A Bang or a Whimper? Comparing Imperial Collapse in the US to the UK’s Decline

The unwinding of the British empire can appear in the rearview mirror as almost quaint in comparison to what the US is going through today and what it is inflicting on the world.

While the eventual retreat of US military around the world as its military hardware is outclassed and its proxies suffer defeats is starting to rhyme with the case of the UK. Echoes of Malaya, Kenya, and Cyprus can be seen in US policy in Gaza—although on a much grander genocidal scale—and elsewhere.

The foreign policy Blob lurches from one confrontation to another—proxy wars, economic confrontations, small battles, destabilization campaigns—but unable to impose its will like it once did. It finds successes around the world but they are fleeting, almost exclusively due to chaos creation, appeal to corrupt elites, widespread repression, and destruction. It can offer nothing promising to the people living around its military outposts across the world. On the home front, the situation might be even worse. The population is bled dry by parasitic oligarchs, angry and confused but with no electoral outlet for their rage, with an economy running on the fumes of an AI bubble, and masked federal agents roaming the Hooverville streets as the tools of surveillance and population control increasingly find their way from combat zones abroad to the metropole.

Where do we go from here and can the end of the British empire offer any parallels?

That’s the question I was looking for clues to when I picked up Erik Linstrum’s Age of Emergency: Living with Violence at the End of the British Empire. Linstrum who is associate professor of history at the University of Virginia and is also author of Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire, largely deals with the post-WWII twilight years and is particularly interested in the effect on UK society of the brutal colonial campaigns of the 1950s and how these boomeranged on the public at home.

The text is somewhat constrained by its area of focus. It is not a history book detailing key battles and moments British influence suffered irreversible setbacks.

Though (or perhaps because of the fact) I come from a line of what my Irish friends affectionately call “railroad paddies,” my knowledge of the British empire is largely confined to its effect on Ireland and elsewhere. Age of Emergency provides the flip side of that coin: the effect on British citizens.

Here I’ll try to compare what Americans are going through today to what Age of Emergency describes. If there are any shortcomings with regards to British history, I believe we are lucky enough to have some UK history buffs in the readership who can hopefully add more insight in comments.

As one could expect, there are many similarities between the US’ current decline and that of the empire it supplanted, yet there are also key differences, and in some cases it would appear that the US elite learned from the British and are copying or building off effective strategies employed by the British.

Similarities

It was striking how many passages from the book could apply directly to the US today if only a few dates and locations were changed. Take the following examples:

The US and its proxies use similar strategies to the British.

As in Malaya, Emergency Regulations in Kenya allowed for curfews, food restrictions, collective punishments, and detention without trial. A hastily constructed police state swept much of the Kikuyu population into a byzantine network of detention camps where physical abuse, forced labor, and disease were endemic…

That might sound a lot like the US in Iraq and Abu Ghraib or Israel in Palestine. One could argue it’s starting to sound a lot like home.

As we see the wars increasingly come home in the form of tools of oppression used abroad in the “colonies” turned on American immigrants and citizens. Drones used in Gaza by Israel now flying over the US are just the latest example. According to Linstrum, what came home in the UK was more psychological:

…the British state’s reliance on warfare legitimized aggression while individual Britons learned habits of dehumanization in battle with colonial forces.

In the metropole, authoritarian violence generated excitement in large part because its effects were felt elsewhere; it was a rhetorical ideal that could be expressed within the existing system rather than a form of action aimed at toppling it. 

In the US—and not just under Trump— we are getting closer to the bone as authoritarian violence becomes increasingly commonplace. It’s not just masked agents on the streets and militarized police either, but the daily violence of neoliberalism, which sees the state encourage its takeover by oligarchal authoritarian entrepreneurs who openly embrace necropolitics.

The “F” word was also being thrown around a lot in the UK during the imperial collapse years as many saw obvious similarities between British actions and those of the Nazis. The same is happening nowadays in the US with some eager to label Trumpism as some sort of aberration, but what Linstrum describes for the UK would also seem to apply to the US today:

The danger of the fascist label is that it exoticizes and marginalizes the home-grown illiberalism of an empire long rooted in racial violence. 

Yessir. Just as the horror-filled British campaigns in Africa, Asia, and Europe were a logical extension of capitalism and empire, so too is crude version of imperial America led by Trump. The violence might change locations, evolve, or see minor changes in tactics, but it is always there.

…not “total wars” that transformed civilian life but “small wars” of the kind that had long raged on the frontiers of empire…It was not the people living in Britain but colonial subjects overseas who bore the heaviest burdens in these conflicts. 

Sounds familiar. More, including a Graham Greene quote that sums up post-9/11 America:

Tens of thousands of British soldiers, conscripts as well as career soldiers, were dispatched to one trouble spot after another. New wars began before their predecessors were finished. The same grim tactics were tried again and again with uncertain results. Lurking behind it all was the suspicion that the fighting dramatized Britain’s decline as a global power rather than reversing it…What Graham Greene wrote from Malaya in 1950 could stand as an epitaph for the age: “The war was like a mist; it pervaded everything; it sapped the spirits; it wouldn’t clear.” 

