Blood, Class and Empire

by Christopher Hitchens

  A few weeks before I shipped out on the Iowa, a motorcycle messenger from the British embassy in Washington had come to my front door. He bore this notice, blazoned with the Union Jack:

  The following announcement has been made in London today:

  The Queen has been graciously pleased to approve a recommendation by the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs that the Honourable Caspar W. Weinberger be appointed an Honorary Knight Grand Cross in the Civil Division of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (GBE).

  The message went on to say, departing from the language of the Gazette and the Court of St. James’s, that “this is the first award of a GBE to an American citizen for eleven years. The award to Mr. Weinberger recognizes his outstanding and invaluable contribution to defense cooperation between Britain and the United States during his seven years as Secretary of Defense.” It did not take very expert decoding to recognize in this a reference to Mr. Weinberger’s fraternal role in the Falklands crisis, when a potentially quixotic British naval expedition had been protected by the superior supply and reconnaissance resources of a big brother as it made its way down to the South Atlantic. “Closet Brits,” an exasperated Jeane Kirkpatrick had scoffed at her Reaganite colleagues, as they gradually moved to discard her own preferred allies on the Argentine General Staff, whose combat experience had been gained, until that point, chiefly against civilians.

  Mr. Weinberger duly appeared with his wife at Buckingham Palace on February 23, 1988, and was solemnly invested with membership in the Most Excellent Order. There were no chirrups of republican protest in the United States, such as still occasionally arise when an American official is too ostentatiously attentive to the British Crown. Perhaps this was because Mr. Weinberger had recently retired. Perhaps it was because, as a United States citizen, he had forsworn the right to call himself “Sir Caspar.” (That would have been very choice: Sir Caspar John, brother to the painter Augustus, had in his time been First Sea Lord.) But if he had to stay in the closet as a Brit, Mr. Weinberger could still “come out” as a Tory. Edwin M. Yoder of The Washington Post attended a breakfast meeting with him between his retirement and his knighthood, and in a little-remarked column brought us this glimpse:

  Someone asks the former Secretary whether all the U.S. borrowing of recent years might not someday restrain our freedom of action. Not at all, Weinberger says. Much of California, his home state, was developed by British and French and German capital. It’s nothing new.

  But might the precarious indebtedness expose the United States to the sort of jam the British got into in 1956, when a run on sterling forced them to scrap the Suez operation? Nothing of the sort, Weinberger insists. “They withdrew—and they didn’t really have to—because the Labor politicians wanted to go on winning elections.” But, sir, someone says, the Conservatives, not Labor, were running things—Sir Anthony Eden himself. And everyone remembers the dangerous run on sterling. No, Weinberger insists. It was all Labor’s doing.

  Even if it had been “Labor’s doing,” it’s surprising that Mr. Weinberger didn’t possess enough institutional Washington memory to recall the day when Sir Anthony Eden’s deputy, R. A. Butler, called U.S. Treasury Secretary George Humphrey to beg in person for a loan to save the pound. Humphrey offered a generous loan with interest deferred—on the condition that the British got out of Egypt. That sort of talk between London and Washington doesn’t take place every day, and this was the hinge moment when the United States replaced Britain in the Middle East. Indeed, Humphrey had asked Eisenhower not to squeeze Eden’s exchequer too hard, precisely because “if they throw him out then we have those socialists to lick.”

  But no matter. Weinberger may have got everything factually wrong, while still comprehending the deep grammar of the “special relationship.”

  The founding Clausewitz of this relationship was Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, who summarized in his own person the elements of love-hate, envy and emulation, admiration and calculation, that have always defined the military half of the “special relationship.”

  At first reading, Mahan’s historic contribution to the study of sea power qualifies him for that overused and frequently misleading title “Anglophile.” This was certainly the simplistic view taken of him by Duff Cooper, a protege of Winston Churchill and leading Tory of his day, who contributed an introduction to a later Mahan biography that now reads like a hostage to fortune:

  At a time when Anglo-American relations were by no means so established and so cordial as they are today, and when an American writer might easily have injured his own reputation by evincing pronouncedly pro-English sentiments, Mahan, though of Irish origin himself, never hesitated to express his admiration and affection for Great Britain. Deeply religious and high-principled to the point of austerity as he was, we can feel confident that it was not the welcome which his books received in this country nor yet the lionising to which he was subjected in London that won his heart; it was rather his profound study of English naval history and his intimate knowledge of our greatest Admirals which made him love Great Britain less only than the United States.

  Cooper was, perhaps, laying it on a touch thicker than water. The condescension of the British Establishment is notorious, but what might have served in the 1890s was getting a bit thin by the time of Churchill. Mahan had his own “agenda,” as people now say and as we shall see. Still, the British had had every reason to feel grateful and enthusiastic, as Cooper went on to stress. Mahan, in his short-term view,

  was so far from regarding the growth of the Royal Navy with any jealousy or ill-will that, on the contrary, his only fear was that it might prove inadequate to its great responsibilities, However that might be he felt strongly that the United States could not rely for their security on the naval forces of another power, and he was continually urging on his fellow-country-men the necessity of creating a navy of their own. In the last book that he wrote, published in the autumn of 1913, he urged the United States to “wake up betimes” and he warned them that neither the Monroe Doctrine nor the exclusion of Asiatics could “be sustained without the creation and maintenance of a preponderant navy.”

