The Post-American World - Fareed Zakaria [82]
Britain’s Descent
Britain’s exalted position was more fragile than it appeared. Just two years after the Diamond Jubilee, the United Kingdom entered the Boer War, a conflict that, for many scholars, marks the moment when its global power began to decline. London was sure that it would win the fight with little trouble. After all, the British army had just won a similar battle against the dervishes in Sudan, despite being outnumbered by more than two to one. In the Battle of Omdurman, it inflicted 48,000 dervish casualties in just five hours, while losing only 48 soldiers of its own.3 Many in Britain imagined an even easier victory against the Boers. After all, as one member of Parliament put it, it was “the British empire against 30,000 farmers.”
The war was ostensibly fought for virtuous reasons: the rights of South Africa’s English-speaking people, who were treated as second-class citizens by the ruling Dutch migrants, the Boers (Boer is the Dutch, and Afrikaans, word for “farmer”). But it did not escape the attention of London that, after the discovery of gold in the region in 1886, South Africa had been producing a quarter of the world’s gold supply. And in any event, the Afrikaners launched a preemptive strike, and war began in 1899.
Things went badly for Britain from the beginning. It had more men and better weapons and was fielding its best generals (including Lord Kitchener, the hero of Omdurman). But the Boers were passionate in defending themselves, knew the land, had the support of much of the white population, and adopted successful guerrilla tactics that relied on stealth and speed. Britain’s enormous military superiority meant little on the ground, and the British commanders resorted to brutal tactics—burning down villages, herding civilians into concentration camps (the world’s first), sending in more and more troops. Eventually, Britain had 450,000 troops in southern Africa fighting a militia of 45,000.
The Boers could not hold Britain back forever, and in 1902 they surrendered. But in a larger sense, Britain lost the war. It had sacrificed 45,000 men, spent half a billion pounds, stretched its army to the breaking point, and discovered enormous incompetence and corruption in its war effort. Its brutal wartime tactics, moreover, gave it a black eye in the view of the rest of the world. At home, all of this created, or exposed, deep divisions over Britain’s global role. Abroad, every other great power—France, Germany, the United States—opposed London’s actions. “They were friendless,” the historian Lawrence James wrote of the British in 1902.4
Fast forward to today. Another all-powerful superpower, militarily unbeatable, seems to win an easy victory in Afghanistan and then takes on what it is sure will be another simple battle, this one against Saddam Hussein’s isolated regime in Iraq. The result: a quick initial military victory followed by a long, arduous struggle, filled with political and military blunders and met with intense international opposition. The analogy is obvious; the United States is Britain, the Iraq War is the Boer War—and, by extension, America’s future looks bleak. Iraq is now relatively peaceful, but the cost of getting to that point was massive. During the course of the war, the United States was overextended and distracted, its army stressed, its image sullied. Rogue states like Iran and Venezuela and great powers like Russia and China took advantage of Washington’s inattention and bad fortunes. And now, to a significant extent, Afghanistan has taken the place of Iraq. The familiar theme of imperial decline is playing itself out one more time. History is happening again.
But whatever the apparent similarities, the circumstances are not really the same. Britain was a strange superpower. Historians have written hundreds of books explaining how London could have adopted certain foreign policies to change its fortunes. If only it had avoided the Boer War,