[In the following review of Blood, Class, and Nostalgia, Ryan commends Hitchens's engaging observations and wit, but concludes that the collection as a whole lacks a cohesive theme and adequate historical perspective.]

Winston Churchill—one of the tragic heroes of Christopher Hitchens's tale—dismissed a dessert from the dinner table with the curt command, “Remove this pudding, it has no theme.” Hitchens is too lively and opinionated to produce a pudding, but he is an author in need of a theme. His brief history of the cooperative and competitive imperialisms of Britain and the United States over the past hundred years or so is a nice entertainment. It skips agreeably from the ghastly piety with which “Masterpiece Theatre” surrounds perfectly ordinary imports from British television to the curious and undernoticed fact that Kipling's poem “The White Man's Burden” is aimed not at the British, but at the American conquerors of the Philippines, and skips again to the peculiar ways in which Britain dragged the United States into two world wars and thereby contrived to defeat her military enemies while losing out to her savior and ally. As to how all this fits together, one may read Hitchens several times over and remain none the wiser.

If he doesn't have a theme, he has a target. The target of his book [Blood, Class, and Nostalgia] is the so-called “special relationship,” and it provides a great deal of characteristically unkind fun. But it is scrappy fun. Hitchens's subtitle gives the game away: Anglo-American Ironies is a nice catch-all, but who ever supposed that this “special relationship,” that any special relationship, is not full of ironies, and who ever supposed that the presence of ironies sufficed to pick out Anglo-American diplomacy from, let us say, most marriages, life at IBM, or a cab ride across New York?

If there is a plot here, an argument rather than a collection of witty and knowing prejudices, it is the thought that Britain has been uniquely implicated in the imperial seduction of the United States. At crucial moments in the American embrace of the role of a great power, British pressure made the difference. Even this thought, though, is ambiguous. Are we to think of Britain as the old sinner pointing out the tempting pleasures of imperialism to a younger and more innocent nation? If so, when exactly were the Americans innocent enough to need seducing? What of the continuous American pressure to expand into what had formerly been Mexican territory, and what of the longing eyes cast on Cuba, the West Indies, and Brazil by the slaveholding South? Or should we think of the British as luring the naive Americans into a competition for access to China, Japan, Oceania, and wherever else? Once again, however, it is hard to think that the Americans needed terribly much luring.

Or are we to think of the British as trying to use American industrial and military muscle to save the British empire and its unofficial penumbra in the Middle East and the Mediterranean, only to find, when two world wars were done, that they could no longer sustain the White Man's Burden and had to pass it over to their American successors? There's something to be said for that; but it, too, implausibly suggests that the British infected the Americans with the desire to dominate. Given the presence of oil, Russia, and Israel, the American takeover of the British role was, as the jargon used to have it, overdetermined. Indeed, Hitchens himself points out that the British did their best to keep Iranian oil to themselves, and were told off for attempting to muscle in on Saudi oil as well.

The book gets off to a good start by reflecting on the minor idiocies of “Anglophilia, Anglophobia, Anglo-Americanism, and Anglo-Saxondom.” The provocation is the Churchill Foundation's presentation of its Churchill medallion to Ronald Reagan. The cast includes Prince Philip retelling the often told joke of his visit to the United States just after Churchill had been re-elected prime minister and finding himself congratulated on his father-in-law's success. The audience includes a curious mix of tycoons, entertainers, and politicians, among them Walter Annenberg, whose career as ambassador to the Court of St. James's never quite recovered from the moment he presented his credentials to the queen. In reply to a question about how he was settling in, he said that he was “subject, of course, to the discomfiture as a result of a need for, uh, elements of refurbishment and rehabilitation.”

This foot-in-mouth pomposity leads naturally to one of the book's sustained motifs: the British ambition to “play Greece to America's Rome,” to put a veneer of style on American crassness and vulgarity, and to siphon off a little luxury in payment. The idea was given canonical expression by Harold Macmillan while he was serving in North Africa during the Second World War. “We, my dear Crossman,” he observed, in conversation with Richard Crossman, “are Greeks in this American Empire. You will find the Americans much as the Greeks found the Romans—great big, vulgar, bustling people, more vigorous than we are and also more idle, with more unspoiled virtues but also more corrupt. We must run Allied Forces Headquarters as the Greek slaves ran the operations of the Emperor Claudius.”

