes to the EU budget. For good or bad, Britain has taken back control. Well, up to a point.

On laws, Britain can be said to have only partially taken back control, given that EU law still applies in one part of its territory, Northern Ireland. (Since Brexit, both Britain and the EU have sought to ensure that no border is erected between Northern Ireland, which is part of the U.K., and the Republic of Ireland, a separate sovereign state. The result has been a de facto border between Northern Ireland and the rest of Britain, with EU rules and regulations still applicable on one side but not the other.) This means that every time London wishes to scrap an EU law that would continue to apply in Northern Ireland, it risks dividing its own country. Partly for this reason—but more likely because a lot of EU laws are either sensible or popular—the government has only sparingly used its control to diverge from the EU. Britain continues to run a distinctly European social and economic model, but without the benefits of being in the EU’s single market.

On trade, Britain has essentially rebuilt the network of deals that it had as a member of the EU, but it now has a much worse relationship with its biggest trading partner, the EU. It has not pursued a radically different strategy with the goal of changing the nature of its economy—using protectionism, say, to build domestic capacity, or unilateral free trade that would sacrifice inefficient industry. Ironically, the one trade deal that might have made at least something of a difference to Britain—with the United States—is now politically impossible, in large part because of Washington’s opposition to Britain’s efforts to take back some of the legal control that it has lost over Northern Ireland. And instead of trying to liberalize global services trade, which would have a huge impact on the British economy, it has prioritized symbolic trade deals with faraway countries such as New Zealand, which make almost no difference.

Then we come to borders. Britain has negotiated itself into the preposterous position of operating two borders, neither of which it wants. The first, as we have seen, sits within its own country; the second sits at Britain’s busiest trading route with the continent, but which only the EU enforces. Six years after the Brexit referendum, all goods moving from Britain to France are checked by the EU, yet hardly any are checked in return, partly because Britain has not built the capacity to do so. For European businesses, this couldn’t be better: Their access to the British market is largely unchanged. For British businesses, the one-sided frontier is a disaster. London argues that the EU is punishing itself by making British goods more expensive to import. The EU simply shrugs, able to absorb this limited cost as the price of protecting its market. Either way, the result—again—is just a version of the status quo ante for Britain, only indisputably worse.

Of the ostensibly fulfilled promises, immigration is the most complex. Here, London has introduced a points-based system that, again—on the face of it—is different from what came before. Instead of there being free movement within the EU, offering priority to European citizens, Britain today operates a system open to anyone in the world, without a preference for Europeans. Yet it has used this newfound control to effectively maintain immigration levels, rather than reduce them. Supporters of this policy say the fact that Britain is directly in control of who comes into the country means people are more at ease with high levels of immigration. Some initial evidence indicates that this is true. Still, yet again—and for good or bad—Britain has chosen to maintain the same kind of high-immigration economic model it had before Brexit, rather than substantially change it.

So far, Britain has chosen the hardest, most expensive version of Brexit available, one that leaves the country divided and its businesses disadvantaged, without having bothered to do anything that would actually alter the basic nature of the economy. Brexit, then, turned out to be both more radical than its supporters claimed, leaving the British economy indisputably worse off, and far less radical than its opponents warned.

In Wolf Hall, Cardinal Wolsey realizes he really should go to Yorkshire himself at some point, given that he is the archbishop of York and has never actually visited his see. His goal is not to help build that archdiocese, however, but to divert income from his northern monasteries to fund two new colleges in the south. How little things change.

Today, as in Wolsey’s time, almost all of Britain’s great institutions and national assets remain in the south, promoted and protected by those in charge in London: the City of London’s finance sector, Heathrow Airport, the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, the pharmaceutical and technology industries, all of the country’s world-class museums, its biggest media companies, its highest law courts. The U.K.’s only core economic asset that remains outside the south is the oil and gas industry in Scotland, and even that is disappearing.

It hasn’t always been this way. During the Victorian era, parts of northern England were genuinely wealthy. Thanks to the industrial revolution, Liverpool, Newcastle, Glasgow, and Belfast were centers of the world. Today, they are fine cities, but have once again fallen behind their European counterparts. Although we don’t like to admit it, they are poor. As the economist Torsten Bell told me recently: “Yes, this is what failure looks like.”

In some senses, this is just a reversion to the historic mean. In The Shortest History of England, the historian and author James Hawes notes how the north-south divide was buried in the soil of the country, there when the Romans came. When Emperor Claudius looked at Britain, Hawes writes, he “only cared about the tribes already advanced enough to be making and using coins”—all of whom were in the south. By the time Cardinal Wolsey was running things 1,500 years later, the divide remained in place. We know this because the real Wolsey carried out surveys of England, which show that the areas most heavily Romanized at the turn of the millennium were still the richest in England in the 16th century. As Hawes puts it, “despite the fall of the Roman Empire, the English invasions, the Vikings, the Conquest, the High Medieval boom, the Black Death and the Wars of the Roses, the North-South divide was almost exactly the same.” And it is almost exactly the same today.

Ultimately, as manufacturing began to wilt after the Victorian boom and the Second World War, so too did the north. Every prime minister since Margaret Thatcher has tried to address the problem, and all have failed. Now it is Johnson’s turn.

Yet leveling up, like taking back control, is radical in theory and conservative in practice. Johnson proposes to close a 2,000-year-old divide with a few more bus routes, some “free ports,” the relocation of parts of government departments out of London, and a “leveling up fund” of £4.8 billion, equivalent to 0.2 percent of Britain’s annual GDP.

Brexit seems, if anything, to be making this problem worse, as London, with its service-sector economy, recovers far more quickly than the rest of the country. This, in turn, naturally leaves the Treasury more reliant on the south for its revenue, while being able to spend less to change the reality of the north-south divide than it did before, thanks to a slowing economy. So the cycle continues, nothing changing, only degrading.

Johnson seems to grasp the historic nature of the challenge while also being singularly useless at being able to do anything about it. When I interviewed him last year, he admitted that governments struggled to change the deep-seated historical realities of a nation. “It’s very, very hard to change the fundamentals,” he said. He had been reading about Shakespearean England and some of the challenges that existed then and now. He nevertheless insisted that it was possible to change things quickly. “Less than 100 years ago, Liverpool was producing more tax than London,” he told me. “The regional imbalance can shift quite quickly with local leadership, infrastructure, and great skills.”