  (Cooper thus neatly made the then essential connection between foreign and immigration policy.)

  Even as shrewd a critic as Richard Van Alstyne, in The Rising American Empire, says: “Unlike Strong, Beveridge and other lesser lights, Mahan never became effusive over the cults of race, religion and superior civilisation. He recognised that the United States was a member of the complex of national states, and he saw its survival in terms of sea power collaborating with the British Empire.” Actually, the record shows that Mahan was a good deal swayed by considerations of blood. Indeed, it was not for nothing that the French edition of Mahan’s writing, published in 1906, was entitled Le Salut de la Race Blanche et l’Empire des Mers. The editor and presenter of these papers was Professor Jean Izoulet of the Collège de France, who had also fathered such works as La Croix et l’Epée en Occident and L’Expropriation des “Races Incompétentes.” He dearly wanted to claim Mahan for the French “civilizing mission” and even went so far as to remove Mahan’s praise for Sir Garnet Wolseley from one of the translated chapters. Alas for Professor Izoulet, Mahan had chosen firmly in favor of Albion.

  The Influence of Sea Power upon History, Mahan’s masterpiece, begins with an evocation of “that English nation which more than any other has owed its greatness to the sea.” Citing Arnold on Rome’s victory over Hannibal, and Sir Edward Creasy on Britain’s victory over Napoleon, Mahan, making the then uncontroversial assumption that Britain was most accurately to be compared to Rome, continued: “Neither of these Englishmen mentions the yet more striking coincidence, that in both cases the mastery of the sea rested with the victor.”

  Mahan had so thoroughly grasped this point, and had become so enamored of the nation that had put this point into practice and action, that he invariably gave England the benefit of every doubt. In his writings on the
Navigation Acts and the War of 1812, he almost unconsciously sided with the British against the United States. The Navigation Acts, after all, stated peremptorily that all imports into or exports from the British Isles or their far-flung colonies had to be conveyed in English vessels. Aimed directly at any other nation which dared to act as carrier, and designed to put the Dutch out of business, these Acts were enforced with tremendous arrogance. As Mahan mildly put it:

  A century and a quarter later we find Nelson, before his famous career had begun, showing his zeal for the welfare of England’s shipping by enforcing this same act in the West Indies against American merchant ships.

  Nelson, of whom Mahan was to write glowingly in another book, called Types of Naval Officers, was above criticism: sans peur et sans reproche. But Mahan’s admiration of the British naval tradition was so intense that it even allowed him to be pro-British concerning events that took place seven years after Lord Nelson’s death. In his account of the War of 1812, Mahan showed a little of the hand that he was later to play so deftly and persuasively in his Influence of Sea Power. By setting up the British as examples, and by according them the right to be admired and understood, he also suggested that they should be emulated. Here is the method at work:

  That much of Great Britain’s action [in 1812] was unjustifiable, and at times even monstrous, regarded in itself alone, must be admitted; but we shall ill comprehend the necessity of preparation for war, if we neglect to note the pressure of emergency, of deadly peril, upon a state, or if we fail to recognize that traditional habits of thought constitute with nations, as with individuals, a compulsive moral force which an opponent can control only by the display of adequate physical power. Such to the British people was the conviction of this right and need to compel the service of their native seamen, wherever found on the high seas.

  Having taken it upon himself to present the British case for stopping American vessels and press-ganging their crews, Mahan argued that it was of no use for Americans to complain and strike heroic attitudes at such high-handedness:

  The conclusion of this writer is, that at a very early stage of the French Revolutionary Wars the United States should have obeyed Washington’s warnings to prepare for war, and to build a navy.

  Mahan, in other words, envied and admired the British but wanted to supplant them as much as to ally with them. In 1894 Andrew Carnegie began to propagandize for his idea that Britain and America should fuse or federate. Although this campaign was also designed to make America realize its “expansionist” potential, and was directed against isolationism, it did not meet with Mahan’s entire approval. In fact, invited to comment by the editors of the North American Review, he had this to say:

  It is not then merely, nor even chiefly, a pledge of universal peace that may be seen in the United States becoming a naval power of serious import, with clearly defined external conditions dictated by the necessities of her interoceanic position; nor yet in the cordial cooperation, as of kindred peoples, that the future may have in store for her and Great Britain. Not in universal harmony, nor in fond dreams of unbroken peace, rest now the best hopes of the world, as involved in the fate of European civilization. Rather in the competition of interests, in that reviving sense of nationality, which is the true antidote to what is bad in socialism.

  So, no Utopian ideas of a reunified Anglo-Saxondom. But mutual alliance by all means. As Mahan went on to put it:

  Our Pacific slope, and the Pacific colonies of Great Britain, with an instinctive shudder have felt the threat, which able Europeans have seen in the teeming multitudes of central and northern Asia; while their overflow into the Pacific Islands shows that not only westward by land, but also eastward by sea, the flood may sweep.

