Review of Tom Stevenson, Someone Else’s Empire: British Illusions and American Hegemony.. London: Verso, 2023.
Munich (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Everything is going well in the “Special Relationship” between the US and the UK. After an American chemist dared to suggest that adding salt to the quintessential British cup of tea could represent an improvement, the US embassy stepped in and calmed restless audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. “We cannot stand idly by as such an outrageous proposal threatens the very foundation of our special relationship,” posted the US embassy in London in January 2024. The embassy noted that “the unthinkable notion of adding salt to Britain’s national drink is not official United States policy. And never will be.”
There was never a risk of a diplomatic conflict, of course, because two countries that agree to jointly strike Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen continuously for almost two months are not likely to create a tempest in a teapot. The long-running dynamics in the US-UK relationship that help explain their joint strikes in Yemen, not frivolous discussions on tea, are part of Tom Stevenson’s latest book, “Someone Else’s Empire: British Illusions and American Hegemony”, a collection of articles published by the author over the years for the London Review of Books (LRB).
Stevenson, a contributing editor at the LRB, discusses Yemen in the book concerning the US-UK support for the bombing operations Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have carried out in Yemen for seven years. Stevenson obviously could not have had the US-UK joint strikes against the Houthis in mind when his book went to press at some point in mid-2023. Still, his assertion that, within the British establishment, “nostalgia for global influence has produced a compulsive Atlanticism and a reflexive resort to military actions that the UK is near incapable of actually performing”[1], could also serve as a clever analysis of the most recent events.
Facing its decline as a global power, “the dominant trend of late twentieth-century Britain was not resurgence as an independent power but a new surrogacy” to the US.[2] With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the supposed “end of history”, following Washington’s lead seemed more self-evident than ever. This was the case even if it implied invading Iraq under the false premise that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
Tom Stevenson, Someone Else’s Empire:British Illusions and American Hegemony. Click here.
Tony Blair was perfectly content to become George Bush’s junior partner. He was not alone among European leaders in embracing America’s turbocharged bellicosity after the 9/11 attacks. In Spain, for instance, Prime Minister José María Aznar from the center-right Popular Party was only too happy to meet Bush and Blair in the Portuguese Azores archipelago four days before the invasion to support the US-UK alliance. The Spanish press referred to Bush, Blair, and Aznar as “El Trío de las Azores” (The Azores Trio) and Spain sent 2,600 soldiers to Iraq between August 2003 and May 2004. Eleven of them would die there.
The Spanish participation in the Iraq War ended after the Socialist José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who had campaigned on the promise to withdraw the troops from Iraq, defeated Aznar in the national elections of March 14, 2004. The Iraq War was key in Zapatero’s victory. It will soon be exactly two decades since March 11, 2004, when Madrid suffered a series of terrorist attacks in commuter trains that killed 193 people.
Aznar’s government blamed the Basque separatist group ETA for the attacks despite knowing early on that everything pointed at al-Qaeda. The terrorist group had attacked Spain due to its involvement in the Iraq War. When the truth was eventually revealed right before election day, Zapatero’s Socialist party won a surprise victory. In an interview three years ago, Aznar continued to defend that his decision to join the conflict in Iraq “represented Spain’s most important role in many decades.”
In the early 2000s, the UK was not the only country with a vanished empire overplaying its relevance at the international level by seeking to stay close to the US. Whereas Spain soon shifted course, the UK has tied its future even closer to the US after Brexit, notes Stevenson. One of the examples the author provides is the trend in British weapons acquisitions. During the last twenty years, the UK has almost uninterruptedly procured more than 50% of its weapons imports from the US. However, this has recently only intensified. The data offered by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) shows that in the period from 2020 to 2022, the last year for which data is available, weapons imports from the US represented 95% of British total expenditure on weapons produced abroad.
One of Stevenson’s main arguments regarding the US-UK relationship is that London has often been conducting a foreign and defense policy that makes little sense in terms of promoting British national interests. For instance, Stevenson points to Britain’s commitment to deploy patrol vessels and a frigate in the Indo-Pacific area with the vague objective of “projecting power.” This is the kind of investment London has often committed to despite it more likely benefiting the US than the UK, if at all.
In this sense, the case of the US-UK joint strikes against the Houthis is exceptional. If we accept, for the sake of the argument, that US-UK attacks against Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen are the most effective way to ensure freedom of navigation in the Red Sea, then it would be the UK that would profit more from this. The economic interests of the US are hardly directly affected by the attacks on ships in the Red Sea, whereas the Suez Channel is a key trade artery for cargo either coming from or going to Europe.
Some exceptions notwithstanding, there is a clear general dynamic of British subordination to Washington. As Stevenson argues, this can also be observed in the Five Eyes intelligence alliance that comprises the US, the UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand. Whereas the US National Security Agency (NSA) automatically receives the feed from intelligence stations in other countries, the NSA “sometimes withholds what it knows.”[3]
Stevenson discusses the changing character of war from the perspective of the US and the UK. The author is deeply knowledgeable of varied topics such as the overuse of economic sanctions by Western countries, the details of nuclear competition, or the militarization of space, with satellites and space missions becoming increasingly important.
But Stevenson often pushes too far the book’s generally convincing main argument, that Britain has become subservient to American power. For instance, he writes that “one must wonder whether Britain retains an independent foreign policy at all itself.”[4] “Someone Else’s Empire” also tends to overplay the influence of Washington, and by implication London, in the Middle East. Writing about the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, Stevenson argues that “since the West installed the monarchs, and its behavior is essentially extractive, I see no reason to avoid describing the continued Anglo-American domination of the Gulf as colonial.”[5]
It is difficult to see how a colonial power would not have replaced Crown Prince and de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia Mohammed bin Salman following his implication in the murder of the Saudi journalist and dissident Jamal Khashoggi in Istanbul. Bin Salman’s role in the assassination of Khashoggi was a huge embarrassment for his Western supporters. Neither would a colonial power have allowed Saudi Arabia and the UAE to impose a blockade on Qatar, a Western ally, between 2017 and 2021.
Stevenson is sometimes hyperbolic about US power. Still, it is true that, for all talk of American decline, “the shadow of American power still casts over the rest of the world is unmistakable.”[6] The UK has been enveloped by this shadow while also contributing to making it larger. From Iraq to Yemen and, once the controversy around Britain’s national drink has been happily resolved, over a cup of tea.
[1] Tom Stevenson, “Someone Else’s Empire: British Illusions and American Hegemony” (London: Verso, 2023), p. 4.
[2] Ibid., p. 15.
[3] Ibid., p. 55.
[4] Ibid., p. 234.
[5] Ibid., p. 160.
[6] Ibid., p. 232.
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