But Johnson offers almost nothing of practical value when it comes to addressing this imbalance. He says he doesn’t support “jam spreading,” taking from the south to give to the north. Instead, Johnson wants the north to “level up” to the south without anyone suffering any pain and without his government actually exercising much of the control it paid such a heavy price to take back. There is no strategy, no plan, no vision of what Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, or Sheffield need in order to become as wealthy as the south; no idea of what major interventions the government must make to balance the playing field, what is required for the north to reach the kind of prosperity enjoyed across much of Northern Europe. Instead, his government offers ad hoc, politically driven nonsense, pulled in different directions by its voters based in “red wall” towns that will not be the engines of any rebalancing on one side, and Labour-supporting northern cities that have the genuine capacity to grow on the other.

It is all so depressing, all so familiar. In the 19th century, just a few years after Britain and Ireland formed a United Kingdom, the Anglo-Irish politician William Cusack Smith concluded that England was just not interested enough in making the union work. “Can a Unionist avoid blushing when he contrasts the performance with the promise?” The same could be said of this government.

Britain today cannot even commit to completing the first new train line outside the south since Queen Victoria died. Instead it has canceled one leg of the project, known as HS2, that was meant to go to the northeast, Britain’s poorest region, and another spur in the northwest. No one now even talks of extending it to Scotland. In London, meanwhile, a giant new £18.9 billion underground line has just opened, connecting the east and west of the capital, cutting journey times to Heathrow. Outside London, only one other city has any real metro system of note, while Leeds remains the biggest city in Europe without an underground or a tram network. If you want to travel from Leeds to Manchester—the two richest cities in northern England—you must board a train that still runs on diesel.

Even when the government is given the chance to create a regional hub away from London, it misses the mark. Leeds hosts an offshoot of the Bank of England, as well as a new state investment bank. Yet when the Treasury was weighing where to locate a new hub, it chose Darlington, a town selected in large part because it sits within the red wall—constituencies long held by Labour that Johnson won in 2019—rather than because it made any economic sense. I happen to be from Darlington and am happy for my hometown, but the decision exposes the government’s lack of seriousness about leveling up.

In all of this, we see the same story over and over again. Little bits of government get moved out of London, each to a different place, each welcomed by whichever town has won the race to attract the jobs, but each doing nothing in the grand scheme of things to rebalance the country, a task that requires commerce, industry, infrastructure, investment, and difficult choices that prioritize some places over others. Through it all, London remains utterly dominant; the economy, the political class, and the country plod on.

The truth is, it’s already too late for Johnson’s leveling-up agenda. It may even be too late for the next government, because not a single potential Conservative leadership candidate nor the opposition Labour Party has developed any kind of strategy that might significantly shift the fundamentals of the British economy.

Brexit represents the single biggest upheaval for Britain’s economic model since the country joined the European Economic Community in 1972. Yet the government seems to be largely attempting to hold the line, only under significantly worse circumstances. Today, no political party seems to be genuinely considering changing the Bank of England’s mandate, or overhauling how the economy is run by the government; building a rival to Heathrow in the north; or even relocating a single national museum away from the south. No party says the great cities of the north should be connected with a transport network the size and scope of London’s or recommends completely different tax, planning, and investment rules—either for the country as a whole, or just for the parts outside the southeast of England. Nothing radical is ever put forward to prioritize northern growth, pursue a different economic strategy, overhaul the regulatory environment or tax system, or actually do something transformative. Instead, parties propose the most minor, insubstantial tweaks to a basic settlement that already exists, has always existed, and has been failing for much of the country, leading to two successive votes against the status quo.

Perhaps the brutal reality is that the north-south divide cannot be fixed. It exists—a part of British life and history to be managed, reflected upon, and even at times celebrated (not everywhere wants to be as expensive and crammed as the southeast of England). And perhaps the British economy cannot be fundamentally altered, though surely it can be a lot wealthier than it is today.

The truth that few—whether they are Leavers or Remainers—wish to face up to is that of Britain’s economic failure. For Leavers, it is difficult to acknowledge that Brexit has amounted to a bad deal, negotiated from a position of extraordinary weakness, that has left Britain in an obviously worse position than it was before and with no clear strategy to build something better. For Remainers, meanwhile, this means accepting that the British economy, with its high levels of inequality and poverty masked by a wealthy capital, wasn’t doing very well inside the EU; it’s also difficult to acknowledge that though Brexit has been an upheaval, it hasn’t changed the basic structure of the British economy or its biggest dilemma, which is how to make the north much wealthier than it is today without undermining its only globally productive region, the south.

“Brexit means an up-front hit to the economy, although not necessarily a disastrous one,” Duncan Weldon, the author of Two Hundred Years of Muddling Through, an economic history of Britain, told me. “With the right policy choices and some sort of coherent plan, the country could still thrive. But we aren’t seeing much coherence; instead we have a scattergun of short-term, mostly reactive measures.”

Britain’s choice, as Bell, the economist, put it to me, is the same as it was inside the EU: to double down on what it’s good at—or to get poorer. Brexit will not bring back manufacturing, as some hoped, or magically turn the country into a laissez-faire trading hub like Singapore. Britain is a service-sector economy that can do well inside or outside the EU—if it governs itself properly.

But ultimately, what Britain has been doing hasn’t been working. Voters said so in 2016, and again in 2019. The country needs to start doing something different. And yet it won’t, because that would be too difficult. That would mean not simply taking control, but exercising it.

Where Russia’s Declinist Rage Isn’t Enough

2022-06-18T06:00:00-04:00

The novel Jamilia tells the story of a free-spirited woman trapped in a passionless marriage who is suddenly awakened by the arrival of a mournful, lonely outsider who touches something in her soul. Set in Kyrgyzstan, it achieved a degree of fame in the West after it was praised by the French poet Louis Aragon as “the most beautiful love story in the world.” But there is a darkness to the story as well, a suggestion of violence and control, of forced marriage and a sapping of the human spirit when it is not free.

Woven throughout the novel, published in 1957, is an ambiguity—both about Jamilia, the protagonist, and the society she inhabits; one that is a loyal part of the Soviet Union but with its own connections and feelings for a past distinct from Russia. Jamilia, like Kyrgyzstan, is part of a wider family, but an outsider within it; a woman with passions and desires beyond those imposed upon her in a marriage whose circumstances are left intentionally vague—the reader doesn’t learn whether it was ever of her own choosing.

