[In the following review, Smith offers a generally positive assessment of Blood, Class, and Nostalgia.]

Georgetown University, Christopher Hitchens tells us, supplies its Rhodes Scholars with free tuxedos to grease their assimilation into Oxford life (as if anything other than their dollars were needed). The point, you might think, is that made by Václav Havel's well-televised uncertainties: new-found power has to learn what to do with its hands. Britain, having lost an empire, has found a role in civilizing her supplanters. But the simple-minded “Greeks in the Roman empire” formula is precisely what Hitchens derides in [Blood, Class, and Nostalgia, a] quizzical and entertaining probing of the Anglo-American relationship. It looks to him more like a case of the old Romans tagging at the heels of the new, peddling such wrinkles and passing on such style as they can still be said to possess, in return for the occasional handout and the semblance of privileged participation in an imperial lifestyle which they can no longer finance but cannot completely forget. The Gulf crisis emphasizes that their services continue to be useful. The USS Britannia may not be the smartest strike-carrier in the American fleet, but the captain knows it counts when a Gadaffi or a Saddam Hussein has to be hit. Mrs Thatcher seems to find dual control invigorating rather than embarrassing, and she has less to fear from muttering below decks since “the most courteous man in the Western world” spoke nicely to Mr Kinnock.

The cynical and effete old world has, in this perspective, for a century at least, sought to prolong its life by assiduous corruption of the new. When Britain's power to sustain empire waned, not merely her statesmen and diplomats but even her poets set out to harness American power and energy to the tasks of global hegemony by encouraging the United States to deck itself no longer in the civic virtues of the Roman republic but in the purple panoply of the Roman empire. Hitchens reminds us that Kipling's injunction to take up the white man's burden was originally addressed to Teddy Roosevelt as a spur to the American occupation of the Philippines, and quotes another Kipling cry:

Oh, well for the world when the White Men join
          To prove their faith again!

White men in this context meant that curious construct of contemporary racial ramblings, the Anglo-Saxons. Joseph Chamberlain, a great exponent of Anglo-Saxondom, was ready to cut the Teutons in on the deal, but, when accommodation, with Germany proved impossible, the United States supplied a counterweight to a European balance which left Britain no longer secure. Compromised in Cuba and the Philippines, America avoided official censure of British policy in South Africa. Drawn, despite the isolationists and the America-firsters, into, if not the entangling alliance, at least the clinging complicity of global role-playing, she administered the blood transfusion that decided the issue of two world wars, and became after the second the “receiver” of the European empires whose wickedness was the justification of her existence and an article of her communal faith. At every stage of this progressive ensnarement in the unthinkable and the unavowable, Hitchens detects the promptings of raddled and faded Britannia. “It is beyond doubt,” he writes of the major British role in the setting up of America's first secret intelligence services, “that wherever the United States needed to lose any kind of virginity in global affairs, the British were on hand with unguents and aphrodisiacs of all kinds” (the old whore/young stud image is irresistible). Thus seduced, Americans must find it hard to be told now by a British academic, Paul Kennedy, that “overstretch” will destroy their version of empire as it has all others, and that Scarsdale will go where Rome and Carthage (and presumably Belgravia) went.

Why such insidious guile on the one hand and such readiness to be beguiled on the other? Hitchens's answer is that the “special relationship” as ritually invoked and actually practised is to be understood not as a natural affinity between the British and the Americans but as a mutual support operation between their respective élites (largely English on the one hand and WASP on the other), tricked out with enough “kith-and-kin” cant and bulldog breed bluster to exercise some attraction at lower levels. It is

a transmission belt by which British conservative ideas have infected America, the better to be retransmitted to England. The process of transmission has been made easier, admittedly, by those Americans who are themselves receptive to the temptations of thinking with the blood, or the temptations of empire, or the temptations of class and caste superiority. But it was always in the British mind to press these ideas upon them.

By the turn of the century, there was a willing audience in a WASP élite which had acquired not only an imperial role through American involvement in Cuba and the Philippines but also a racial consciousness sharpened by reaction to large-scale Jewish and Catholic immigration. Both, it is contended, drew it closer to the attitudes and functions of Britain's ruling class, and the developments of the twentieth century only intensified the symbiosis.

Fragmentary though Hitchens's historical analysis tends to be [in Blood, Class, and Nostalgia], there is much to be said for his lively Painite lampooning of the transoceanic complicities of property and power. The British élite's interest in this bonding was perhaps even broader than he suggests. Superficially, it might be seen simply as a crude need for an infusion of fresh resources. The damage done to landed revenues by the import of American grain was mitigated by the import of milch cows in the form of young American heiresses and by letting Spencer House to Yankee tenants. The difficulty of sustaining imperial responsibilities and global importance was alleviated, for a space, by the coaxing of the American giant into the imperial and hegemonic game. But on a deeper level, the British looked not only for material aid but for some of that knack of political survival which is often supposed to have been their own distinctive contribution to the traffic.

