“…we must put the growing consciousness that there will be only two great powers left — Great Britain and the United States. Which one is going to be greater, politically and commercially? In that constantly recurring thought may be found much of the Anglo-American friction that arises.”
—Sir William Wiseman before Versailles, 1918
The most important constant in the history of the United States of America has been the implacable hostility of the British Empire and the London-centered British oligarchy. This hostility generated the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812 and the Civil War, in addition to many lesser clashes. But after Gettysburg and Vicksburg in 1863, the reality of US military and naval superiority forced London to come to terms with the inevitable persistence of the United States on the world scene as a great power for another century and more. By 1895-1898, galloping British decadence, expressed as industrial decline combined with a looming inability to maintain global naval domination, suggested to the circles of the soon-to-be King Edward VII the advisability of harnessing the power and resources of the United States to the British imperial chariot. Thus was born the London-Washington Special Relationship, under which the United States was established as London’s auxiliary, proxy, and dupe through such stages as the 1898 Anglo-American rapprochement before Manila Bay, Edward VII’s sponsorship of Theodore Roosevelt’s aspirations to “Anglo-Saxon” respectability and, most decisively, Woodrow Wilson’s declaration of war on Germany in April, 1917. Under the Special Relationship, London has parlayed its financial and epistemological dominance over the United States into profound and often decisive influence over US directions in foreign policy and finance.
The essence of British policy has long been embodied in the immoral doctrine of geopolitics or the quest for the balance of power. For centuries this meant that the New Venice on the Thames habitually concluded an alliance with the second-strongest power in Europe so as to checkmate the strongest continental power. Naturally this approach conjured up the danger that in case of “success,” the second-strongest continental power of today might become the strongest of tomorrow, and sometimes strong enough to threaten London. London therefore did everything possible to guarantee that their continental surrogates of today received the maximum possible punishment so that their interlude of alliance with London, even if victorious on paper, left them in absolute prostration and deprived of the ability to threaten the British. In this way, London’s enemies and London’s allies embarked over the centuries on converging roads to ruin. After antagonizing Spain, Holland, France, Russia and Germany as both friends and foes over several centuries, the British turned in the early years of our own century to the Special Relationship with the US. The onset of this Special Relationship coincided roughly with Britain’s implicit loss of world maritime supremacy, starting in the Pacific. (more...)
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