I read Jamilia last month while traveling through Kyrgyzstan, a small, extraordinarily beautiful country on the eastern edge of “the stans,” those former Soviet republics in Central Asia that seem to have collectively merged in the Western mind. While there, I was traveling through the lost Russian world of Vladimir Putin’s dreams, one he is seeking to bring back to life with appalling brutality in Ukraine. Yet throughout, it was hard to escape the feeling that the tide of the Russian world is on its way out; the waves of its civilization may still lap over its near-abroad, but not as powerfully as they once did. In Kyrgyzstan, like everywhere else, the tidal pull of other civilizations can now be felt. Like its national myths, which look south and east, to battles with Uyghurs and Afghans, the forces of nationalism, economics, culture, and religion all pull it away from Moscow. Russia can stem this tide for a while yet because its influence remains strong, but, in the long term, can it really compete?

At one point in the novel, Jamilia’s mother-in-law tells her how lucky she is to have come into such a “strong and blessed house” by marrying (or being forced to marry) her husband, Sadyk. “That’s your good fortune,” the matriarch says. This is Putin’s vision of the Russian world, a strong and blessed house with Russia as the paterfamilias, tough and occasionally harsh, but ultimately benevolent, sharing the fruits of Russian civilization with those who belong to its world. Jamilia’s mother-in-law, though, completes her remark with a warning. “Happiness, though, belongs to those who retain their honor and conscience.”

Kyrgyzstan is part of the land once known by the Russians as Turkestan, a place that sat at the confluence of competing civilizations that have poured into it over the years, whether Turkic, Mongol, Chinese, Islamic, or Russian.

It was not until the late 19th century that Russian power formally spread over Central Asia, thanks to the usual mix of apparent “invitation” and conquest met with resistance and suppression—a marriage with murky origins of its own. In Kyrgyzstan’s case, the resistance culminated in a mass uprising against conscription into the Russian army in 1916 that was put down with appalling brutality. Not until 1991 would the country win its independence, along with the rest of the old Turkestan.

Kyrgyzstan—a land of snow-capped peaks and lush valleys, yurts and minarets, roaming horses and frozen waterfalls—remained part of the Soviet Union long enough to, in some way, become Soviet. The script is still Cyrillic (Kazakhstan has switched to the Latin alphabet), and guides called Sergey and Vlad can take you to Russian Orthodox churches or valleys marked by statues of the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. The national flag might depict the central opening of a yurt, but in the capital, Bishkek, it flies opposite the Soviet-era Parliament, close to an imposing statue of Lenin and a giant mural celebrating Soviet victory in the “Great Patriotic War,” Moscow’s nomenclature for World War II.

There is something astonishing about being so deep into central Asia and feeling the remains of this Russianness, a reminder of Russia’s cultural depth that is hard to comprehend in Western Europe. Russian remains the lingua franca, and Moscow retains a military base as well as close economic and diplomatic ties that mean Kyrgyzstan lies within Russia’s purported sphere of influence. While I was walking in Bishkek on the day I arrived, a four-by-four drove past with a giant Soviet flag attached to its roof.

But to visit Kyrgyzstan is also to understand that it is assuredly not Russian. Its people are mostly Turkic, not Slav; Muslim, not Christian. Although 300,000 Russians are still in Kyrgyzstan, out of a population of about 6.5 million, this is down from the more than 900,000 that lived there before the fall of the Soviet Union. Jamilia’s author, Chinghiz Aïtmatov, himself embodies many of these contradictions. Aïtmatov was a hero of the Soviet Union; he even became a Soviet ambassador to multiple European countries later in life. Yet his novels focus on his native land of Kyrgyzstan, the land for which his father was executed in 1938 after being found guilty of “bourgeois nationalism.” Aïtmatov is the country’s most celebrated author, honored with a display of his work at the national museum and with a statue nearby. Reading Jamilia, it is impossible not to speculate about the real Aïtmatov lurking beneath, to wonder what he truly thought and felt about the Russian world and his own country’s place within it. “How could someone … know what’s in a person’s soul?” Jamilia asks at one point in the book. “Nobody knows.”

Kyrgyzstan does not easily fit into Joe Biden’s democracy-versus-autocracy framing; the NGO Freedom House rates it low on both political rights and civil liberties, and both, at least based on this rating, have worsened in the past year. What Kyrgyzstan represents, instead, is something else: a country that is part of a declining Russian world, but is not Russian; a country that must incorporate its Soviet past into its own independent national story, which is broader and deeper than the one Moscow wants to tell.

To Putin, of course, the loss of Kyrgyzstan and the other Soviet republics that left Moscow’s control in 1991 forms part of what he characterizes as the wider “humanitarian disaster” that befell Russia and the people who were left behind outside their motherland. This is partly a reflection of Russian nationalism, but it’s also a longing for the role Russia used to have. Notice how Putin speaks of Nurmagomed Gadzhimagomedov, the first Russian soldier acknowledged to have died in the invasion of Ukraine, for example. Gadzhimagomedov was an ethnic Lak from Dagestan, a Russian republic in the Caucasus. Putin said that although he himself was Russian, Gadzhimagomedov’s death made him want to say: “I’m Lak, I’m Dagestani, Chechen, Ingush, Russian, Tatar, Jew, Mordvin, Ossetian.” Once, he would have been able to include Kyrgyz in that list and, of course, Ukrainian. This is the house Putin wants to rebuild.

When we visited a beautiful valley where Yuri Gagarin used to holiday, I asked our guide whether the statues of the Soviet cosmonaut meant that Kyrgyzstan still had pride in the Soviet Union. “No,” he replied. “It’s gone.” In Jamilia, Aïtmatov seems concerned with the ebbing of Kyrgyz rather than Russian culture, reflecting on the power of custom and how it can be lost. “If a storm uproots a mighty tree, the tree will never grow again,” he writes. This is Putin’s problem.

In a town called Karakol, near the Kyrgyz border with Kazakhstan and the Chinese region of Xinjiang, we visited a mosque built by Muslim-Chinese refugees, whose renovation was paid for by Turkey, according to a sign outside it proudly displaying the Kyrgyz and Turkish flags. At another site, we toured a 10th-century minaret being maintained with money from the European Union. Traveling back to the capital, I was told about speed cameras from China replacing useless ones from Belarus. In Bishkek itself, we watched as a musician sang Radiohead and Frank Sinatra in an Irish bar for a crowd of hip young Kyrgyz. To the tune of “New York, New York,” he sang: “I want to be a part of it, Bishkek, Bishkek.”

Today, Russian hegemony over its old empire is being challenged not just militarily in places such as Ukraine, but everywhere, and across politics, religion, and technology. In the long run, unless Moscow snaps itself out of its declinist rage, it is hard to see how Russia can compete against this encroachment—not only of the West’s cultural appeal, but of Islam’s religious appeal, China’s economic appeal, and even Turkey’s notion of shared civilizational appeal.