Noting only in passing the alternative special relationship of radical and democratic aspiration and working-class solidarity which spanned the Atlantic, Hitchens barely glances at its interaction with the élite connection which forms his subject. The United States in the age of Bright was a beacon of democracy for the British left. But as Britain herself haltingly acquired the formal apparatus of democracy, it became paradoxically a sustaining example to the right of how that regrettable modern fashion might be tempered and tamed. Lord Salisbury, who in the 1860s had hankered for the victory of the Confederacy over the “democratic” North, was by the 1880s gazing enviously at the judicious safeguards which the American constitution embodied against the kind of drastic and hasty class legislation made so depressingly easy (he alleged) by the British parliamentary system. And, indeed, Salisbury was scarcely dead when Britain began to implement schemes of social welfare requiring a degree of redistributive taxation to which democratic America never aspired and profoundly complicating the funding of imperial power: it was not least because Britain had the welfare and America the wealth that the latter's buttressing of imperial rule became so essential. Moreover, the United States supplied excellent examples of the assimilating and dominating skills that were required both for domestic stability and for imperial sway. Oliver Wendell Holmes's assertion that the Americans were “the Romans of the modern world—the great assimilating people” looked even more pertinent by the end of the nineteenth century, when the United States within its own borders supplied a hardly less spectacular case than the British empire of how a white, Anglo-Saxon, protestant minority might keep in hand vast and potentially explosive ethnic and social diversity. A Romance of the White Man's Burden was the subtitle of the racist novel on which Griffith's Birth of a Nation was based. In the art of giving the law to lesser breeds, at home or abroad, America need not always be the pupil, Britain the tutor. The use of the Mohawk Valley Formula, derived from American strike-breaking experience, to outmanoeuvre Arthur Scargill's miners was to emphasize that.

As befits a Washington-based correspondent with every opportunity of observing the ironies of his title and a relish for the mordant exposure of hypocrisy and fraud (see the riddled targets tumbling out of the pages of his collected pieces published under the title Prepared for the Worst), Hitchens is savagely good on the clubby, back-scratching, seminaring, old leather and not-so-old money atmosphere that marks the special relationship and its tools and institutions—the Rhodes scholarships, the Council on Foreign Relations, Ditchley Park. He calls in Neal Ascherson's jibe about “Atlantic provincialism” to characterize the blinkered mutual admiration of two narrow groups in the Home Counties and on the eastern seaboard, linked more intimately to each other than is either to the hinterland it still manages in some degree to dominate, the Americans supplying the capital, the British still just about supplying the class, or at least, as Hitchens calls it, the kitsch.

The show must be nearing its finale. If it has allowed the British to cling vicariously to one sort of greatness, it has involved them in the endless humiliations implicit in the huge imbalance of physical force. In the mid-nineteenth century, the Great Western Railway was still a stronger symbol of modernity and power than the Great Western Republic. In the 1840s, Emerson could describe a pounding, pulsating, steam-driven, fast-running, materialistic Britain, stamping itself on the consciousness and activity of the world (even to “multitudes of rude young English … who have made the English traveller a proverb for uncomfortable and offensive manners”), in terms which, as Harry Allen pointed out, make it hard to believe that the subject is not the United States a century later. But it was obvious even then—at least to the Economist in 1851—that “The superiority of the United States to England is ultimately as certain as the next eclipse.” However strong the rhetoric of blood relationship and the attraction of English style for a relatively new élite, superiority meant condescension in the end. What was forged by the First World War was an American nationalism rather than an Anglo-Saxon brotherhood, and if the reputation of British imperial know-how long compensated for the limitations of British power, it could not survive the kind of shock administered by the realization that the gentlemanly tradition could and did include Burgess, Maclean, Philby and Blunt. If Americans sometimes admired the British, and, indeed, like Dean Acheson, resembled them, they rarely had time for the British empire, except perhaps in its Hollywood incarnation as a sort of Asiatic or African Wild West. The unwillingness to underwrite it signalled by the Suez episode destroyed its credit as surely as Gorbachev's withdrawal of effective Russian force destroyed the credit of communism in Eastern Europe.

Mention of current events in Eastern Europe points to a major cost of the Anglo-American élite relationship. Its attraction for the British is partly that it relieves them of the need to learn a foreign language. Hitchens quotes André Visson: “Of course if the hour for Britain to pass on her great historic mission has struck, the British would definitely prefer to have as successors their younger American relatives rather than intellectual Latins, unbalanced Germans or temperamental Slavs.” The easy option and largely illusory privileges of the special relationship bent Britain's rulers away from Europe at a time when they could have taken the lead in the construction of a counterpoise to American hegemony based on a community of civilization arguably more real than that alleged to form the foundation of the special relationship. The tables are now turned, and Britain must face about. That old imperial villain, Cecil Rhodes, was crafty enough in his time to place an each-way bet. There were German as well as American Rhodes scholars up to 1914. Perhaps Heidelberg and Jena will furnish their quota again. They can afford to pay for the tuxedos.