But that, too, turns out not to be a simple idea; its snobbishness and its self-interestedness have not gone undetected, and its costs to the British themselves have not been negligible. Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities comments unkindly on the “rich and suave secret legion” that had insinuated itself into New York to prey upon the natives, and forty years earlier Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One made it painfully clear that the cultural superiority that sustained the British in exile was a small consolation for something close to indentured labor.

More seriously, Britain had never been Greece, and the United States had had Roman aspirations all along. The thought that Britain should make the American empire a civilized and humane affair ran into the difficulty that Britain itself had been perfectly happy to play Rome for as long as its military and financial strength held out. Civility had come a very poor second to power so long as the power lasted. In their imperial pride the British looked a long way back, to the Roman conquest of their obscure offshore island. They took pleasure in the thought that the obscure offshore island ruled an empire larger than Caesar had ever contemplated—in the spirit, for example, of Cowper's poem on Boadicea:

Regions Caesar never knew
Thy posterity shall sway,
Where his eagles never flew,
None invincible as they.

Seen in that light, the conceit of “British Greeks to American Romans” makes no sense. The only sensible story is the old story that Paul Kennedy has lately popularized. The idea of “imperial overstretch,” the thought that all imperial powers take on tasks that eventually outrun their capacities, is very like the old view that nations have life cycles like individuals; the tired old lion hands history over to the vigorous young cub. Britain-as-Rome could make a tidy job of what was usually a very messy process and hand over power to America-as-New-Rome. (Arnold Toynbee often sounded as though he believed that; so, surprisingly, did Bertrand Russell.) The problem is that as an account of what actually happened over the past half century, or as a guide to what British statesmen and military men were after, the story of Old Rome yielding to New Rome won't do, either.

The end of the British empire, after all, was not the consequence of Britain's understanding that it was time graciously to pass the baton. The end of the empire was forced on Britain. Most of those concerned with the empire did not want to pass it on to neo-Romans, or to new Romans, or to anybody else; witness Churchill's famous insistence that “I did not become His Majesty's Prime Minister to preside over the dissolution of the British Empire.” Moreover, those to whom the empire was to be passed did not like to think of themselves as having an empire. Just as Americans have readily talked of “class” as meaning “style” but fiercely resisted the idea that America was cursed with a “class system,” a nation conceived as a decisive break with monarchical Britain could imitate, at least consciously, the imperialism of the mother country.

The large irony, then, is that Britain first hoped to employ American strength to maintain a British empire, but became “in practice, the political and military colony.” But who is the joke on, really? “Is it,” asks Hitchens, “at the expense of the United States, which has abandoned its affectation of anti-colonialism and been invaded repeatedly by English manners and English taste? Or is it at the expense of the British, who called in the New World to redress the balance of the Old and then found it was the New World doing the calling?” On the face of it, there's no question: the invasion of American suburbs by fake half-timber housing and unpersuasive pubs (a topic on which Hitchens holds the usual British views) is an infinitely less serious matter than finding your commercial, military, and industrial life substantially under the control of a foreign government. If there is a joke here, the joke is against the wretched British, who like the young lady of Riga thought they could ride the tiger without ending up as the tiger's lunch.

To offer any other answer, we have to return to the seduction theme, to the thought that America might have pursued a much less imperialist foreign policy but for the British entanglement, that America could have stayed out of both World Wars, and that this would have been inestimably to its advantage. Think what corruptions might have been avoided. Without British entanglement in the First World War, none of the racism and the nativism that accompanied the doubts about the loyalties of German-Americans would have sprung up. Without American troops in Europe, they could not have been diverted to fight against the new Soviet regime, and perhaps we might have been spared the worst excesses of American anti-communism, as well as the worst excesses of Soviet anti-Americanism. The argument spins out easily, and without end. Without the British entanglement, would the United States have gotten so embroiled in the Middle East? Without the British entanglement would the United States have thought itself the guardian of peace throughout Asia? And so on.

Hitchens never quite puts this somewhat submerged and pretty implausible thesis to the test. He invokes an assortment of emblematic figures who wanted Britain and America jointly to shoulder the White Man's Burden and to save the savage races from themselves, but since Kipling on the British side was neatly matched by Mahan on the American side, they do not quite fit into a tale of seduction. They do, it must be said, fit perfectly into Hitchens's catalog of life's little ironies. Kipling may have encouraged President McKinley to occupy the Philippines, but he was quite sure that America should never be allowed to challenge the supremacy of the Royal Navy; Mahan may have praised the Royal Navy to the skies, and reminded his readers that it was the Royal Navy's control of the Atlantic that allowed the United States a free hand in Latin America, but he was passionate for an American navy that could in a pinch take on the Royal Navy with some hope of victory.

