Against Anti-Americanism

There is a fair bit of discourse around America these days. I could cite articles and point to numerous examples, but I won’t bore my readers with that sort of stuff when they are so clearly versed in current affairs. No doubt a brief illustration of the common argument will bring to the fore-mind what I am talking about, it goes as follows:

1. Britain is very dependent on America

2. This is a bad thing

What form does this dependency take? Well we have the economic, the political and the cultural. Economically more and more of Britain is owned by foreign interests particularly American ones, and aside from purchasing shares in our companies their own companies penetrate our market and construct Macdonalds and Starbucks all over the place.¹ The political aspect is even more troubling. They ask us nicely to invade Iraq and we do it, they have some problem with us building our 5G towers out of Chinese spyware so we don’t, what’s next? Forcing us to close down our National Champions like Weatherspoons, Betfred and Only Fans?²

It’s easy to see why the second point in the argument follows - it does indeed seem rather like a bad thing and it probably is. But what is to be gained by noticing this?

The trouble with the growing Anti-Americanism is that it risks reaching for the wrong solutions. We’ve all seen Love Actually, we all know that it would feel good to have a Prime Minister stand up and say “aaaaaa, shut up” to the American president — especially if said president had just fondled the Prime Ministers maid — but ultimately the Lessons of History (which I shall now impart to you) point to this being a bad idea.

Consider, if you will, the Stuarts. Charles II received a generous pension from the King of France as (probably) did his successor James II, who even fled to France when things went south. After James II was peacefully replaced by William III the monarchy fell under the influence of the Dutch. William’s famous fighting talk that he would “die in the last ditch” rather than see his country fall refered to his beloved windmill strewn Netherlands rather than Britain. Incidentally he was even willing to give up immense royal powers to the Woke (good) Whigs because he didn’t really care what the position of the monarchs of Britain would be. After William the first two Georges were attached to an even more ridiculous country called “Hannover” and it wasn’t until George III that we got a properly British monarch who went down the pub and such.

Why did this happen? Why were we totally unable to escape foreign influence no matter how often we chose some random foreigner to be our King? What could possibly have been wrong with this strategy? Ultimately the way we got out was by growing our economy through the industrial revolution and having a massive navy.

The anti-foreigner attitude of the eighteenth century Brits was a product, not a cause of her proud independence which was founded on hearts of oak and roaring furnaces. If the anti-Americans really want to break free they will need to focus on economic growth and naval strength. Displays of nationalist bravado without these preconditions are pointless posturing at best and third world banana republic rubbish at worst.

There is a sad epilogue to this which is that it’s unlikely that Britain will be “top country” for a few hundred years. Unless America breaks up into smaller states we will be unable to match their economic heft. The best we can do at present is to be a healthy middle power, able to assert her national interest in a few key spheres (keeping the Falkland oil, breaking up the EU, invading Iceland) this is not at all incompatible with remaining friends with the Americans, indeed if we grow our own wealth and military strength it’s hard to see what we could possibly obtain by the sacrifice of this friendship.

1. Did you know there are over 1,000 Starbucks in London alone?

2. Some claim that there is a third element to this dominance — the cultural — but I am too sophisticated to have noticed.