I don’t believe I can remember the last clear day; perhaps I am not old enough.

Differences

For the US, since just September 11, 2001, there is nary a corner of the earth that hasn’t been affected by American violence, regime change operations, or economic warfare. Yet a key difference between the UK empire and America today is that the latter is also taking place during the heights of neoliberal globalization.

So when Linstrum writes that “The challenge for the British people was to find ways of living with the violence that they simply could not ignore,” it’s an altogether different one for Americans today. US citizens are practiced at ignoring the violence abroad—at least those who aren’t part of the armed forces. It’s not that there is support for endless wars for oligarch profit, but Americans are usually preoccupied with more pressing survivability concerns.

It’s harder to ignore the economic collapse for the majority of the population. There are Hoovervilles and dying towns, deaths of despair, and now masked federal agents roaming the streets as wealth inequality surges past Gilded Age levels. The US empire’s downfall comes at a time of late stage capitalism when more than 99 percent of the public are effectively disenfranchised while factions of reactionary billionaires vie for control. The public has largely become just another colonized people who are surveilled, arbitrarily imprisoned, and feasted on for profit.

In contrast, the UK at that time was arguably a much more cohesive society, which also had—and continues to have a degraded version—of national healthcare. The UK also became a much more equal economic society during the post-WWII years during the bloody end to its empire.

Here’s one last passage that stood out among the differences:

…violence against relatively defenseless enemies offended British pride. 

No issue with that among the American hawks; indeed, those are the foes they prefer.

Lessons Learned? 

Unlike the UK, the US no longer relies on conscription. Though that may be more a legacy of the Vietnam War, but it also helps avoid widespread opposition to the wars.

British opposition to war argued that there was a trade-off between warfare overseas and welfare at home (”the country cannot have schools, houses, and hospitals and also build huge bombing planes, warships, and A and H bombs”).

This argument feels few and far between in the US—and political rules designed to maintain a two-party system, elite control over the media, as well as a police state with more eavesdropping tools than ever can help make sure it doesn’t grow louder than a whisper.

This stuck out, considering today’s accelerationists in high places:

…A Second World War veteran…worried that military service in the colonies was breeding a hardened generation of white supremacists. 

That’s what the new American elite like the Peter Thiels and Alex Karps want—that and a privatized state in which they rule. Here’s Unpopular Front on Karp’s book, The Technological Republic: 

The book is extremely creepy: It becomes clear in the course of reading this “Technological Republic” the authors propose is essentially some kind of merger or acquisition of the United States government by Silicon Valley, a state run by an engineering elite that would be empowered to “ruthlessly” pursue “outcomes.” It’s a proposal for a kind of tech oligarchy: “no public “oversight for me, surveillance for thee.”

…To recap, Karp wrote his dissertation on a form of rhetoric that employs aggression to bind a community together and then he goes and writes a terrible, jargon-filled, cliché-riddled book about how the United States needs to rearm with the help of Silicon Valley. The shittiness, one might say, is the point: is Karp intentionally using jargon in this technical sense to create his own vision of Volksgemeinschaft? Maybe, but the rhetoric is not stirring! As for “aggression in the life-world,” Karp is saying “Yes, please!” In the book, Karp explicitly says how he wants to cultivate a more martial society to defend “the West.”

The same way the British used colonial war as a ‘source of order: “a citadel of strength and a guarantor of peace,” holding the line against a sea of “potential anarchy,”’  the Trump administration makes the same case—except in this case it is at home against enemies within. And as America’s power is increasingly threatened abroad, one can expect the home front to become more turbulent, and interested parties to try to steer more power to Silicon Valley surveillance and population control oligarchs in the name of battling the threat from within:

The demonization of anticolonial fighters throughout the 1950s furnished a script for fear-mongering about immigration…Boundaries between colonial battlefields and British streets likewise blurred in the fascist romanticization of racial violence….Rightists held the weak-kneed liberalism of both major parties responsible…

Again, this stands out with regards to relentless brutality we’re bombarded with on a daily basis today: exposing it doesn’t work:

The apathy of the masses was a perennial concern for the left. Activists’ hope in the 1950s, that exposing the brutality of the colonial war would inspire a collective repudiation of it, was not vindicated by events. 

While the British government—and the US today—often tried to suppress information, it also used another tactic: embracing it.

