Another voice

David Selbourne is right about empires in decline, but wrong about Islam

28 April 2007

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 al-Qa’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.