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Chaturanga

~ statecraft, strategy, society, and Σοφíα

Chaturanga

Tag Archives: Britain

Politics of Spite

09 Wed May 2018

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Iran, Middle East

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Barack Obama, Britain, CAATSA, Chabahar, China, Countering America's Adversaries Through Sanctions Act, Donald Trump, EU Blocking Regulation, France, Hassan Rouhani, INSTC, International North-South Trade Corridor, Iran, Israel, JCPOA, Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, nuclear, Russia, Saudi Arabia, United States

As predicted, US president Donald Trump has led the United States out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran. The agreement, which was supposed to increase international (Western) oversight into Tehran’s nuclear programme and hopefully rein in its nuclear ambitions, was one of the few unambiguously positive legacies of Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama, but ran into opposition even during the delicate negotiations. Critics tried to add riders involving their pet projects – usually human rights or missile development – to the deal in an attempt to derail process. Consistent with his pre-election criticism for once, Trump had called the JCPOA a bad deal and promised to repudiate it if elected.

America’s European partners – Britain, France, Germany, and Russia – have parted ways with Washington and declared their intent to continue adherence to the JCPOA; China has so far been mute but already threatened with a trade war with the United States, it is highly likely that it, too, will follow the Europeans in holding on to the Iranian nuclear deal.

It is not yet clear what the fallout of the American departure from the JCPOA will be. Although the rhetoric of the exit has been focused on how the agreement did not go far enough in preventing Iran from pursuing nuclear weapons, the fact that Trump administration officials have stated that sanctions will be “snapped back” indicates that they believe Iran to be in breach of its obligations under the JCPOA – although most technical experts disagree with this evaluation.

Given that the other members of the E3 + 3 – particularly Britain, France, and Germany – will not be following the US example, the interesting question is if Washington intends to sanction their businesses and banks under the recently passed Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) as India fears its defence dealings with Russia might. This would cause an enormous rupture in in the US and world economy as China is the United States’ single largest trading partner and Britain, France, and Germany are together the fourth largest ahead of Japan. Yet if Trump does use his presidential discretion to waive sanctions and exempt these four countries, it would be too blatant an act of political hypocrisy if the same treatment was not extended to others over Russia and North Korea as well as over Iran.

In February 2018, Patrick Pouyanné, the CEO of the French oil & gas giant Total, openly called for the implementation of the 1996 European Union Blocking Regulation, a law that prohibited European firms from cooperating with foreign demands that are in violation of international law or hurt European sovereign interests. Denis Chaibi, a senior diplomat in the European External Action Service, commented that the EU was looking at a variety of options and the blocking regulations would not be difficult to implement.

Ultimately, these are political instruments and businesses would be hurt either by European penalties for obeying US sanctions or the denial of access to American markets due to US sanctions. Obviously, firms would prefer having access to the far larger American markets than pin their hopes on soaring Euro-Iranian trade and the threat of blocking regulations is empty. States are supposed to exercise restrain and caution and a tit-for-tat exchange between the United States and its three primary European allies will hurt everyone. More to the point, the multinational supply chains of most large industrial houses today means that there would be few European firms that are not exposed to the United States and are free to do business with Iran.

Internationally, many countries would be pulled into the US wake for similar reasons; most countries are fairly integrated into the US economy and their national economies are not robust enough to withstand the loss of the American market. Additionally, others may have political reasons to reluctantly support Washington. India, for example, has been trying to purchase high-end American weapons systems and seeks Washington’s cooperation on several crucial issues such as defence technology and the geopolitics of the Indo-Pacific. It is most likely that India will have to bear the damage done to its own ambitions in Chabahar and the International North-South Trade Corridor (INSTC). Delhi will have even more to lose if Tehran responds to Delhi’s distancing by handing the responsibility for the Shahid Beheshti port over to Beijing.

If India can persuade the United States for a partial waiver on trade as it had done last time, its importance to Tehran would rise again only to the extent that other countries stop or reduce links with the Islamic republic.

Saudi Arabia, considered to be one of the beneficiaries of the American abnegation of the JCPOA, will enjoy in the short-term the spike in oil prices that is bound to follow Trump’s decision. However, this entire episode will have reiterated to Iran that the only way to be truly safe from American interference, as an Indian general is supposed to have observed after the First Gulf War in 1991, is to acquire nuclear weapons. Tehran seems to have been acutely aware of this note – Iran’s ambitions, as revealed by Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent document dump, were to posses just five nuclear warheads than an entire arsenal.