  Roosevelt’s later letter to Kipling is anticipated rather well by another of Mahan’s essays at about this time, in which he insisted:

  It should be an inviolable resolution of our national policy, that no foreign state should henceforth acquire a coaling position within three thousand miles of San Francisco—a distance which includes the Hawaiian and Galapagos Islands and the coast of Central America. . . . In the Caribbean and the Atlantic we are confronted with many a foreign coal depot, bidding us stand to our arms, even as Carthage bade Rome.

  Close your eyes and you could be listening to any British imperialist of the Joseph Chamberlain school. Except that such an orator would not have gone on to say, as did Mahan:

  In conclusion, while Great Britain is undoubtedly the most formidable of our possible enemies, both by her great navy and by the strong position she holds near our coasts, it must be added that a cordial understanding with that country is one of the first of our external interests. Both nations doubtless, and properly, seek their own advantage; but both, also, are controlled by a sense of law and justice, drawn from the same sources, and deep-rooted in her instincts.

  Beginning his naval service in the Civil War, Mahan took part in blockade duty in the western Gulf south of New Orleans. We do not know what view he formed of British support for the Confederacy, though he had been in London in July 1863 and noted an editorial in the London Times which carried on insufferably about the “sad condition to which the Republic of Bunker Hill and Yorktown was reduced; Grant held up at Vicksburg, Lee marching victorious into Pennsylvania.” (The Times hoped this would teach contrition.) But he did gain some valuable comparative experience from the campaign. As his almost uncritical biographer W. D. Puleston said, he observed naval warfare

  carried on in much the same manner as it had been under Nelson, Cornwallis and Collingwood off the coasts of France during the Napoleonic Wars. Late in life, when Mahan described the dreary monotony of the British blockade of Napoleon, and the weather-beaten ships of the British Navy, he could by simple recollection picture these ships and the conditions that they had endured.

  He was to have other chances to indulge his fascination with the English at first hand. He paid a return visit to England on board the SS Worcester in 1871, and managed to see five of the great national cathedrals. At Exeter he attended Easter service and wrote in a letter of “the vast numbers of the faithful who during four centuries have worshipped under the same arches . . . the vague, awful mystery of great age which seems to people the building with the ghosts of the many generations gone to their rest.”

  Cruising around the world with the U.S. Navy, Mahan found himself generally approving British colonial policy, though he was a little disturbed by the misery and poverty he saw in Aden. But rank and ancestry came first with him. As he wrote in 1893 about Admiral Hawke (“closely connected by blood with the Maryland family of Bladen; that having been his mother’s maiden name”), who died only three days before the British flag was struck at Yorktown:

  In the great struggle for Anglo-Saxon predominance, which had begun under William III, but was now approaching its crisis and final decision in the Seven Years War, the determining factor was to be the maritime strength of Great Britain. . . . In this eminent particular, which involves real originality, no sea officer of the eighteenth century stands with him: in this respect only he and Nelson, who belongs rather to the nineteenth, are to be named together.

  Mahan, in point of fact, counted North America as “civilized” to the extent that it had been the scene of English victories over the French and other comers. So it’s hardly a wonder that his books on sea power, warmly and pointedly reviewed by Theodore Roosevelt in The Atlantic Monthly, were received with even more enthusiasm in England. In a letter to his friend Captain Bouverie Clarke of the Royal Navy, Mahan was to acknowledge “the recognition which your countrymen have obtained for me from my own.” Certainly, the British were unstinting in their welcome for Mahan and his tomes when he visited England in 1894. The Royal United Service Institution had prepared the way by serializing and digesting Mahan’s work as it came out. But when his ship, the USS Chicago, put in at Gravesend, the British began to excel themselves.

  A banquet was given by the Lord Mayor for Maha
n and his superior, Admiral Erben. Mutual toasts were exchanged, to the President and the Queen, to the United States and the United Kingdom, and to the respective fleets of the two nations. Admiral Erben, responding to the latter, toasted the visit of the British to New York a short while previous, when “the British Lion and the American Eagle marched down Broadway together in the only way they will go.” A lion and an eagle parading à deux was the sort of symbolism in which the Punch of those times used to specialize, and in fact the magazine was equal to the occasion with some doggerel verses.

  Mahan was taken to view the memorabilia of Lord Nelson at the Royal Naval College in Greenwich. He dined with Queen Victoria and was received cordially by the Prince of Wales, by Prime Minister Lord Rosebery, and by the Marquis of Salisbury at Hatfield House itself. He received honorary degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge in one week, was honored on Admiral Lord Howe’s day by the Royal Naval Club, and in general received what Americans call “the whole nine yards” and British people used to refer to as “Foot, horse, and guns.” Modest and religious as he was, Mahan could not forbear to boast a little to his wife about his British acclaim:

  The London Times has been calling me Copernicus again. I find that their meaning is, Copernicus taught that the sun was the centre of the system—not the earth as was believed before his time, and I have been the first to show that sea-power is the centre around which all other events move. . . . In the philosophy of the subject, we must all sit at the feet of the eminent writer. My dear, do you know that it is your husband they are talking about?