Are we living through an end of empire moment, like the Suez Crisis?

Are we living through an end of empire moment, like the Suez Crisis?

there is this sort of sense at the moment of an end of Empire moment are we living in an end of Empire moment and trying to think clearly about that with the benefit of world history is really the key point of this live stream what I really wanted to focus on and spring off from a recent piece I wrote on the substack which was called is Ukraine the West’s sewers moment this is something that uh really um was prompted by an article in The Economist magazine which asked exactly that question and I’ll read you the said passage in The Economist magazine that asked this question it was in the little section of the economist called um charmain a sort of like a pseudonim type for one of the editorial writers and it said to ask what if Ukraine losers was once a tactic favored by those looking to berate its Western allies into sending more money and weapons okay uh increasingly the question feels less like a thought experiment and more like the first stage of contingency planning uh after a grueling few months at at the battlefield gone are last year’s hopes of a Ukrainian counter offensive that would push Russia back to its borders and humble Vladimir Putin these days it is fear that dominates and then the fear comes out a defeat of Ukraine would be a humbling episode for the West this is the economist uh speaking the sort of establishment anglo-american uh newspaper founded I think by Walter baggot in the 19th century and uh very much a kind of a a cheat sheet almost for the business government uh media Elite in so many Western countries but I digress it goes on a defeat of Ukraine would be a humbling episode for the West a modern sewers moment so what does that mean a sewers moment but of course it’s referring to the 1956 sewers crisis when Britain France and Israel combined together but primarily on the uh instigation and planned by Britain they effectively invaded Egypt now of course Egypt for for I don’t know like 70 odd years had been a de facto colony of Britain in the 1920s it was given a kind of pseudo Independence following World War I but that was very much a pseudo Independence uh Britain still called the shots and E after World War I Britain still had a kind of a puppet puppet sort of King in in uh Egypt who sort of supported uh Britain and in particular supported Britain’s uh military base and Commercial interests in the sews Canal which the Prime Minister who sent those British troops into 1956 uh into Egypt in 1956 described as uh the the wind pipe of Britain’s Empire uh obviously crucial navigation route between Britain and its its uh economic the jewel in the crown of its Empire uh India or Barat that is and Britain France and Israel all went into the sewers uh canal and it had really followed I guess 10 years of deine and a little bit of uh humiliation for Britain uh first of all um even more than 10 years it really dates to the great Imperial crisis for Britain in 1939 to 1942 the start of World War I where they were Fred in Europe and in the homeland of course but they also uh lost a lot of their interests in Asia in 1942 very decisively for the of Australia uh Singapore fell the impregnable Fortress of the British Empire at Singapore and with that the sort of uh a lot of the British interests in Asia were threatened the 1939 1942 uh period is really described by the historian of the British Empire who will come back as the sort of Abyss the darkest moment of the collapse effectively of the British Empire and after then it’s it’s sort of uh Winston Churchill in particular is really fighting World War II in order to keep that British Empire going for a few more Generations but ultimately without success and then at the end of World War II Britain loses in um uh 1947 India goes as well China after with as does America with uh the you know revolution in 1949 formation of the People’s Republic of China and you know the the long-term beginning of the end of all the treaty ports and the uh the those sort of arrangements and what’s more Britain is in a complete Financial Mess by this point it had already during World War I become deeply deeply indebted to the United States and in many ways it was you know World War I where really the part the Baton of uh you know world uh higgon passed uh if that title ever really belonged to Britain U but America United States of America really became the sort of a superstate of the world after uh World War I when obviously the European Empires well several of them were knocked out completely Austria Hungary you know Germany the sort of you know monarchical Germany Imperial Germany Russia became uh the Russian Empire became the Soviet Union uh and had a very different stance on the world and uh austrial Hungary did I mention Austria Hungary anyhow so all those sort of things were going on but Britain and France were still strong to some degree but finan EV indebted to the United States and then in World War II that gets even worse and it’s really only through America the Britain’s lifted off its knees but the Elites in Britain of course did not like that they still believed that the British Empire had uh Decades of life left into it and this was the view of Winston Churchill and the other subsequent uh leaders of Britain going forward to Anthony Eden who was the Prime Minister during the sewers crisis in 1956 but what they found was uh you know there were three newly christened superpowers in the world Britain uh the United States and the Soviet Union of those three by a long long way Britain was the weakest it still had Imperial interests but they were unwinding all over the place Egypt um in the early 1950s went through a kind of a political revolution in the beginning of more nationalistic Independence similar things were happening in other Asian colonies of or you know dominions of Britain uh and places like Australia um uh were still emotionally and socially and culturally deeply linked to Britain uh in a world before the