Riyadh has only managed to stoke Tehran’s determination and not douse it. The JCPOA was designed to give the international community breathing space to consider how best to dampen Iran’s love of the Bomb – it was never meant to provide a permanent solution as there are none. As non-proliferation experience has illustrated, the determined country will acquire nuclear weapons regardless of the financial and political costs to it and the willingness to pay such a high price will attract unscrupulous suppliers. The classic example of this is Pakistan, whose nuclear journey would have taken far longer had it not been for the generous acts of commission by China and of omission by the United States.

Perhaps the greatest beneficiary of the American walkout is Israel. On the one hand, the reintroduction and expansion of sanctions hurts the Iranian economy and removes funds that might have otherwise gone to fund the Hezbollah and its adventures in Syria but on the other, the European and Iranian decision to continue observing the JCPOA keeps the checks on the Iranian nuclear programme in place for at least the next decade. If the archives reveal 30 years down the line that this was a game of good-cop-bad-cop, this would be a strategic masterstroke by Benjamin Netanyahu.

The one certainty at this moment is that Iran is not as isolated as it was prior to 2015. Even if Europe falls in line with America’s wishes, Russia and China are both unlikely to go along with the West this time. Both countries have been antagonised by Trump’s sanctions and threats of a trade war to be receptive to cooperation. This opens the door for greater Russian and Chinese influence in the Middle East. Russia also gains by the rift that has been created between Europe and the United States over the Iranian nuclear programme.

In some ways, Trump has just given Iran’s hardline clerics a lease of life. There have been several signs that Iranians citizens are frustrated with their government and the poor economy. Some analysts were even hopeful of organic reforms that would gradually move the country from its extreme Islamic views. Trump’s abandonment of the JCPOA underscores everything hardliners warned against – that the United States is not a trustworthy partner and it ultimately seeks the total subjugation of Iran.

If Washington expects Tehran to come back to the negotiating table, it may have a long wait. Rather than re-engage with a party that has shown bad faith, Iranian president Hassan Rouhani may simply choose to wait out his American counterpart in the hopes that Trump’s successor would be more amenable to the Obamian status quo.

It is not clear what the Trump administration sought to achieve by leaving the JCPOA. If anything, it draws attention to the Iranian bogey in American minds and the ghosts of 1979 that such policies would have any support in the houses of legislature or with the citizens. Pace the political acrobatics that are about to ensue over the coming days, the ultimate prize is the withering of the Iranian nuclear weapons programme. It is not clear if anyone in the White House had kept that in mind while thinking about abruptly walking out of an international treaty.


This post appeared on FirstPost on May 10, 2018.

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The Rebirth of a Nation

29 Wed Nov 2017

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Israel, Middle East, Opinion and Response

≈ Comments Off on The Rebirth of a Nation

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Britain, David Ben-Gurion, Golda Meir, Haj Amin al-Husseini, Harry Truman, Israel, Jordan, King Abdullah, Menachem Begin, Michael Bar Zohar, Palestine, Resolution 181, Sonnenborn Institute, Soviet Union, Stalin, United Nations, United States, Ze'ev Jabotinsky

Panama…yes; Paraguay…yes; Peru…yes. As Philippines voted next in favour of the partition plan for Palestine, cheering broke out across the yishuv in the British mandate of Palestine. It was late in the evening as the news from Flushing Meadows crackled over radio sets in the Middle East. In essence, the British had announced their intention to abandon the Mandate and it was up to the locals to pick up the scraps of civilisation from the mess left behind. On November 29, 1947, United Nations Resolution 181 created legal ground for the formation of a Jewish state partitioned from the Arab domains of the region. The State of Israel had not been declared yet – that would have to wait until May 14, 1948 – or the 5th of Iyar if you want to get all Jewish about it – the day before the British mandate formally ended.

Seventy years hence, there is an air of inevitability around the story of the partition. Israel’s march from strength to strength makes the tense moments of its past seem like mere signposts to the present generation. However, the United Nations resolution came in the midst of tumult among even Zionist ranks, not all of whom were supportive of the partition plan. The Levant was a powder keg, something that would become customary over the decades. International opinion had been against the Jews and flipped at the last minute with some impressive Zionist diplomacy and an inexplicable Soviet change of heart. Although the United States has long been presented as Israel’s saviour at this crucial moment, the Soviet Union (and its four satellite nations) had a larger role to play than many realise.

