The hardest thing for a hegemonic power is to see its dominance wane. US president Donald Trump’s angry unilateralism, whether his trade war against China or sanctions against Cuba, is supposed to be proof of power. Another way of looking at the president’s belligerent tweetstorms is as a cry of pain for a mythologised past.
When Franklin Roosevelt prepared to meet Winston Churchill during the closing stages of the second world war, the US president received some cautionary advice from his secretary of state on handling the British prime minister. Churchill, Edward Stettinius told Roosevelt, would struggle to accept a new, postwar, international order. Having been a leader for so long, the Brits were not accustomed to a secondary role.
Stettinius was right. Britain had been bankrupted by the war. America was booming. The peace marked the formal transfer of western leadership to the US. Washington’s ally found the psychological adjustment long and painful. Even after the humiliation of the Suez expedition in 1956, Britain was loath to own up. Surely, its politicians imagined, it still sat alongside the US and the Soviet Union as one of the “Big Three”? Bizarre as it seems, there remains an echo of this howl of anguish in the “global Britain” fantasies of leading Brexiters.