The question for Russia is, right now, what does it have to attract its former colonies beyond history? It is not rich enough, advanced enough, or ideologically compelling enough. Nor does it show the kind of love that suggests it would preside over a happy family. Instead, Putin offers a harsh Russian nationalism without any of the sense of progress, possibility, and even pride that, at least at one point, the Soviet Union seemed to offer (at least to some people). Of course, what the Soviets provided was an illusion too, but there was an idea. All that is left today for Moscow, beyond its history, is coercion, control, and corruption. Which country in the world today aspires to be Belarus or Crimea, let alone the Donbas?

In Aïtmatov’s novel, set during World War II, Jamilia’s husband, Sadyk, is at the front, leaving her, the other women, and the boys in the family to harvest their crop and transport it to the nearby railroad station to be ferried west. Doing this work, Jamilia meets a man named Daniyar, a former soldier invalided out of the war, who seems distant and dreamy until, one day, he begins to sing while on their journey, songs in Kyrgyz and Kazakh, transporting Jamilia and her brother from the reality of their life.

“Before me flashes strangely familiar scenes from childhood,” Jamilia’s brother recalls. “First the delicate, smokey-blue, migratory spring clouds floating at crane’s height above the yurtas; then herds of horses racing across the ringing earth, neighing and pounding to their summer pastures, the young stallions with streaming forelocks and wild, black fire in their eyes proudly overtaking their mares, then flocks of sheep slowly spreading like lava over the foothills.”

So begins a love affair that ends with Jamilia escaping with Daniyar, leaving her husband and family in fits of rage at her betrayal. Nations are rather like Jamilia, containing within them a certain spirit that, perhaps, can be sated for a time within a strong and blessed house, but not in a weak and coercive one. But as Russia is discovering in Ukraine, they cannot ever really be happy without a sense of honor and conscience of their own.

Boris Johnson Has Only Delayed the Inevitable

2022-06-06T16:06:50-04:00

Boris Johnson lives to fight another day. Britain, meanwhile, lives to endure another day in his shadow, a bit part in the soap opera of his life, watching on as the drama is set on an endless doom loop from comic farce to tragedy.

After months of turmoil over Johnson’s behavior in office, in which he became the first sitting British prime minister ever to be fined for breaking the law, enough of his fellow Conservative members of Parliament finally plucked up the courage to trigger a formal vote of confidence in his leadership of the party. Had he lost, even by a single vote, the process to replace him as party leader—and prime minister—would have begun immediately, culminating in a new appointment within weeks—the sixth British leader in the space of just 15 years, an astonishing period of political instability and failure. Yet, once again, this master of evasion somehow managed to escape, winning 211 votes to 148 to stay in post.

This “victory,” however, marks just the beginning of Johnson’s fight for survival. Each of his Tory predecessors who were challenged to a vote of confidence lost power soon after, many spectacularly. Even though each prevailed, for Margaret Thatcher, John Major, and Theresa May, the very fact of being challenged marked the beginning of the end.

The fundamental problem for Johnson is that he is now a populist who is no longer popular. This is no repeat of the Donald Trump impeachment drama, where the president might have been unpopular nationally but was protected by a wall of support from his base. In Britain, Johnson is opposed both in the country at large and among what should be the Tory grassroots. Appalled by revelations of drunken parties in 10 Downing Street during the COVID lockdowns, the country seems to have concluded that it will not vote for him again. And so long as the country feels this way, he is toast—or, if he isn’t, then the Conservative Party most certainly is.

For any prime minister, this is a deadly bind. It is especially so for Johnson, who was elevated to power not because Conservative parliamentarians ever particularly liked or respected him, let alone backed his political philosophy—if such a thing exists—but because they concluded that he was their only hope of saving the party from electoral oblivion. Johnson was the instrument necessary to “get Brexit done,” a phrase he repeated ad nauseam during the 2019 election campaign. Then, his character faults were less important than his political potential. Britain had voted to leave the European Union, but its political class had proved unable to fulfill this instruction, and so Johnson was given the power to enact the revolution the public demanded, overhauling the Conservative Party and the country in the process, and winning the biggest Tory majority in 30 years. At a stroke Johnson became the most radical and consequential prime minister since Thatcher and, it seemed, was destined to remain in office for as long. In 10 Downing Street soon after his election victory was confirmed, one of his aides told me that Johnson’s was a 10-year project—at least.

That was less than three years ago, but regardless of today’s survival, he seems perilously close to having thrown it all away. He now faces a monumental challenge to turn this around, his authority, popularity, and political purpose lying in tatters with few obvious ways to put it all back together. And for what? A few parties in 10 Downing Street that broke the lockdown rules that he himself introduced, albeit so reluctantly that his delay cost the lives of more Brits than it ever should, but for which he never paid a political price. The entire episode is so pathetic. The entire episode is so fitting.

The irony is that we now seem to be watching the tragic chronicle of Johnson’s political death foretold—not just by his fiercest critics, who long ago warned it would end this way, but by the prime minister himself.

Alone among the politicians I have covered, Johnson has seemed to so openly flash his own flaws at the public, almost daring them to join him on his journey of self-destruction. In his novel, Seventy Two Virgins, Johnson’s main character—essentially a caricature of himself—even speculates about politicians wanting to watch their demise. “There was something prurient about the way he wanted to read about his own destruction,” the protagonist says. “Just as there was something weird about the way he had been impelled down the course he had followed.” Why did Johnson write this, if not to tell us something about himself?

Johnson’s political life once appeared to be a sweeping epic, an unending rise to power that would ultimately reshape Britain and secure his place as one of the country’s most important postwar leaders. Instead, this episode—even though he has survived—makes clear that his time in office now risks being more of a tragic novella, unless he can find even more dramatic ways to escape the bind he has put himself in.

The past few days have encapsulated both Johnson and Britain, highlighting inner truths about both, illustrating their deepest flaws, ones that will not go away whatever Johnson’s fate.

Confirmation that Johnson would face a vote of confidence came as Britons returned to work with something of a groggy head after four days of celebrating Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee. Some Conservative members of Parliament, it now appears, submitted letters of no confidence in Johnson before the festivities had drawn to a close, but postdated them to ensure that nothing sullied the royal occasion.

