Grand Alliance
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900
by Andrew Roberts
HarperCollins. 752 pp. $35.00.

In his new book, the British historian Andrew Roberts, whose well-regarded works include Eminent Churchillians (1994) and biographical treatments of Lords Halifax and Salisbury, carries into the 20th century and extends into the 21st the narrative concluded at the end of the 19th century by Winston Churchill in his four-volume The English Speaking Peoples (1956-58).

Under this rubric, Churchill encompassed the peoples of the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and of course the United States. A romanticist of the British empire if ever there was one, Churchill looked forward from his historical vantage point to envision a broad and roughly equal partnership between Britain and the U.S., albeit one in which the British would play a slightly superior intellectual role: Greeks to the Americans’ Romans, as it was once put. In many ways—although not in all—the story told by Roberts vindicates Churchill’s vision of the emergent Anglo-American relationship.

As Roberts sees it, the initially cautious courtship of Washington and London, begun at the dawn of the 20th century, would be given enduring substance by four consecutive “assaults” driving the two powers together and eventually merging them into a close alliance. Of the four—Prussian militarism culminating in World War I, fascist aggression leading to World War II, Soviet Communism and the cold war, and Islamist terrorism—the first three were dealt with in the characteristic fashion of the English-speaking peoples. That is to say, they were ignored until it was almost too late. But then the victims managed to rally, mobilize, improvise, invent, and—under the great leaders with whom they were blessed—triumph in the end. Whether they will similarly prevail against the fourth assault now under way is the great question still before us; despite his own misgivings, to which others may be added, Roberts is confident that they will.

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In his account of World War I, Roberts has little use for those who continue to see it as nothing but a saga of unremitting error, tragedy, and an almost simultaneous disillusionment, later to grow much larger, both with war itself and with the ideals of martial valor. To repudiate that view, which by now has assumed the status of conventional wisdom, he draws upon a rare memoir, Private 12768, by John Jackson, a British soldier who served in the Battle of Loos in 1915. Published before the “flood of generational-betrayal literature” that came to shape so much of our thinking about the era, it portrays British soldiers and officers sharing a bond of camaraderie, sacred purpose, and an indomitable will to push on to victory. As for the American side of the equation, Roberts freely grants that Woodrow Wilson dithered out of fear both of the Germans and indeed of war itself, entering the conflict utterly unprepared and only at the last moment—but still in time to help halt the potentially decisive German offensive in the spring and summer of 1918.

This wartime Anglo-American alliance was hardly destined to remain permanent, however. Even Theodore Roosevelt, an enthusiast for intervention, could write in 1919:

I do not believe in keeping our men on the other side to patrol the Rhine, or police Russia, or interfere in Central Europe or the Balkan peninsula.

And so, when the second assault came along in the forms of Adolf Hitler and imperial Japan, America under Franklin D. Roosevelt dithered again. Yet, once again and much more dramatically, its contribution to victory was indispensable.

As early as 1928, Roberts observes, “Hitler had recognized that the industrial power of the United States was likely to make her the most powerful nation in the world.” In time, the Nazi dictator would “discover quite how crushing that power could be.” The “unleashing of American enthusiasm, energy, and expertise” ensured an Allied triumph. It also signaled a high-water mark in Anglo-American relations: the fruit of shared sacrifice, close cooperation at every level, and a convincing show of intimacy between two egotistical leaders, Roosevelt and Churchill, who in fact did not really get along or, more importantly, have a common vision of the postwar world.

This brings Roberts to his third “assault”—the one launched by Soviet Communism against the West. His account of the low and high points of this great confrontation shows him at his most engrossing. Shining throughout is his admiration for Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, the two leaders who brought the cold-war struggle to a stunning victory for the cause of liberty. No less evident is his disdain for the intelligentsia on both sides of the Atlantic who worked so hard to prevent it.

