British Decline, American Decline – And Brexit

British Decline, American Decline – And Brexit, Forbes, June 22, 2016, "James Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute is – at least to this historian of Britain – one of the most readable and stimulating commentators on economic affairs out there today. His recent column on “Is America Really in Decline? What We Can Learn from Britain” raises a few points which shed some light on the declinist argument and on the case for Britain’s exit from the European Union, or Brexit. As Pethokoukis puts it, drawing on historian Robert Tombs, the so-called decline panic that Britain experienced in the post-1945 decades “rests on two assumptions: First, Britain experienced a collapse in global influence and economic dynamism. Second, those results stemmed from ‘long-standing failures’ of the nation’s core institutions.”"

A Troubling Meme on the Special Relationship

Sir Michael Howard on the Special Relationship, Contentions, July 18, 2009. "In the latest Times Literary Supplement, Sir Michael Howard, in the course of a largely admiring review of two recent works on Winston Churchill, makes a claim that made me pause. According to Sir Michael, 'The myth of the “special relationship” that Churchill invented and that so many of his admirers on both sides of the Atlantic continue to propagate is briskly demolished. . . . Throughout the war the United States consulted her own interests, as any state is bound to do: and these did not extend to helping Britain either to remain solvent or to retain any part of her empire once the war was over.' I am, I suppose, one of those propagating admirers."

The Five Myths of US Defense Spending

Demystifying Defense: Exposing Myths About US Military Expenditures, Harvard International Review, Spring 2009, Vol. 31, No. 1. "The most serious impediments to a serious discussion of defense spending are the myths that surround it. Until these myths are cleared away, no rational debate regarding what the US and its allies around the world should do to secure their interests is possible. The most urgent need, therefore, is for politicians and the public to know how much the US and other powers spend, to place these expenditures and their trends in historical context, to weigh the dangers of both excessive and insufficient defense spending, to understand why the US and the world's democracies maintain armed forces, and why the US spends so much relative to its potential adversaries. Absent this knowledge, the political process that shapes defense spending in democracies will not work effectively, and their defense will suffer. In short, for today's democracies, defense spending is not an economic problem. A people who lack the will to pay will eventually find they are a target for those who have the will to fight."

On Halford Mackinder

Back to Mackinder. Really?, Contentions, May 1, 2009.

Review of Peter Clarke, Last Thousand Days of the British Empire

The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire (Allen Lane, 2007), Volume 21, Issue 2 (2008), Cambridge Review of International Affairs.

"The British Empire, according to Peter Clarke, made Britain a great power. It was also a major cause of the Second World War, in that its magnificence tempted other powers to attack it, and Britain fought the resulting 'unsuccessful imperialist war' (xvii) for the Empire. The architect of this defeat, which left the British people feeling cheated by the fall, was Winston Churchill. Churchill, so the narrative goes, deluded both himself and his people into trusting the United States (US), which was in reality fighting the war to bring the Empire to an end and to enlist it as a 'yes-man' in a new American empire. This is an angry and unbalanced book. . . ."

The full review is not available on-line except to paid subscribers.