internet it could hardly be any other way but they were um uh strategically uh more ambiguous about Britain because Britain had let Australia down at Singapore in 1942 uh and it was really only America that saved Australia in the Pacific War so I’m sort of rambling here a little bit but the point is that um uh the Brits still fancied themselves uh an Empire and a match with the United States and one of their frustrations was around the British currency uh they didn’t like the Britain Woods agreement and they dreamt of sort of freeing themselves of that and freeing themselves of the Diplomatic and financial and Military uh sway of the United States and it was in that context of these uh British Elites who really wanted to be back in the top seats of the world uh that the Fiasco of the sewers crisis happened uh and um the precipitating event was uh debates around uh the azwan dam financial aid from the United States for that for Egypt’s economic Redevelopment and also the establishment of or the the maintenance of a major military base in in in uh the seers canal now that was not just there to control the sewers Canal the reason Britain wanted to do that was to be the regional hegemon in the Middle East uh what we would now know as West Asia and North Africa it wasn’t just about controlling the access routs or controlling the oil that was passing through the sew Canal it was actually about uh both real power and perceptions of power for Britain in um in uh as the regional eggon in this part of the world to show that it could be uh a force to be reckoned with and what’s more this part of the world’s quite a long way from Britain uh and a very long way from India and by the 1950s of course uh Britain no longer controlled India there was a disastrous partition in uh 1947 which caused you know ter was a you know a disgrace of British Imperial valure and a human tragedy in many ways what the significance of the sew Canal base also was in Britain’s eyes was it was a southern base to attack Southern Russia yes even then even even back then as part of the sews crisis the lon held British distaste for Russia was sort of making itself felt and I sort of went into the these uh issues to some degree in my article in the substack but what I also did during the week was actually just check uh this book here by odd AR westad the cold war of World History to look at what it said about the sewers crisis and it was quite fascinating really odd AR West dad’s description of the seers crisis and one of the things he pointed out that I have not really noticed terribly much in uh some of the commentary on YouTube about the sew Canal Crisis and some of the commentary um you know on geopolitics channels and things like that like the Jan which tend to you know buy into the idea that the sewers crisis was the end of Empire moment for Britain rather than if you like the moment when uh the world realized that uh the British Empire the British Emperor had no clothes um but one of the things I really didn’t realize was the sewers crisis really was a bit of a follow on event from the famous bandang conference in 1959 now the band dang conference was uh like you know the first major International Conference of the non-aligned movement if you like it was a little bit like the bricks of the 1950s it was uh separate from the Soviet Union to some degree also separate and a little bit suspicious of China even though China wanted to be along because China was you know communist power at that point a communist state at that point uh but it was uh it was really trying to take the world away from a world of two ideological blocks in Conflict away from a bipolar world away from the Cold War and the three driving countries the three driving leaders and uh countries in uh the uh bandang conference in 1955 were India uh president neou of India or prime minister nou uh sucan from Indonesia and NASA from Egypt and it’s really With The Wind in his sails from bandang that uh the uh NASA goes forward and takes some of the actions that he does in 1956 that so angered uh prime minister Anthony Eden of uh Britain that he decided NASA had to go yes even in the 1950s these Western leaders were planning regime change operations When leaders in other countries sort of got in the way of their interests uh and so it leads to this extraordinary um conflict where NASA is consciously summoning the sort of uh um anti-colonial um uh movement of uh of of the 1950s as part of the sewers crisis so the sewers crisis wasn’t all just about decadence in the metropolitan Empire it was about a new assertiveness a new set of relationships and shifting balance of power across what was even then a multi-polar world uh yeah in the 1950s uh what I also discovered here was uh that um uh uh of course the one of the central parts of the drama of the sew crisis is that Britain really cocked up basically uh I don’t know if I get into trouble with YouTube to say that particular word but it’s not that bad a word it was a absolute Fiasco uh so what happened was Britain sent in its forces within day they were forced to withdraw and that was in part because um there was a run on the British currency the pound order of Sterling uh and that Financial weakness that had been there for Britain for really decades but certainly since uh 1945 and which they resented mightily uh they resented the dominance of the US dollar that Financial weakness was exposed uh and the United States were Furious about it they also felt that uh Britain was trying to do all this in the context of the 1956 US presidential election uh which has strange resonances with our current current uh time uh but as a you know he President Eisenhower who was then the president of the United States said that uh he was enraged he’d been completely kept in the dark about the plans of his allies and now he felt that he had just never seen great powers make such a complete mess and botch of things now uh this is where perhaps there’s this unwitting truth in what uh people say about this being the your loss in Ukraine being the West’s