In this latter connection, Roberts mercilessly dismembers various leftists and Communist fellow-travelers among the elites of the English-speaking peoples. The historian Eric Hobsbawm, who to most scholars towers like an Everest in the Himalayas of British academia, comes in for particularly rough treatment. As late as 1993, four decades after Stalin’s death and fully four years after the collapse of Soviet tyranny, Hobsbawm was capable of telling a group of Hungarian students that, for the common man in the less developed countries of Eastern Europe, Stalin’s reign “was probably the best period in their history.”

Such intellectual folly, working to deeply sinister effect, has reappeared in superabundance in the period Roberts calls the “fourth assault.” This is the one launched by Islamist terrorists and abetted by those whom Roberts does not shrink from identifying as the terrorists’ “de-facto allies” in the West. Here he has in mind such figures as the Australian journalist John Pilger, who asserts that “the current American elite is the Third Reich of our times.” And Pilger is only one of the many cited by Roberts who insist upon comparing the United States to Nazi Germany and George W. Bush to Adolf Hitler, with the latter sometimes coming out better than the former.

Yet Roberts steadfastly puts his faith in the ranks of the undeluded and the resolute, including preeminently Bush and Tony Blair. He tells the story, too, of the 9/11 hijacking of United Airlines flight 93, whose passengers rose up against their terrorist captors and sacrificed their own lives in order to thwart an attack on a target unknown to them. Todd Beamer’s call to action before he and his self-selected gang stormed the cockpit—“Are you ready, guys? Let’s roll!”—is, to Roberts, one of the “great rallying cries of the English-speaking peoples in combat.”

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Lying behind the phrase “English-speaking peoples” is some undoubted substance. As historians are coming to realize with increasing clarity, the trust required to form alliances and to fight wars together cannot be improvised. It takes decades, perhaps centuries, to be formed. Shared victories and defeats, a common language and culture, above all shared values and political systems: these and more are required to weave the sorts of multiplex bonds that today connect the English speakers of the world.

The question, to revert to where we started, is not only whether these bonds remain sufficiently strong to cope with today’s threat, but even whether the English-speaking heritage itself offers a sufficient knowledge base from which to understand that threat. For, no matter how well or badly the English-speaking peoples cooperate, the assault we face today is in many ways unintelligible to us.

This, too, is not exactly a new problem, including to historians; it is one that Roberts himself exemplifies to a degree. Consider his treatment of a consequential event in World War II: the fall of Singapore to the Japanese. That crushing defeat was the outcome of a very long and complex process beginning as far back as 1898—when, in order to confront the German naval buildup of the time, Britain began to concentrate nearly its entire fleet in home waters, turning to Japan, with which London concluded a treaty of alliance in 1902, to help secure the British empire in the East.

In 1923, Britain was forced to break its treaty with Japan under pressure from the United States, Australia, China, and others. This left the Japanese outside of any club. Nor were they reassured when Britain turned Singapore into what it imagined would be an impregnable outpost of the British empire, a “Gibraltar of the East”—the forces of which could only be aimed at Japan. Tokyo, feeling isolated and threatened, and aspiring to empire, decided, disastrously, to attempt the unilateral guarantee of its own security by creating an Asian sphere of influence. In February 1942, the Japanese duly invaded and, moving through the “impenetrable” jungles of Malaya, overwhelmed the stronghold of Singapore from the land side, forcing an abject Allied surrender within a week’s time.

But when Singapore fell and was occupied, Australia in particular became exposed to mortal peril. Successful Japanese bombing attacks on Australian ships and harbors and the palpable threat of invasion were brought to an end only with the arrival of the American—not the overstretched British—fleet. Postwar Australians did not hastily forget and may never have forgiven what they regarded as a betrayal by their mother country, and were never again to be the instinctive loyalists that their forebears had been. To this day, and notwithstanding their current rock-solid partnership in the war against Islamist terror, they have drawn their strategies accordingly, including the carefully maintained capacity to go nuclear if necessary.

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Roberts deals competently with the military aspects of the Singapore disaster, but misses its political repercussions entirely. I mention this not to deprecate his very considerable talents as a historian but to call attention to the chasm between what we English-speaking people know and what we need to know about the nature of the cultures and political systems that form either the core or the periphery of the fourth “assault”—a chasm evident everywhere in the academic, intellectual, and governmental worlds.

