Benny Morris: Battle-Hungry Brits

Benny Morris is a professor of history in the Middle East Studies Department of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. His most recent book is One State, Two States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict (Yale University Press, 2009).

Reading John Le Carre's latest book, Our Kind of Traitor (and living in England for the past few months), has set me thinking a little about Britain's current place in the world.

Back in the first decades of the twentieth century, atlases depicted much of the land surface of the globe in pink, the color of the British Empire and its dominions (Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, and much of east and west Africa, Oceania, the Caribbean, the Middle East, etc.). Today politicians and economists say the country is in the throes of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. There are across-the-board budget cuts, a major trade deficit, severe unemployment and declining industries and services. Even in Europe, Britain plays second or third fiddle, its economy lagging behind, or way behind, Germany's and France's.

In Traitor, Le Carre has his hero, Peregrine ("Perry") Makepiece, a disenchanted Oxford don, ask an MI6 officer: "How does it grab you, representing a country that can't pay its bills? … Good intelligence being about the only thing that gets us a seat at the international top table these days, I read somewhere ….Punching above one's weight." I'm not sure that Le Carre is right about this, that it is Britain's intelligence capabilities or performance that underpin the country's still prominent role in world affairs...