um the West sewers moment because it certainly is a complete mess and botch of things uh but in this case it’s not Britain who’s really botch things although Britain has certainly been one of the more energetic sporters of you know high levels of intervention in Russia and Ukraine but it has been the United States policy absolutely what’s happened in Ukraine since 2014 and earlier has the United States fingerprints all on it nothing they could possibly do is really going to conceal the fact that this is the case so the question is then is the defea in Ukraine revealing the weakness of us power the constraints on us power the financial weakness of us power and also the declining military strength of the United States as well one of the things that was also interesting here of course was the sewers crisis happened at the same time pretty much as the sort of Russian uh Invasion or you know entry into uh Hungary to sort of maintain uh the sort of pro- Soviet regime in Hungary uh you know dramatic event you know tanks in Budapest all that sort of thing it was a matter of absolute Fury that there was this uh apparent hypocrisy between uh the Old Colonial Powers you know deciding to send Armed Forces into their proxy colonies or their their their pseudo colonies uh and um the United States proclaiming its belief in you know National self-determined ation the principles of the United Nations and all that sort of thing uh and the so the sewers crisis sort of undermine the moral authority of the West in many ways uh and certainly the it it undermined the moral authority of Britain but it also exposed some of the limitations of Cold War thinking and uh westad uh in the cold war of World History which is a really excellent reference if you’re wanting to understand you know the the real context of uh current events what an westad says he quotes that president or prime minister of India I’m not quite sure what his position was I think it’s prime minister I think it was prime minister nou Jal n um he quotes him as saying in the Indian parliament in the context of the sewers crisis so this is a voice from India in the 1950s this era where we’re told it’s a bipolar world and the world’s just divided between you know the evil empire of the Soviet Union and the Free World led by the United States of America uh he says the use of armed forces by the big countries while apparently achieving something it has really showed its inability to deal with the situation it is the weakness which has come out and there is a sense in which there is a truth there about the nature of what’s happened in in uh the West’s sewers moment in Ukraine he carried on with the greatest danger which the world is suffering from is this cold war business it is because the Cold War creates a bigger mental barrier than the Iron Curtain or brick wall or any prison it creates barriers of the mind which refuses to understand the other person’s position which divides the world into devils and angels and that is very much the kind of mental world of the uh I guess um what was happening in the 1950s with the growing kind of crusading character of uh American anti-communist rhetoric uh and and geopolitics the CIA the McCarthyism and the general refusal to even recognize the People’s Republic of China at that point the bloody Chinese Eisenhower described them as he was frustrated with Britain in the midst of the sews crisis because he felt br Britain wanted to you know go easy on economic sanctions against China that the United States was implementing some things it seems almost never change it just shows that our world has always been multipolar and we just need to look behind some of these dividing the world into devils and angels into democracies and autocracies because it really gets in the way of seeing what’s really happening in in the world more clearly now the other great thing about the seers moment is or the sewers crisis and the seers moment in the memory particularly of British Elites is it’s uh it’s a it’s a sign of Imperial failure a lot of the blame was sheated home to Anthony Eden of being sick and a bit silly um and not um having I guess maybe the strength of will the strength of character to really see through the crisis properly uh one of the other things I discovered in my exploration of the sewers crisis is through this book here by John Darwin the Empire project and I quote this in my uh in my substack at jeff. substack do.com in the essay the um is is Ukraine the West’s sewers moment and I’ll just quickly read for you what he says CU he says a lot of people felt that Britain learned a lesson in the sewers crisis but that really was not so in the long-term perspective we can all see that it was the moment when the weakness of Britain was brutally brutally exposed to the world just as perhaps these last couple of years in Afghan and Ukraine and Yemen and Gaza the weakness of the United States is being exposed but uh what he what John Darwin who is really the the greatest of British historians of the British Empire and not just the British Empire but of all the empires of the world over the last 600 years his um magnificent book after Taman the rise and fall of global Empires 1400 to 2000 is absolute essential absolutely essential reading and and I’m actually doing a course at courses. jeffr rider.com on the rise and fall of Empires that’s going to start in June uh and it really uses John Darwin’s book as the spine to take you through over 12 weeks the true history of the rise and fall of Empires so that you can actually base your assessment of what’s going on in today’s world whether this is in fact an end of Empire moment whether America is in Decline whether we are still in a unipolar world or in a multi-polar world you can base your assessment your independent thinking about that on something more than just you know TI old stale analogies with the Roman Empire that uh is after all one one case of an Empire and not even a very clearly clearly understood case in most cases so John Darwin’s book uh says that um you would think that after such