David Selbourne is right about empires in decline, but wrong about Islam
The hottest months are July and August, though the summer solstice, when the sun is highest, is in June. There’s a time-lag. Thus it is with empires, too. By the time they burn brightest, the fuel is already beginning to run out.
So David Selbourne is right about one thing. The American empire has passed its zenith. More disputable is his implicit suggestion that America and the world are heading for some kind of nemesis. And he is mistaken, I reckon, to conclude that Islam will prove that nemesis.
Writing in The Spectator two weeks ago (‘Why there will be no future Pax Americana’), the distinguished essayist, author and thinker had sniffed the wind and concluded that it is all up for what he calls the US ‘imperium’. Islam has been Washington’s undoing, he believes, and after six short decades as top dog of the world, America is already stumbling and set to lose her predominance.
It’s a fascinating thesis. May I without undue immodesty mention canvassing the first half of Mr Selbourne’s argument myself, in the Times, about three years ago — a year or so into the Iraq war? My contention was that, viewed with long hindsight, we can see that with most empires the rot sets in some time before the apparent noontide of their power, fame and influence. The British imperium was at its most florid and boisterous towards the end of the 19th century but was, in retrospect, badly overstretched by then. Our sun was heading for the western horizon. Britain’s world economic predominance was on the wane, and we were relying on a kind of bluff: a bluff we hoped not too many of our subject peoples would call at once. I suggested that it was perhaps the South African Boers who put us most embarrassingly to the test (I don’t think Selbourne is right to make the comparison with the American colonists’ revolution: this was for us an early hiccup, after which we widened and deepened our imperium). The Boers softened us up, the first and second world wars weakened us further, and I suppose it was really Mahatma Gandhi who finished us off as an empire. We were then easy pickings for various tinpot African nationalist leaders — and indeed for the United States, which assiduously undermined British colonial rule.
I think the question of how, when and by whom an imperium is toppled is often secondary. Cometh the hour, cometh the mutiny. Empires fall because they rot from within: they over-extend themselves, become greedy, and lose idealism, nimbleness and drive. The balance of power shifts away from them as other, smaller nations learn to combine forces to harry. By this stage an imperium is a vulnerable giant, and any number of potential Boy Davids with their slings could bring it down. Looked at in terms of relative economic and military power, the United States was probably at her most formidable in the decade following 1945. By the time Americans fully took on board what clout they had, and adjusted their foreign policy mindset accordingly, the rest of the world was catching up, and ganging up. Now that the rest of the West feels no need to hide beneath Washington’s skirts from the Soviet empire, this will intensify.
David Selbourne thinks it might have been very different for Washington. He thinks America’s mistake has been to underestimate the guile, energy and willpower of international Islamism. If only America and her allies had fully understood and squared up to the devil they were facing, he laments. Here he and I really do differ. No more than the Boers, no more than (for Imperial China) the Boxer rebellion, no more than Gandhi and his passive non-resisters, will history see Islamism as a great and enduring force in the world, or the ‘reason’ for the decline of American power.
Have we not noticed how incompetent are Islamic governments and organisations the world over? Has it not occurred to us that if alQa’eda really were as wily and resourceful as we tell ourselves they are, and if their tentacles really did extend as wide and deep as some say, they would be on the advance — not battled into a stalemate by Western security and intelligence? If I were an al-Qa’eda activist I could have blown up Parliament or shot at least one of a range of prime ministers by now. Al-Qa’eda’s failure to infiltrate or penetrate Western structures has been complete.
There is a reason for this. Islam, in its more fundamentalist form, doesn’t work. Serious, committed Islamists are most unlikely to succeed within any structures but their own. Their own, meanwhile, are notoriously inefficient and corrupt. Only by lucky coincidence have much of the world’s known petrocarbons been found beneath Islamic nations, giving them what temporary influence they wield. How can any culture which despises modernity, hates mobility, distrusts individual liberty and autonomy, persecutes those who deviate from cultural or ideological norms, imposes a kind of brutal conformity on the way people live, love and work, and at a stroke disempowers 50 per cent of its people (women) from proper education and from all career opportunity so that every boychild it produces is being brought up by a person who knows little of the world and only a fraction of what the boy must learn — how can such a culture bestride the 21st century, as Selbourne fears Islamism will do?
We are hugely overestimating our supposed enemy. We are overlooking the fractures and potential fractures within it. Even if we were not — even if Islamism really were a great, fearsome and growing beast — cynics would say that we in Europe and America would be best advised to let its most implacable enemies shed their blood and money confronting its advance. In Chechnya, in Southeast Asia, with China, and all across that swath of nations ending in -stan, the struggle between Islam and its rivals is one from which the West can stand aside, leaving both sides to an expensive and wasteful scrap. The Chinese and the Russians are infinitely more savage than we dare be.
This is a battle Islamism cannot win. Fundamentalist Islam is a mediaeval force. It has little to contribute to modern business, science or government, and subsists uneasily in today’s world. Profoundly and essentially reactionary, it hardly creates, innovates or invents, and appears chronically disorganised and prone to internal division and distrust. Islam in its more convinced forms may even be in its death throes — it is too early to say.
We should stand well clear. An imperium in its death throes can be a nasty beast; I am by the same token nervous that the American empire may lurch dangerously around for decades to come. For the rest of us, as we contemplate these dysfunctional beasts, the best advice is that offered to his country (when America really was at a zenith) by President Truman, as the Soviet imperium headed for its afternoon: containment, not confrontation, is the wisest policy.
Matthew Parris is a columnist for the Times.
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