prasad1
Active member
Spending a few days recently in Britain, I was struck by just how parochial it has become. After an extraordinary 300-year run, Britain has essentially resigned as a global power.
Over the next few years, Britain’s army will shrink to about 80,000. A report from the Royal United Services Institute predicts that the number could get as low as 50,000, which, the Daily Telegraph points out, would be smaller than at any point since the 1770s — and, as David Rothkopf of Foreign Policy magazine notes, about the same size as the New York Police Department.
The International Institute for Strategic Studies concludes that over the past five years “the 8 percent to 9 percent decrease in the U.K. military defense budget . . . has led to a 20 percent to 30 percent reduction in conventional capability.” No wonder, then, that Britain has been a minor, reluctant ally in the airstrikes against the Islamic State. Britain’s 30-year-old Tornado fleet of planes is a generation behind the American F-22s it flies alongside. The Royal Navy, which once ruled the waves, operates without a single aircraft carrier (although two are under construction).
Why does this matter? Because on almost all global issues, Britain has a voice that is intelligent, engaged and forward-looking. It wants to strengthen and uphold today’s international system — one based on the free flow of ideas, goods and services around the world, one that promotes individual rights and the rule of law.
This is not an accident. Britain essentially created the world we live in. In his excellent book “God and Gold,” Walter Russell Mead points out that in the 16th century many countries were poised to advance economically and politically — Northern Italy’s city-states, the Hanseatic League, the Low Countries, France, Spain. But Britain managed to edge out the others, becoming the first great industrial economy and the modern world’s first superpower. It colonized and shaped countries and cultures from Australia to India to Africa to the Western Hemisphere, including of course, its settlements in North America. Had Spain or Germany become the world’s leading power, things would look very different today.
It is a paradox, readily apparent to visitors to Britain, that London continues to thrive as a global hub, increasingly cosmopolitan and worldly. More than a third of Londoners were born outside the United Kingdom. And this government has been more than willing to travel around the world petitioning for investment, whether it be Chinese, Russian or Arab. That is fine as a strategy for an aspiring entrepôt or financial haven, but Britain is not Luxembourg. It is, even now, a country with the talent, history and capacity to shape the international order.
Britain resigns as a world power - The Washington Post
Over the next few years, Britain’s army will shrink to about 80,000. A report from the Royal United Services Institute predicts that the number could get as low as 50,000, which, the Daily Telegraph points out, would be smaller than at any point since the 1770s — and, as David Rothkopf of Foreign Policy magazine notes, about the same size as the New York Police Department.
The International Institute for Strategic Studies concludes that over the past five years “the 8 percent to 9 percent decrease in the U.K. military defense budget . . . has led to a 20 percent to 30 percent reduction in conventional capability.” No wonder, then, that Britain has been a minor, reluctant ally in the airstrikes against the Islamic State. Britain’s 30-year-old Tornado fleet of planes is a generation behind the American F-22s it flies alongside. The Royal Navy, which once ruled the waves, operates without a single aircraft carrier (although two are under construction).
Why does this matter? Because on almost all global issues, Britain has a voice that is intelligent, engaged and forward-looking. It wants to strengthen and uphold today’s international system — one based on the free flow of ideas, goods and services around the world, one that promotes individual rights and the rule of law.
This is not an accident. Britain essentially created the world we live in. In his excellent book “God and Gold,” Walter Russell Mead points out that in the 16th century many countries were poised to advance economically and politically — Northern Italy’s city-states, the Hanseatic League, the Low Countries, France, Spain. But Britain managed to edge out the others, becoming the first great industrial economy and the modern world’s first superpower. It colonized and shaped countries and cultures from Australia to India to Africa to the Western Hemisphere, including of course, its settlements in North America. Had Spain or Germany become the world’s leading power, things would look very different today.
It is a paradox, readily apparent to visitors to Britain, that London continues to thrive as a global hub, increasingly cosmopolitan and worldly. More than a third of Londoners were born outside the United Kingdom. And this government has been more than willing to travel around the world petitioning for investment, whether it be Chinese, Russian or Arab. That is fine as a strategy for an aspiring entrepôt or financial haven, but Britain is not Luxembourg. It is, even now, a country with the talent, history and capacity to shape the international order.
Britain resigns as a world power - The Washington Post