This little detail neatly sums up a moment in 21st-century Britain that was both bonkers and brilliant, joyful and ludicrous, unifying and absurd—an event that revealed something of the country’s spirit while providing a vent for it. This was a festival in which a giant drone display above Buckingham Palace beamed images of corgis and handbags to a cheering crowd of thousands while Diana Ross warbled away onstage, and where street parties up and down the country created a rare and uplifting sense of national unity—but one of the defining images of the weekend was the prime minister being booed as he walked up the steps to St. Paul’s Cathedral to attend a thanksgiving service in honor of the Queen.

Here was the extraordinary spectacle of a Conservative prime minister being jeered by a crowd of flag-waving monarchists. For some, the image was terminal for Johnson, proof he had lost the crowd. This fact remains, the elemental source of all of his problems that is not going away. Johnson has become a tribune of the people, without a people.

It is worth pausing to reflect that Johnson is far from unique in being loathed. In fact, he is just the latest British prime minister to be hated by the public with a vehemence that does not seem particularly healthy. Tony Blair remains a virtual pariah to this day, David Cameron a figure of open disdain, and Thatcher a source of such continuing hostility that a statue honoring her is egged by protesters. It is a strange quirk that Britain’s worst prime ministers are now its most popular: Major, May, and Gordon Brown. Yet, each was driven from office in a wave of public hatred, horribly warped and disfigured in the process.

Where Johnson somewhat differs from his predecessors is that he has always seemed so open and sanguine about his fate and, in a sense, his own smallness. “Politics is a constant repetition,” he once wrote. “How we make kings for our societies, and how after a while we kill them to achieve a kind of rebirth.” Politics is not about grand plans and ideologies in Johnson’s mind; it’s a cynical ritual used by societies to keep on some kind of even keel, a ceremony of hypocrisy in which everyone is able to feel better about themselves by raising and then slaying the avatars of their hopes and fears. Politics, like life, drifts in and out of cycles—not in a forward sweep. Problems remain; histories consume; leaders rise and fall.

The irony for Johnson is that this is now the fate he is battling to delay, while being fully aware that it will consume him in the end. Today, a sense of national unease and unhappiness, disunity and trouble hangs in the air alongside the very opposite feelings that were on display during the jubilee.

The Conservative Party is now trapped between those who have concluded that it needs to kill the king to achieve the requisite rebirth and those who think that it has not come to that yet. The risk for the party is that it achieves the worst of all worlds, leaving Britain to drift on in the doldrums, without a fair wind to propel it or a captain with the power to sail it.

The strange reality is that there is no real policy problem for Tory MPs at the core of this crisis. The ritual bloodletting we are going through once again is not being pursued in order to change anything other than the guy at the top. The music has stopped and Johnson is battling to stay perched on the throne, but little more than that.

Of course the personality here is important, particularly so with Johnson. As the prime minister’s fiercest critics have long warned, his character flaws are baked into who he is. What made him the popular choice for his party and the public in 2019 are the same flaws that make him so unpopular today: He is a mocking, disdainful observer of the serious and their codes of honor, someone who believes in the fleeting, cosmically tragic, and darkly comic reality of life—and the power of Boris to rise above the rest, to poke his nose out of the celestial cloud even for a millisecond in the grand sweep of time. This makes him formidable and careless, historically-minded and shortsighted, endlessly jovial but melancholy, useful for smashing through old orders, but less good at imposing new ones.

Still, should Johnson lose this battle to survive over the coming weeks or months, the fundamental problems that Britain faces will remain. It is true that character matters. The simple fact of Johnson remaining in power makes some diplomatic relationships in Europe harder to fix. Perhaps the country will be able to move on from Brexit only once all those associated with the campaign are gone too. Still, the candidates to replace him will almost certainly promise to maintain all of the major planks of his agenda. Indeed, some already have. Each will pledge to remain outside the EU and its economic zone; to stay hawkish in their support for Ukraine; and to revisit the Northern Ireland protocol that is the rot underlying Britain’s troubled relationship with Europe. Each will promise to pursue new trade deals with countries around the world rather than prioritize one with the EU, to make the economy more competitive. Each will insist that they rebalance the economy to make northern England wealthier and to protect the “red wall” seats that Johnson won off Labour in 2019. The reality is that if Johnson goes, Johnsonism will survive in large part until the Labour Party manages to win an election. And even then, if Labour wins power under Keir Starmer, Brexit itself will not be reversed.

But just as much as Johnsonism will remain independent of Johnson, so too will all the problems that Johnsonism either was elected to address—and has failed to—or has actively exacerbated, and in some senses even created. Britain’s long-term competitive decline continues, as does the shame of its internal border between Britain and Northern Ireland, and the appallingly uneven frontier now operating with France. The forces of nationalism pulling the country apart are not going away, a reality no party seems able to address in any serious fashion, while the endemic north-south divide that Johnson promised to resolve looks set only to get worse. And of course, there is still Brexit.

Britain today is a country where religion has been replaced with a kind of state Shintoism in which the monarch is raised in exaltation while her chief ministers are ritually sacrificed to cleanse the nation of its sins. And all the while, nothing ever really changes. Deep-seated problems go unaddressed, left to fester, passed from one prime minister to the next, none of whom seems capable of even seeing the scale of the challenges they face, let alone addressing them. Johnson is just the latest prime minister to fail spectacularly at the job, though in his case, in uniquely grubby circumstances. He won’t be the last.

‘It’s Extremely Important That We Don’t Forget the Brutality’

2022-05-30T02:00:00-04:00

The Western world must prepare itself for a long war in Ukraine that will require ongoing support for Kyiv to guarantee Russia’s defeat, as well as reinforced defenses across Europe to ensure that Vladimir Putin does not underestimate NATO’s readiness to defend “every inch” of its territory, Jens Stoltenberg, the military alliance’s secretary-general, told me recently.

The warning came in an in-depth interview at his office on the outskirts of Brussels, as the Russian war machine, after months of failure, was beginning to make progress in its campaign in eastern Ukraine. “Of course it is emotional,” he continued, his anger visible, as we discussed the ongoing butchery along NATO’s borders. “This is about people being killed; it’s about atrocities; it’s about children, women being raped, children being killed.”

For Stoltenberg, however, using this emotion—rather than hiding it—is important. This emotion is the reason NATO has been able to mobilize such support for Ukraine against Russia—a conflict, Stoltenberg insisted, that affects security across the alliance. Although he wouldn’t say it quite so openly, he clearly believes that Ukraine is fighting not only for itself but for the civilized world, for the basic values of life and liberty, land and sovereignty. It is crucial, therefore, that the West continues to be outraged by Russia’s behavior, to not lose sight of Moscow’s barbarity as the war drags on. “In the middle of Europe, we have cities bombed, we have people that are our neighbors killed in the streets, massacred, and raped,” he said. “It’s extremely important that we don’t forget the brutality because that helps us mobilize the solidarity … which we need for the long haul.”