In treating the Islamist threat, does Roberts—do we all—miss the political repercussions of the challenge at hand? Islamist terrorism has struck regularly at Europe and America, but its most important targets are within the lands of Islam themselves. The Muslim states of the Middle East—some of them wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice, with increasingly restive and resentful populations—are being drawn ever more deeply into a contention that threatens to absorb the whole region in chaos.

What is going on in the Middle East and the Islamic world beyond it is a vast and elemental historical process that we must certainly try to influence and from whose ravages we should seek to insulate ourselves. Fortunately, at least for now, the struggle is largely focused inward. But outside powers, especially Russia and China, are cynically manipulating deep-seated Islamic grievances in purely instrumental fashion—as a way to pressure, intimidate, and divide the West. Still another complicating factor is that both of these countries have substantial Muslim populations of their own and border on volatile Muslim Central Asia.

How are we to respond? To be sure, we must be absolutely vigilant against terrorist networks, illegal financing, deceptions, front operations, and the rest. At present we are far from possessing all the linguistic, cultural, and intelligence tools to carry out even those missions with assurance of success. And what of the even greater challenge posed by the two emergent and now-allied powers of Russia and China, both of them anti-Western in stance, possessing far more by way of wealth and knowledge than the Soviet Union ever did, and actively supplying the weapons, the nuclear know-how, the missiles and missile designs, and much of the rest of the new military technological base that is transforming the world of Islam itself into a multi-nuclear power?

All of these fundamental challenges are linked together. If they are to be met and overcome, we need to fill in many of the vast intellectual blanks in the proud tradition we have inherited. And then, or rather simultaneously, the quality that Roberts identifies as the great gift of the English-speaking peoples—namely, the ability to form alliances—will have to be exercised as never before.

Australia has risen to the call. For its part, New Zealand has gone AWOL, though assuring itself, with staggering misjudgment, that (in the words of a local politician quoted by Roberts) “if the balloon goes up, [the Americans] will be there.” Canada seems largely of the same mind.

Where are the British? They are assuredly with us in Iraq, but it appears they may not be with us for long, and their elites seem to be drifting dangerously toward the sort of complacency and willed ignorance that Roberts identifies as operating all too powerfully on the eve of previous disasters. That leaves the Americans, who, although they never shared Britain’s imperial interests, have nevertheless taken up much of Britain’s former role as keeper-of-last-resort of international order and now represent both its forward and its rear guard. The British talked about democracy far more than they actually supported it (as in India, for example). But even talk matters, and Roberts is absolutely correct in writing that “the neoconservatives of George W. Bush’s administration did not invent some brand new political philosophy in their desire to extend representative institutions to the Middle East” and elsewhere; on the contrary, they were and are extending the articulated political philosophy of the English-speaking peoples. But are Americans to bear the burden alone (or, given their intermittent proclivity to withdraw from the word, even at all)?

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Perhaps the lesson is this. The history of the half-real, half-imaginary entity known as the English-speaking peoples, which Churchill limned with great fluency and smoothness, and to which Roberts has added his own stylistically disparate but worthy sequel, is interesting because it was so unlikely. Who would have thought that, after fighting one another in the 19th century, the British and Americans would become allies in the 20th? Beyond shared culture and language, it required real effort to create the strategic partnership that eventually emerged and that worked to such beneficial effect. A similarly real effort, moral and intellectual no less than diplomatic and military, will be required to sustain it.

In a world as dangerous as ours, one can do far worse than have almost instinctive rapport and understanding over distances as great as those that separate Washington and London and Canberra—pretty much all that is now left of “the English-speaking peoples” of yore. The past has provided stirring examples of what cooperation can accomplish and the evils it can avert or defeat. That old framework may continue to function and may yet again play a heroic role. But if it is to do so, the English-speaking peoples must, paradoxically, free themselves from themselves. We need to understand and to think hard about places and events largely absent from the grand and inspiring narrative given us by Churchill and by his literary epigone Andrew Roberts; and we need to remind ourselves that the triumphs of the past offer no guarantee for the future.

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