…violence proved more difficult to attack when it was already in the open. Colonial violence is usually thought to have left few traces in the language of British politics. A quiet tradition of “liberal militarism”—preferring high-tech weapons to mass mobilizations and full-scale occupations—may be the closest thing to an official ideology for the use of force, in the colonies and elsewhere. But the intricacies of liberalism…distract from what the wars of decolonization reveal most dramatically: the appeal of illiberal militarism in Britain. This was not an elite policy doctrine but a popular language of resentment. Its tenets were the rejection of legal and moral restraints on soldiers in the field, intolerance of debate and dissent at home, and the embrace of national greatness and racial prestige as paramount values. When officials shrugged off brutality against Britain’s enemies as unimportant or unavoidable, they created a space for more radical apologetics. 

In this light, the Department of Homeland Security producing slick videos of ICE agents terrorizing immigrants and Pete Hegseth’s War Department turning war crimes into social media entertainment make more sense as an attempt by Trump and his backers clumsily trying to wed MAGA to illiberal militarism. Meanwhile the beloved Democrats favor liberal militarism.

For now, the US military-industrial complex wins either way, but due to all the overpriced hardware, corruption, deindustrialization, and more, a Suez always seems to be right around the corner (if we haven’t already witnessed it in Hormuz), which could curtail its prized weapons exports and dissuade future proxy countries from doing its fighting.

With the neoliberal peasant death spiral poses a unique threat for American workers, the increased imperial challenges are also a threat to the US elite.

Trump, even before the Epstein affair exploded again, was sinking fast due his acceleration of economic parasitism and inability to extricate the US from foreign wars. While MAGA largely opposes the forever wars and is more interested in reshoring American jobs, in the UK “the simmering resentments of frustrated nationalism drove popular support for colonial war.”

The American elite have been trying for years to drum up similar support. Biden’s “foreign policy for the middle class” was such an attempt, and many in Trump’s circle desire that MAGA quit the whining about child trafficking influence ops and the local shuttered factory, accept the assertion that this is the greatest economy evah, and start cheerleading Israel’s latest atrocities.

But when was the last time the American public displayed broad support for foreign intervention? The immediate post 9/11 wars?

In retrospect, 2001 will almost certainly mark the beginning of the end—on numerous fronts.

The year the “Global War on Terror” launched and the Project for the New American Century began. NATO, fresh off its official transformation from a defensive alliance to aggressor in the Balkans, had turned its sights on Russia and in a few short years would bring in Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. And the US economic elite worked to admit China to the World Trade Organization greasing the wheels of America’s great deindustrialization and empowering the country that now has US capital over the barrel.

As the US collapse accelerates, the danger is that a cornered elite will look back fondly to those days of strong support for vengeance after 9/11 and try to recreate such an atmosphere in one final push to reclaim American dominance.

A Better Comparison?

Perhaps the biggest difference is that while the UK was forced to relinquish its empire, it was to a former colony “ally” with which it shared strong cultural ties and under which it could remain junior partner operating more from the financial spook shadows.

US acceptance of its reduced power, on other hand, would be an admission that the period of “Western”-centric world order is finished.

The economic situation on the American home front continues to track towards Russia’s “wild 1990s.” That “wild” label has always seemed a misnomer; the decade was an absolute catastrophe for the vast majority of its citizens, more akin to a brief Dark Ages.

And it’s not dissimilar to what many working class Americans have been living through for some time now and which looks set to only worsen on current trajectories as Trump 2.0 pursues “shock therapy on a civilizational scale.”

Stephen Bezruchka, the author of Inequality Kills Us All: Covid-19’s Health Lessons for the World, writes that the US is condemning its citizens to the same fate that Russians experienced in the 1990s and 2000s:

The latest United Nations Human Development Report, issued last September, shows that for 2021 American length of life was behind that of 43 countries. These included all the rich ones and some not, such as Chile, Slovenia and Thailand. If we eradicated our three leading killers: heart disease, cancer and COVID-19, we would still not be the healthiest nation. It may come as a surprise to some of us that the oldest person is never found in the U.S. We are also the only rich country to have seen continued drops in life expectancy from 2019 to 2021. What is going on?

We can find clues by looking to the former Soviet Union, where life expectancy fell after the 1991 breakup…The already soaring rates of American income and wealth inequality gained steam with the pandemic and our poor response to it, which encouraged profiteering over sound public health policy. Expected increases in length of life began faltering around 2015 and are now in free fall. Will the United States follow the Russian example of continued health declines?

Americans report some of the world’s highest levels of stress. We consume about three-quarters of the world’s opioids to treat our stress-induced social pain. This leads to staggering overdose deaths in addition to the causes of death listed above.

Consider stress as the 21st-century tobacco. By creating awareness of the harms of second-hand cigarette smoke, most smokers were discouraged from their habit. Today only poorer people smoke, mostly to treat the social pain of poverty. Deaths of despair are clearly not limited to Russia and its former satellites. Can we expect to follow their pattern of continued decline? This seems likely unless we deploy the parachute of decreasing our record income and wealth gaps.

Hardly a country prepared for a fight to maintain global dominance, but perhaps one where its corrupt elite might take some well-placed bribes from, say, China in order to stand down.