This was the crux of Stoltenberg’s point: The West needs to start digging in for a battle that is unlikely to end anytime soon, a test, he seemed to indicate to me, that was not just about military strength but about character.

And the reality, Stoltenberg admitted, is that Russia continues to make incremental territorial gains in Ukraine. Stoltenberg was also clear that the war is likely to end at the negotiating table and not, as some have hoped, with a kind of Second World War–style unconditional surrender of one side. Still, Stoltenberg rejected calls for the West to find Putin an honorable way out of the invasion, an “off-ramp” to save face and return to Moscow. Instead, he told me, it is crucial for Western security that Putin not be rewarded for his aggression.

Stoltenberg, who is already NATO’s longest-serving secretary-general in 40 years, was due to step down later this year but has agreed to stay on for another year to steer the alliance through its biggest challenge since the fall of the Soviet Union. After taking over in 2014, he quickly found himself tasked with convincing the most volatile and anti-European president in postwar American history of NATO’s merits. The deftness with which he performed this role earned him the respect of many in Europe who feared that Donald Trump would seek to pull the United States out of the alliance altogether. For some, he was the Trump whisperer, one of the few people—other than Putin and Xi Jinping—whom Trump seemed to respect.

Yet his legacy extends beyond this. After years of falling defense spending, all of the alliance’s members are increasing their military budgets; 40,000 troops stand ready under direct NATO command; the U.S. has expanded its presence in Europe; and the alliance’s eastern flank has been reinforced. Even more transformative changes are in the pipeline, with Sweden and Finland set to end their decades-long policy of neutrality by joining the bloc. Of course, much of this has been spurred by Russia’s invasion. Yet Stoltenberg, NATO officials and politicians have told me over the years, has been a capable steward of an often-unruly grouping.

At a NATO summit in Madrid next month, Stoltenberg will oversee further changes to meet the threats of what he said is a more dangerous world, beyond the alliance’s traditional turf. “NATO will remain the strongest alliance in history as long as we are able to continue to adapt,” Stoltenberg told me. “I’m absolutely confident that allies will be able to make decisions to ensure that we continue to adapt.” And this will include, for the first time in its history, articulating a focus on the threat from China.

Still, though the bloc’s response to Russia’s invasion seems to have reinvigorated its sense of unity, purpose, and mission, deepening its members’ commitment and even expanding its territory, there remains a curious contradiction and hesitance at the core of the alliance. This tension can be seen most clearly in NATO’s policy toward China, as the alliance grapples with its history as a regional grouping while facing a globalized world.

When I pressed Stoltenberg on how the war in Ukraine might end, he seemed to glide between two extremes that are sometimes on display within NATO—those, particularly in the U.S., who spy an opportunity not only to defeat Russia but to degrade it permanently, and those, mostly in Europe, pushing for a cease-fire and an acknowledgment from Kyiv that it will have to cede territory to Russia if there is to be any peace.

Stoltenberg appeared to advocate a kind of hawkish third way that fits with his image as the Tony Blair of Norway. “We know that most wars end at the negotiating table,” he said. “But what happens at the negotiating table is totally dependent on the situation on the battlefield, so we have to ensure that Ukraine has the strongest possible position to uphold the right to self-defense, to protect their sovereign nation, and that’s exactly what NATO allies are doing.” The point for Stoltenberg is to make sure whatever concessions Ukraine does make are on its terms.

And here is where we get into the fact that this war is unlikely to end anytime soon. While Russia has failed in its expansive initial war aims, it is now a “factual thing” that Moscow’s forces are making “incremental advances in [the] Donbas,” he told me. The future direction of the conflict would be hard to predict, but it is crucial for the West to match Putin’s commitment. “It’s extremely important that NATO and partners continue to provide support to Ukraine and that we are prepared for the long haul,” he said. “We can not let President Putin be rewarded for his brute military aggression. That would threaten all our security.”

The West, thus, has two fundamental tasks in Stoltenberg’s view. The first is to help Ukraine stand up to Russia, so that “President Putin does not succeed with his brutal use of force, violating international law, and the challenge to the rules-based order and to reestablish spheres of influence.” The second task, though, is to prevent the war from escalating, “leading to a full conflict in Europe between NATO and Russia.”

To achieve both, Stoltenberg argued, requires strength and commitment, not weakness and concession. Increasing NATO’s military presence and readiness is the only way to “remove any room for misunderstanding, miscalculation in Moscow, about our readiness to protect and defend all allies,” Stoltenberg said. The message to Moscow, he continued, is that the alliance will protect “every inch of NATO territory.”

Stoltenberg’s commitment to dealing with allies as they are, not as he may wish them to be, is perhaps what has made him a good leader for a grouping that seems at times unclear about how deeply it wants to help Ukraine. “Any secretary-general of NATO has to be able to speak to all the leaders,” he told me. “We are 30 countries, from both sides of the Atlantic, with different history, different geography, different political partners in charge.”

The key for Stoltenberg is ensuring that the bloc is strengthened, and, in his words, “institutionalized,” so that it can weather any political storm anywhere in the alliance. Though he didn’t say it, he clearly meant Trump. “If we are afraid of political leaders in Europe or in North America being elected that are not strong supporters of the strong transatlantic bond, then it makes it even more important that the transatlantic bond is institutionalized.”

Institutionalizing NATO would also allow the alliance to think beyond the current crisis to the long-term, strategic threats facing the West. That means not just Moscow but Beijing.

Russia’s invasion seems to have reestablished NATO’s raison d’être in a way that Putin does not appear to have expected. As Stoltenberg told me, the Russian president wanted less NATO, only to end up with a lot more NATO than has existed at any time since the end of the Cold War.

And yet underneath this newfound unity of purpose and mission remains a serious division on the new existential challenge facing the West: China. France and Germany want to forge their own European relationship with China, independent of the U.S. and, as much as possible, NATO. The U.S., Britain, and others, meanwhile, see China as a security threat that must be dealt with collectively by the West. Again, it falls to Stoltenberg to try to find a third way through this challenge.