It does not escape Hitchens that it wasn't only a matter of taking up the White Man's Burden that preoccupied Kipling, Mahan, Theodore Roosevelt, Cecil Spring-Rice, and his other turn-of-the-century anti-heroes. They were decidedly keen to avoid the burden of Chinese and Japanese immigration into the United States, and looked to naval supremacy in the Pacific to keep the closed door firmly shut. This mixture of unabashed Anglo-Saxon racial solidarity in the face of Huns, Goths, the Yellow Peril, and “incompetent races” combined with the predictable Great Power rivalries whenever British and American interests ran into each other in Central and South America. While Woodrow Wilson could not rally the American people in 1914 around racial solidarity with the British, he was embarrassingly susceptible to such considerations, and as big a sucker for the British conception of government by gentlemen as a former president of Princeton could be expected to be.

Even correspondence between Churchill and Roosevelt during the Second World War is surprisingly rich in the old imagery; at times of stress Churchill still reached for Kipling, and Roosevelt played the same tune back to him. Meanwhile, of course, American and British diplomats, generals, and politicians gyrated around the same old issues: How far ought the United States go in assuaging the British resentment that for twenty-seven months the British had held off superior German forces on their own? How much ought the United States to remind the British that they had done it with American equipment they could not have made or bought otherwise? How central to a postwar settlement were the British going to be? Were they entitled to a large role in virtue of their previous power or the usefulness of their experience, or were they entitled to next to nothing because they had next to nothing left?

On all of this, Hitchens casts a journalist's eye, not a historian's. Personalities predominate, and more than once the reader may well feel that a gossip columnist has seized the pen. Hitchens suggests, for example, that the British were partly to blame for getting the United States into Vietnam. His only evidence for this is that Dennis Duncanson, the influential British strategist, supported the American war in Vietnam and defended the postwar behavior of General Douglas Gracey, who used Japanese POWs and his own troops to beat off the Vietminh nationalists and restore what had been French Indochina to the French. The British army behaved exactly the same way in Indonesia, save that it was a Dutch colony that the British and their Japanese prisoners took pains to give back to its former owners; but Duncanson's view that this was all part of an attempt to tidy up after the war, and thus to treat insurgency as a law and order problem, was surely right. It turned out to be absurd, of course; but much else did, too.

The one larger issue that does get raised is the issue of “receivership,” or James Burnham's notion that the British empire was no longer a going concern, that its assets and liabilities ought therefore to be handed over to the American empire. Burnham did not flinch from the notion of an American empire; a former Trotskyite turned geopolitical conservative, he was not given to flinching. Churchill flinched, but only from a recognition of the decrepitude of the British empire; in somber moments he, too, thought that a self-conscious handover was what was needed. Of course, the whole idea was nonsense. The kind of hegemony the United States could exercise after 1945 was very different from what colonial powers had formerly taken for granted. Economic pressure, overt and covert bribes and penalties, military and economic alliances, these rather than colonization were the order of the day.

An irony that will strike the attentive reader is how tempted Hitchens himself is by Burnham's scenario. “If James Burnham's concept of ‘receivership’ had ever been made explicit, with the British being asked to disburden themselves of empire in a planned and graduated fashion and the United States moving to assume the said burdens with coordination and consent, there might have been some impressive results.” Of course, Hitchens's point is that it did not happen, that “the history of receivership is a mixed history of improvisation, secret diplomacy, covert action, inter-Establishment jealousy, and military disaster.” To anyone of even moderately liberal views, the effect of the postwar military alliance on British politics has been pretty awful. Apart from the discomfort of serving as America's unsinkable aircraft carrier in the event of nuclear war, British foreign policy has been a muddle, Labour governments have been objects of suspicion, and even of subversion, as if Britain were a banana republic, and British relations with Europe were distorted for twenty-five years.

All that goes without saying, though Hitchens does a spirited job of saying it. The curious thing is that Hitchens's first reaction to Burnham's vision—my own, too, and, I'd guess, the reaction of any Briton over forty—is not to say “how wicked” and start talking about the just claims of small nations to their own place in the world. It is to pause for a moment and whisper “if only …” Of course, one's second thoughts are with General MacArthur's “little people,” who mostly want us Anglo-Saxons off their backs; but not the least interesting feature of this skeptical catalog of the duplicity, the cupidity, the self-deception, and the overblown sentiment that has marked Anglo-American politics in this century is its reluctant recognition of how attractive power can be. That is an irony, I'd guess, that the author did not intend.