Tartu,
Estonia. 21 October. Does the West want
to lead? In his masterpiece The History of the Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire first published pointedly in 1776 English historian Edward
Gibbon wrote, “The five marks of the Roman decaying culture: Concern with
displaying affluence instead of building wealth; Obsession with sex and
perversions of sex; Art becomes freakish and sensationalistic instead of
creative and original; Widening disparity between very rich and very poor;
Increased demand to live off the state”.
Sequestration, Syria, Snowden and Shutdown America shows at least some
of the signs of Gibbon’s Rome.
The other
day I was in conversation with one of NATO’s most senior and distinguished
officers who alluded to the strange symmetry of Western history. The 1713 Treaty of Utrecht brought a final
end to Spain’s once great empire and opened a century of systemic struggle
between Britain and France for global supremacy. In 1815 the Battle of Waterloo finally ended that
struggle in Britain’s favour. A century
ago Europe stood on the brink of the cataclysmic First World War that would end
Britain’s dominion and slowly usher in the American century. 2013?
The United
States pulled back from the brink this past week. However, all the signs are that this is but a
temporary truce and that come January Washington ideologues on both left and
right could well tip America and the West over the edge into self-induced recession. The damage to American leadership would be
incalculable.
As for
Europe the only saving grace at the IMF’s Global
Challenges, Global Solutions conference in shutdown Washington was that for
once Europe’s woes were not dominating the agenda.
Recent
events have demonstrated the malaise from which politics and strategy is
suffering in both Washington and Western Europe’s power capitals - Berlin,
Paris and London. It is as though the very
pillars of the West are beginning to buckle just as China is emerging to pose a
systemic challenge to Western leadership.
It as though the West has lost the will to compete. Indeed, British finance minister George
Osborne spent much of last week trying desperately to sell Britain piecemeal to
China.
It is not China’s
rise that is risking the West’s leadership but rather the elite malaise so
horribly self-evident in Washington these past weeks and Europe these past
years. Absurdly self-abusive partisan
politics, blindly destructive ‘visions’ that bear no relationship to citizens’ lives,
corrosive political correctness that paralyzes policies by championing the
needs of the few at the expense of increasingly alienated majorities who sit in
silent, sullen and impotent witness at the follies of their leaders. Patriotism, duty and obligation are too often
sneered at as passé by the very people charged with leadership. Gibbon would have recognised all of this.
Gibbon
believed Rome fell because Romans became declinist and Roman leaders became so
full of their own conceits that they were unable to see the big strategic
picture. In the wake of the Washington
fiasco China called this week for the “de-Americanisation” of the world. And on the face of it the Chinese may have a
point.
So, is the
West doomed? There is a very big
difference between Gibbon’s Rome/Britain of 1776 and between Britain in 1913
and the West in 2013. In 1913 Britain
was facing the hard consequences of rapid decline that had set in somewhere
between the end of the American Civil War in 1865 and German unification in
1871. Indeed, in 1913 Germany’s
industrial production was almost twice that of Britain’s.
However,
whilst China’s economy is today worth some $12 trillion compared with an America
worth some $16 trillion a range of structural political, economic, diplomatic
and military power factors suggest that leadership is still there for America’s
taking…if Washington wants it. The same
goes for Europeans.
Here in
Estonia on freedom’s front-line some forty kilometres from the Russian border
the question of America’s will to lead and Europe’s willingness to act hangs in
the air like mist in the forests of silver birch that surround me. For the first time in their scorched history
Estonians thought they were secure, now they are not so sure.
Today is the
anniversary of Admiral Lord Nelson’s great 1805 victory at the Battle of
Trafalgar which cemented British naval supremacy for a century. If the West still wants to lead it must compete
for as the great man said; “First achieve victory and then make best use of
it”.
As for
Gibbon the loss of the American colonies proved an irritating inconvenience for
Britain but nothing more. Indeed, through
the 1823 Monroe Doctrine which forbade European colonial ‘interference’ in the
Americas the US effectively protected Britain’s back enabling a massive
expansion in the British Empire to the south and east. Such is history.
Decline and
fall? Only if we in the West will it.
Julian
Lindley-French
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