a catastrophe people would sort of learn the lesson of uh foreign policy found rather better um that they might have learned something from the Fiasco but he says the most curious aspect of the British reaction to sez once the immediate drama had passed was the mood of public indifference there was no Grand debate about Britain’s place in the world no official inquiry into what had gone wrong but what seems even more Curious is that after such a defeat British leaders still showed an extraordinary faith that with its sales duly trimmed Britain must remain a world power and uh Wow have we had a proper inquiry after Afghanistan have we had a proper set of Reflections or self-doubts after Afghanistan and uh will we see the same after Ukraine I’ve seen John mimer say on like the Jiran and other great geopolitics channels that um you know at some point uh people are going to uh ask what went wrong and want to blame someone but I guess perhaps the saddest lesson the very saddest lesson of you of the sews crisis is that might not happen uh you would think after all the tragic failures in Ukraine and as they become more apparent even in the last few days as Money’s been voted into um you know to support Ukraine but uh the the Press is full of the fact that well it might only last a couple of months um you’d think um that there would be some sensible voices calling for a genuine assessment after the catastrophic failure there uh but was there one after Afghanistan was there one after Libya after Syria after Iraq after will there be one after Gaza and will there be one after Ukraine or will we not just see the same kind of public indifference and the same kind of muddling through through a an elite and this makes me say at the end of my substack piece that the last sad lesson of the sewers moment is that usually when great Powers fall catastrophically the Ship of Fools still sails on so sewers moments and end of Empire moments I think one of my Reflections on a lot of the discussion of the end of Empire’s moments uh which you know you see a lot around at the moment is a lot of the american-based discussion of end of Empire is very inwardly focused it’s all about you know decaying infrastructure and you know bad politics and uh you know spin Thrift Lifestyles and um all that kind of thing and what it doesn’t really directly acknowledge all that much or you know a catastrophically bad Health System um uh which seems to be a you know the the one truth of American exceptionalism is it’s catastrophically bad uh Health System uh but uh the one um what was I saying uh yeah a lot of the discussion from a American oriented sort of you know American based channels uh I watched you know a relatively good one uh uh earlier on today about the sort of end of Empire sort of moment but I can’t quite remember who produced it um but it was very much about the weaknesses of American domestic government it doesn’t really squarely face and acknowledge the um the changing balance of power are changing flows of resources power ideas people around the world and ultimately it’s those that new pattern if you like of globalization the changing tides of globalization that are leading to a change in America’s disposition to the world uh so I and I think my other big reflection about all of this is that um end of Empire moments people too often have two comparisons really in mind a very simplistic let’s say or oversimplified understanding of what happened at the end of World War II the transition from the European colonial empires to the world of the United Nations of uh America leading free World of self-determined Nations all equal under international law of course that didn’t really happen quite that way uh nor was there a simple uh peaceful transition of the British Empire to the American Empire or the American Republic uh that was a much much more uh vexed vexed uh sort of uh situation and so there tend to be that comparison with the sort of end of the British Empire assuming that there was a world hegemon and Britain sort of Britain and America won World War II and then you know handed peacefully control of the world to the United States as like a father and son sort of business and that is really not true and it’s not true as demonstrated if nothing else than by the sewers moment the sewers crisis where Britain is resentfully clinging on to to its power its status as a great power and would continue to do so for another 15 years or so and in some ways still does in many ways still has this sense of itself as you know punching above its weight in the world of been a global power and you know the the world’s greatest intelligence uh assets and all the rest of it James Bonds um uh fantasies so that’s one example and the other example is Rome and you know there are so many different interpretations of the Roman Empire so Empires generally there as have been so many empires in the world and that’s one of the the themes of John Darwin’s book that generally in world history uh empires have been the rule of the road um and so that means there have been many many many different cases of Empires waxing waning recovering uh um you know changing their pattern of rule changing their pattern of influence changing their pattern of dominion so I think it’s really uh T it tends to be a bit of a neat way of encapsulating a narrative into a very traditional form the end of Empire moment the collapse of Rome yet again the the the the the sapping of the moral strength for Rome by a moral Corruption of uh whoever is the target of your appr probium within America um that is a really simplistic model uh Empires tend to last a lot longer the process of Decay sort of is is is much more complicated than that

In this video, I share with you insights from the best historians of empire about whether we are living through an end of empire moment? Even Boris Johnson says the collapse of Western hegemony could be near? Will the US empire collapse? Will defeat in Eastern Europe bring on a Suez Crisis for the USA?

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