An Ounce of Self-Respect

Henry Hill writes:

One of the challenges that attends writing for ConservativeHome in the wake of the 2024 election is that the day-to-day function of the ToryDiary is to discuss the latest Conservative news, and there are now many mornings when the Conservatives simply don’t make the news. This is one such morning.

So let’s instead, in the wake of the President’s latest adventure in Venezuela, take a detour on the question of American imperialism, and how it relates to the British Right.

Donald Trump’s foreign policy is interesting inasmuch as it seems calibrated to upset just about everybody: abandoning the multilateralism and politesse of the modern diplomatic tradition whilst also continually getting America militarily involved in foreign countries, much to the dismay of many MAGA supporters.

This pattern probably bodes poorly for the overall good health of Washington’s imperium; there tends to be an inverse relationship between the amount of active military force required to maintain an hegemony and its remaining lifespan. Most people can come round to a profitable empire, if you dress it up in the right language, but only a sentimentalist will seek to maintain an unprofitable one.

But compounding that general augury is the more specific problem that Donald Trump and his supporters don’t appear to have, even inside their own heads, a coherent theory of empire. The urge to demonstrate American hard power around the world (not to mention physically expand the borders of the United States) sits uncomfortably alongside the ‘America First’ philosophy, in pursuit of which the President keeps disposing of much more cost-effective means of projecting Washington’s power, like subsidising NATO.

I have some limited personal experience of this, as a few months ago I met one of them – a senior man at a MAGA-aligned US think-tank who was over here networking, or fact-finding, or whatever it is think-tanks do to expense foreign travel, and had been taken to sample a Westminster pub.

We got to chatting, as you do, and he pushed back against my suggestion that MAGA represented a return to America’s pre-Wilsonian isolationism. Whilst there were certainly some in the White House who felt that way, our man declared himself an explicit believer in “US empire”.

So I asked him about Chagos. Many on the Right in this country had been holding out hope that the President would veto Sir Keir Starmer’s absurd deal. Ought not Trump to have intervened – wield a bit of that power to protect a loyal ally from the consequences of a self-harming government?

Absolutely not, came the reply. It was simply not Washington’s responsibility; or to quote him exactly: “It’s up to Britain to save Britain.”

Now that’s a reasonable enough statement on its own terms, of course; however much one might lament an inward turn by the United States, there is nothing necessarily intellectually or morally inconsistent about it. But for a self-described imperialist, on the other hand, it was a deranged thing to say.

For what lesson was I supposed to take from that save that it would have been better for the UK if we had been a bit more Charles de Gaulle, and not allowed our national leadership to be so enervated by the American alliance that it uses the term ‘special relationship’? What incentive have I, or any other Brit with an ounce of self-respect, to collaborate with Washington if that’s the deal?

Empire comes with responsibilities. Even if you don’t feel any moral compunction to support local leaders who support you, you still have to do it because otherwise at some point they stop doing that, at which point you either lose your imperial grip or start having to maintain it by harder means, with a far worse cost-to-benefit return.

You can have an empire, or you can dole out pompous lectures about republican self-responsibility, but you can’t do both. The imperialist strain of MAGA has not yet realised this – and British right-wingers would do well to notice.

There are a couple of reasons why the American Right enjoys so much influence, deliberate and otherwise, on right-wing politics elsewhere in the Anglosphere. One of them is a common language. Another is cope (pretending we’re a unit allows British politicians to write bold cheques they hope Washington will cash).

The third is money. Americans simply do politics bigger. Even if you’re not angling for US funding for a domestic project (which any of the big American think-tanks could fund with the change they lose down the back of the sofa), there is always the tantalising prospect of a trip across the pond yourself.

Sometimes the radiation poisoning this produces is benign if slightly embarrassing, as is all but the most hard-headed Atlanticism. On other occasions the damage is obvious, as in the case of Liz Truss post-premiership turn to the weird. But between the two there is a unfortunate tendency, on parts of the Right, to behave around American sympathisers (as they see them) like one of those groups of exiles who sometimes haunt foreign capitals, trying to persuade the powers that be how well they’d run their homeland if only someone gave them the chance.

But to what purpose? It is difficult to imagine even Trump waking up one morning and deciding to seize the Prime Minister. (Nor should this comparison be over-read; I have not to date met any actual putschists.) Our alliance with the United States has always been, necessarily, extremely one-sided. Yet hitherto the Americans at least had the courtesy to pretend it wasn’t, at least when we were within earshot.

If Washington is changing, so must we. It seems most likely that the tension in MAGA’s foreign policy will resolve, in the medium term at least, towards isolation; that will require a major overhaul of Conservative foreign policy assumptions whether we want it or not. And if our obeisance to Washington doesn’t deliver concrete returns for our own national interest (exemption from Trump’s campaign to push up the price of American medical exports, for example), perhaps we should want one anyway.