When NATO leaders meet in Madrid next month, he said, he expects the alliance to focus not just on the conflict with Russia by strengthening the alliance’s deterrence—more troops, capabilities, and so on—but also on new realms of security such as cyber, space, and even climate change. In NATO’s most recent “strategic concept,” agreed on in 2010, China was not mentioned once. That will soon change. “In the strategic concept we will agree in Madrid, I’m certain that we will address China,” he told me.

Stoltenberg’s third way again does not quite fall within either the American-led or European-led camps with regard to China: He was quick to insist that dealing with the Chinese security challenge did not mean that NATO views Beijing as an “adversary.” Still, he added, the alliance needs to “address the security consequences of the fact that China now has the second-largest defense budget in the world, the biggest navy, [and] that they are investing heavily in new, modern capabilities.” Among these new capabilities, Stoltenberg listed nuclear weapons and long-range missiles that are capable of reaching “the whole of NATO.”

To reflect the reality of China’s power and challenge for the West, he told me, NATO will welcome core security partners from outside Europe and North America to the summit: Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and South Korea. Three of these four nations are also often invited to summits of the G7 group of advanced economies and, together with the European Union, form the core of the new “West” that stretches across the globe, a network of democratic countries allied to Washington. This is the loose (and voluntary) American empire of which Moscow and Beijing are so suspicious.

The danger for NATO, I suggested, was that rather than actually addressing some of the issues that left Ukraine in limbo—being close enough to NATO to concern its aggressive neighbor, but without the security guarantee that might have prevented this aggression—it risked globalizing them. “We have lots of difficult questions about this situation for vulnerable partners that are not members of NATO but are close partners, and some of them aspiring for NATO membership,” he replied, cautiously, appearing to concede the premise of the question without quite acknowledging whether he agreed or not. He was clear, however, that whatever the answer, nothing excused Russia’s behavior.

Still, aren’t we in danger of making the same mistake? I asked. Why not invite Australia to join the alliance, rather than just becoming closer allies? Wouldn’t this reflect the reality of the West and the shared threat posed by China? Here, though, NATO seems hesitant about how far it must adapt to the modern world.

“NATO is a regional alliance,” Stoltenberg said: “North America and Europe.” This was enshrined in NATO’s founding treaty and, he added, “I’ve seen no appetite in NATO to change the treaty.” The truth is that it’s not just about there being no appetite, but about a genuine divergence of opinion within the alliance about the extent of the Chinese threat generally, and the extent to which it is a threat to the West specifically. This is the crack in the Western world, which may yet grow over time into something more substantial—though that will be for one of Stoltenberg’s successors to grapple with.

The jockeying to replace Stoltenberg has already begun, with different cliques within the alliance pushing various cases as to why it is their turn: Southern European nations argue that after Stoltenberg and, before him, the former Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the next leader should be from the Mediterranean. In Britain and Turkey, officials fear that the French and the Germans will try to foist an “EU candidate” on the bloc, presenting a fait accompli candidate representing their interests. Eastern European countries, and the Baltics in particular, argue that there has never been a NATO secretary-general from the East. The alliance has also never been led by a woman, and it may be high time that this is corrected too. As ever, the U.S. will be the dominant actor, and will seek to broker a deal acceptable to all.

This choice will be important not simply because it will point to which powers are ascendant and which priorities will be placed foremost within the alliance. Each prior leader of NATO has imposed his will on the organization, and so the background and character of the next secretary-general will have a significant impact on NATO’s future. Stoltenberg is no exception.

As the interview was coming to a close, he gave me a tour of his somewhat sparse and modernist office (think Scandi bureaucracy). He showed me a shot of him as a young man with his father, a former Norwegian foreign minister, that sits behind his desk, and another of his children. Two others more clearly revealed the pain that has shaped his life and now shapes his response to the bloodiest war on European soil since 1945. On the wall opposite his desk hangs a photo of his friend Anna Lindh, the former prime minister of Sweden, who was murdered in 2003. And then, right beside his desk, is a calm, peaceful photograph of the Norwegian island of Utøya. The meaning behind the picture is, however, anything but calm and peaceful. This is the island where a neo-Nazi terrorist murdered 69 people in 2011, while Stoltenberg was Norway’s prime minister. The threat came perilously close to the secretary-general himself: The killer had already claimed eight other lives in Oslo with a van bomb targeting Stoltenberg’s office.

Stoltenberg is a well-dressed, controlled man. Yet underneath this calm Scandinavian exterior, you get a sense of anger and emotion—even of fury. When we talked about Ukraine, I noticed that he banged his hands on the table, a physical expression of his feelings. The two tragedies that have occurred on his watch—Utøya and Ukraine—are not directly comparable. Yet his life, and his leadership, has been influenced by both; he applies the appalling lessons he learned from one to his handling of the appalling reality of the other.

How does a peaceful society respond to brutal violence? How can unity be found in the face of such tragedy? How can people channel their fury, and how can they remember? “It doesn’t matter what kind of ideology or religion these people use; it’s about killing innocent people,” he told me, as he showed me the photograph of Utøya. Extremists of all stripes share the belief that “they can use force, they can kill people, to achieve their political goals.” This is Stoltenberg’s challenge as the war continues: to ensure that the West retains its resolve, that it remains united, and that it remembers.

The Ugly Truth About the Beautiful Game

2022-05-28T03:41:45-04:00

The philosopher Roger Scruton once wrote that people become conservative as they experience loss; the sense of passing, of dying and death. Loss gives them a love of things as they are, a desire to hold, to protect, to conserve—even if all attempts to do so come too late.

I thought of this recently when I found myself in the absurd situation of feeling sad that a multimillionaire French soccer player had decided against joining the world’s most successful club. Why did I care that Kylian Mbappé had decided to stay with Paris Saint-Germain rather than sign a contract with Real Madrid, a club I do not support or even particularly like (and that is in fact playing against my favorite team, Liverpool, in the biggest game in world soccer today)?

Because his decision signaled the end of something, and with it came an understanding of that something’s passing. That thing was the old hierarchy, the romance and glory, of European soccer, or rather my naive belief in it.

European soccer, like European culture, is governed by a class structure. Each country has its elite clubs that, together, form a sort of pan-European aristocracy—clubs that, traditionally, have been able to acquire the sport’s best players in their quest for the ultimate prize: the Champions League. Formerly known as the European Cup, this is European soccer’s Super Bowl, the biggest club match of the year.

