Someone Else's Empire: British Illusions and American Hegemony

by Tom Stevenson

Someone’s Else’s Empire coolly reassesses Britain’s relationship with the United States. Elite descriptions of Britain’s position in the world (‘punching above our weight’) are untenable, Tom Stevenson argues. Yet there is a refusal, in most parts of society, to examine the assumptions behind them. Half a century after British withdrawal from “east of Suez,” why has the Indo-Pacific tilt become a Whitehall priority? Why are newly opened Persian Gulf bases working side by side with Saudi and Emirati forces engaged in the catastrophic war on Yemen?

The impetus for so many decisions about British foreign policy comes from a desire to maintain lieutenant rank with Washington. But British leaders and defence specialists tend to dislike seeing Britain framed by American power. A great effort is required to clear away the build-up of irrelevant, nostalgic detritus around “Global Britain.” Stevenson looks at the infrastructure of a US world order re-energised by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and fits the UK into the picture without the usual euphemisms. It is one thing to station military forces around the world to maintain your empire, he observes, but quite another to do so for someone else’s.

Genres: Politics, History, British Literature, Nonfiction, United States, Essays

272 pages, Hardcover

First published November 7, 2023

Reviews

[Ewan Lindsay]

Feel a bit misled as the promised topic of the book, the concept of the British-American ‘special relationship’ and how in the modern world it serves only to make Britain more of an American vassal state, is only really the first 1/3 of the book (and even in that there’s a completely unrelated chapter on Australia) and the rest just becomes a more general outline of the broader American empire on its own.

For that obvious reason the first part is the best chapters of the book but there are some other highlights. All the chapters in the middle part on the tools of American empire were generally good but the Astrostrategy one especially was really interesting even if it’s technically the least insightful and most speculative of them since it’s all about potential future warfare whereas the others were about real mechanisms of control (sanctions, naval power, nukes, etc). I’d love to read a whole book on the topic.

The first chapter in the third part about the strategic importance of the Persian Gulf and the reasons for why we’re so heavily involved in it was good and brought it back briefly to the topic of US/UK combined foreign policy. Unfortunately the rest of the third chapter went right back to ignoring the topic and instead covered the state of various countries in the Arab world. The Libya chapter just went into a massively detailed and massively unfollowable description of the multiple local governments in the region and the limits of the control they each have. Tunisia gets an entire chapter even though it’s explicitly said it was left alone by the US/UK for being relatively stable and on the margins. So why are you writing about it in a book on US/UK foreign policy? It was cool learning about IS tho (finding out they made licence plates with their logo on was incredible and I need to know where I can find them now). Ending on the drone strike chapter sucked tho because thats actually a really interesting topic and it gets abandoned about 4 paragraphs in in favour of discussing the life and assassination (not by drone but by SEAL team) of two IS leaders. Pretty exemplary of the whole book really.

[Matheus Dias · Rating 1 out of 5]

The subject of this book is highly relevant, especially today, when the international consensus forged after the Second World War appears to be dying. The rules-based liberal world order was a product of British economic liberalism and American political liberalism. It was proclaimed by Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill in the Atlantic Charter in the summer of 1941, amid the calm waters of Placentia Bay.

Britain lost an empire but did find a role – as the lieutenant of American hegemony (even if it hates to be described as such) in exchange for influence in Washington. However, this is not the book to read if you want to explore that story. The author is far more preoccupied with the moral sins and evils of British and American foreign policy, and, though he tries to conceal it, his pronounced European leanings.

[Bindesh Dahal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Realistic no-nonsense analysis.