Walter Russell Mead: His new book celebrates Britain's influence on the US
Walter Russell Mead, the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, is what is nowadays called a public intellectual, which means someone who writes and talks about big issues, and not only on college campuses. He teaches American foreign policy as a visiting professor at Bard College and writes books on that subject. He has just published a new one, God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World (Knopf, 464 pages, $27.95), and in it he argues that Americans once knew but have forgotten or don’t want to admit something extremely important: that the overwhelming historical influence on our culture is Britain, and that only by studying British history can we fully understand our own society and how our nation should behave.
He hammers this home at some length, and he can be forgiven for most of the hammering, because when an important thing once known by almost everyone becomes unsayable by almost anyone, hammering is probably in order. He repeats (and repeats) that the big story of the last four centuries or so is not the rise and fall of Europe; it is rather the rise and rise of what he calls the “Anglosphere,” the English-speaking societies founded and shaped by Britain, most especially the United States, which have altogether gone from success to success over that period. He points out that neither the United States nor Great Britain has ever lost a major war, and in the only case that comes close, Britain lost but the United States was created, so that one wasn’t an Anglosphere defeat.
The order devised in and by Britain and America, which Mead calls the maritime model, involves a commercial society engaging in free trade, ruled by a representative democracy running a relatively weak government accompanied by a strong civil society, the latter significantly more religious than are many less successful modern societies. He writes that in terms of creating wealth and winning wars, the maritime system is the most formidable set of arrangements the world has ever seen and is still on the rise. It lets societies survive the extreme stresses of modernity without succumbing to radical and vicious kinds of anti-modernist politics. It is widely hated because it is simultaneously alluring and repellent to those it encounters and vanquishes. Mead thinks the Anglosphere’s citizens often don’t understand why this is so or realize what they can and can’t do about it.
Read entire article at Frederick Smoler in American Heritage
He hammers this home at some length, and he can be forgiven for most of the hammering, because when an important thing once known by almost everyone becomes unsayable by almost anyone, hammering is probably in order. He repeats (and repeats) that the big story of the last four centuries or so is not the rise and fall of Europe; it is rather the rise and rise of what he calls the “Anglosphere,” the English-speaking societies founded and shaped by Britain, most especially the United States, which have altogether gone from success to success over that period. He points out that neither the United States nor Great Britain has ever lost a major war, and in the only case that comes close, Britain lost but the United States was created, so that one wasn’t an Anglosphere defeat.
The order devised in and by Britain and America, which Mead calls the maritime model, involves a commercial society engaging in free trade, ruled by a representative democracy running a relatively weak government accompanied by a strong civil society, the latter significantly more religious than are many less successful modern societies. He writes that in terms of creating wealth and winning wars, the maritime system is the most formidable set of arrangements the world has ever seen and is still on the rise. It lets societies survive the extreme stresses of modernity without succumbing to radical and vicious kinds of anti-modernist politics. It is widely hated because it is simultaneously alluring and repellent to those it encounters and vanquishes. Mead thinks the Anglosphere’s citizens often don’t understand why this is so or realize what they can and can’t do about it.