European soccer clubs, unlike American sports franchises, cannot switch cities but are rooted where they are, representing not simply their locality, but often also certain ideas about their communities—class, identity, or religion. At this year’s English cup final, for example, Liverpool fans booed Britain’s national anthem, protesting the country’s political establishment, which they blame—correctly—for appalling abuses of power in the 1980s. (The police wrongly held Liverpool fans responsible for a 1989 stadium disaster in which 97 people died.) Liverpool believes itself to be a nonconformist, radical city, somehow distinct from the rest of England. Its rival for the Champions League, Real Madrid, meanwhile, literally is the Spanish establishment, symbolized with a crown on its crest, supported by the royal family, and representing Spain.

This is European soccer—or, at least, an idealized version of it: clubs that represent something greater than themselves, offering communities narratives to coalesce around. The reality is less romantic. Liverpool supporters might decry the political and economic establishment, but their club has long been part of the soccer establishment—it and Real Madrid have won 19 Champions League titles (or its predecessor tournaments) between them. The club has been further revitalized under the ownership of an American billionaire, John Henry, who joined a host of other foreign owners attracted by the potential of the English Premier League, the most commercially successful in the world. Liverpool may despise Margaret Thatcher, but the club is a kind of turbocharged Thatcherite success story.

Liverpool is far from alone. Just to compete in European soccer today, you need either a billionaire owner or a global commercial operation generating huge revenues that can be pumped back into the team, and this shift has expanded the ranks of the sport’s elite. European soccer became more and more commercialized in the 1980s and ’90s, but everything changed in 2003 when Chelsea—not part of the traditional European elite—was bought by the Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich, instantly becoming a superclub in terms of wealth. Then, in 2008, an investment company with close links to Abu Dhabi’s royal family bought Manchester City, instantly transforming a team that had been in England’s third tier barely a decade earlier into the world’s richest club. Three years later, Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund bought Paris Saint-Germain, known everywhere as PSG. Since the takeover, PSG—whose founding in 1970 leaves it extraordinarily young among the classes of Europe’s elite—has gone on a spending binge, breaking the transfer-fee world record twice as well as signing perhaps the greatest player of all time, Lionel Messi.

More recently, soccer’s traditional order seemed to be reimposing itself, as Real Madrid courted—and appeared to have persuaded—PSG’s star player, Mbappé, to swap clubs when his contract expired this summer. Unlike in American sports, European soccer superstars do not necessarily make it to the end of their contract, instead using their internal leverage to be “sold” from one club to another, before agreeing to a new contract with their new club. By waiting until he became a “free agent,” Mbappé drove up his value, playing off his two suitors. Last weekend, to the shock of the soccer world, he publicly rejected Real Madrid to sign a three-year contract extension with PSG, unveiling his decision in an elaborate LeBron James–style decision ceremony in Paris.

Mbappé’s choice symbolized more than one player’s preference. It marked a shifting order in European soccer, an order that has been revolutionized by soccer’s transformation from a continental sport and plaything of its own continental elite into a globalized entertainment product and plaything of a global elite. PSG is not a historic club; it plays in a weak league and has never won Europe’s premier competition. Unlike Real Madrid, it is not part of European soccer’s royalty. But PSG now has deeper pockets than Real Madrid, allowing the club to pay Mbappé just over $100 million as a signing-on fee alone, plus an extra $150 million in salary spread over three years, making him the highest-paid soccer player in the world.

His decision to accept such an extraordinary offer is understandable. But it has caused apoplectic fury in Real Madrid, a club used to getting its own way. The Spanish capital’s leading sports newspaper has accused Mbappé of a lack of class in turning the club down. The Spanish league itself threatened to sue PSG for the “scandalous” contract that, it said, was wrecking the “economic ecosystem of European football” by allowing one club to offer exorbitant contracts despite enormous financial losses, subsidized by the wealth of a sovereign state. (Though European soccer does not have salary caps like American sports leagues, clubs on this side of the Atlantic are supposed to ensure that they remain profitable, thus in theory ruling out the possibility of offering all of the best players in the world large contracts.)

The great irony is that of all the clubs in European football, it is Real Madrid that PSG most keenly resembles. Real Madrid first created a team of galácticos in the early 2000s, using its financial muscle to sign an array of superstars with the hope of blitzing the opposition on and off the pitch, winning trophies while creating the sport’s most desirable commercial brand, matching American franchises such as the New York Yankees, Dallas Cowboys, and Los Angeles Lakers, which were, back then, bigger and more profitable than their soccer counterparts. And Real Madrid was also found to have received illegal state aid from Spanish authorities.

Despite all this, I still feel sad about Mbappé’s decision, just as I felt sad when Real itself started its boorish galáctico era, when Manchester City was bought by Emirati royals, and when Newcastle United, also in England, was bought by a consortium that included Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund. Each of these events changed the nature of European football, unmooring an old order that was itself ridiculous and unfair, but now seems simpler and more romantic. (This is an order, we should remind ourselves, in which the German league title has been won by its biggest club for each of the past 10 years; the Italian league title by one of its big three for the past 20 years; and the Spanish league title by one of its big three every year since 2003. In England, the new order is dominated by Manchester City, which has won four of the past five titles.) Even the era preceding this one that I look back to and glorify in my own mind was surely no less corrupt or innocent: Blackburn Rovers won the Premier League bankrolled by a local millionaire, and AC Milan was unstoppable, funded by Italy’s richest man, Silvio Berlusconi.

Deep down, there’s something about sport that reveals people’s natural conservatism. The experience of living through the decline of great players and great teams brings an acute sense of the passing of time and of loss—something you don’t get so obviously with states or empires, which take longer to fall. This is why documentaries about Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls continue to be watched by millions, and why TikTok seems to constantly offer me clips of old English Premier League players reminiscing about the good old days. These are all reminders of a more innocent age in one’s own life.

Scruton wrote that ever since the Paris riots of 1968, he had been a conservative. To him, the destruction on display then was a reminder that European culture was “a source of consolation and a repository of what we Europeans should know.” He was talking about Hegel and Dostoyevsky, not European soccer sagas. Still, the point remains that conservatism seeks to alleviate a sense of loss but ultimately cannot—because it is really about conserving the memory of a bygone time.

I wish Mbappé had chosen romance, to compete against the legacy of Real Madrid’s historic dominance and not just against soccer’s present. But why should he? The soccer world, which seems to share my instinct, is asking Mbappé to conserve something that has already gone. His decision is just a confirmation of what has been lost, not the cause of its death. Globalization, commercialization, and competition did that—creating the best sports competition in the world, which I will tune in to watch with my friends. We will cheer on Liverpool, and hope to defeat those horrible elitists from Real Madrid.