In the immediate aftermath of the Jewish diplomatic victory in New York, riots broke out across Palestine. Angry Arab mobs attacked Jewish shops and residences to punish them for the partition plan and to dissuade them from further political audacity. The formal war would come later, the day after the declaration of the State of Israel, when the fledgling Jewish state’s six Arab neighbours would invade it. In the meantime, however, Jewish blood flowed in a frenzy of disorganised violence. In a single week in March 1948, over a 100 Jews were killed.

Zionist leaders had predicted such a reaction and had prepared themselves well. In their experience, the British government could not be trusted – in the past, they had stood by as Arabs massacred Jews and even intervened to disarm Jewish defence groups to place them at the mercy of the Arabs. In April 1947, the Haganah had little more than 10,000 rifles and less than 3,000 machine guns of poor quality and varying calibers; by independence, David Ben Gurion had almost tripled the Jewish arsenal and even added a couple of dozen Messerschmitts left over from World War II. In addition, a fund-raising drive by Golda Meir in the United States had garnered $50 million for the new Jewish state.

The plan to “save Israel” had been put into play since at least July 1945, when Ben Gurion met with 18 millionaires at the residence of his friend, Rudolph Sonnenborn, in New York. Under the guise of shipping medical equipment to hospitals, the Sonnenborn Institute would collect funds to purchase arms for the future Israeli military. Ben Gurion was fully aware that Washington’s feelings on Zionism were lukewarm at best and he was willing to evict the British, weakened by war, from Palestine by force if necessary. London, however, announced in February 1947 that it would leave Palestine by May 15 of the following year.

When war did break out six months after the passing of UN Resolution 181, the Western powers imposed a strict embargo against arms to the region. This seemingly fair step only helped the Arabs, who not only had established armies but also had British officers to consult with and train under. Israel had to use some clever tricks to procure arms: in one case, a sympathiser posed as a Hollywood producer interested in making a war film and smuggled all the props of his set to Israel. The bulk of the assistance came, as several of the founding generation attested, from the Soviet bloc. A vital purchase from Czechoslovakia, obviously approved by Moscow, saw Israel through the darkest days of its short existence.

The British Mandate of Palestine The separation of Jordan in April 1921 Israel, before and after the War of Independence

Diplomatically too, as Martin Kramer has recently written in Mosaic, the creation of Israel was forged largely through unexpected Soviet support. Zionist leaders such as Ben Gurion and Chaim Weizmann had long argued the Jewish case at the court of the Red tsar, particularly through the Soviet envoy to Britain, Ivan Maisky, but lack of sufficient access to Soviet archives has kept still kept a mystery the reason Stalin eventually allowed the vote to play out as it did. Despite their egalitarian dystopia, the Bolsheviks were only marginally less anti-Semitic than the prevailing currents in Europe. The vote, therefore, was a total surprise even to experienced Eastern Europe hands among the Zionists.

The United States’ role in the creation of Israel has been hyped beyond compare, Harry Truman even anointing himself a modern-day Cyrus, after the Persian emperor who liberated the Jews from Babylonian captivity, in a November 1953 speech to the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. Yet like the British Balfour Declaration, a seemingly pivotal moment in Jewish history tarnished by its context of the White Paper of 1922, the US vote in favour of the creation of Israel was followed by a declaration that partition was impossible to implement and the British mandate be temporarily passed on to the United Nations. Even on the eve of Israeli independence, US diplomats were still busy warning Zionist leaders to defer from statehood.

Besides the superpowers, the international community – perhaps with some transient shame for the Shoah – voted overwhelmingly in favour of the partition of Palestine into a Jewish state. Only Cuba, Greece, and India, along with Muslim countries, voted against partition. The final tally was 33 countries for the resolution, and 13 against, with 10 abstentions and one absence.

The military and political dimensions aside, Resolution 181 was not a completely kosher proposal even in its terms. The Arabs resented it for obvious reasons – they saw European Jews as usurpers of the land, if not a theologically inferior people – and there was no way the holy sites of the Scriptures could be surrendered to them. There was also some power play involved in the Arab position: Haj Amin al-Husseini aspired to build an independent Palestinian state out of the partition, while King Abdullah of Transjordan (Jordan attained its modern name in 1949) sought to annex the remains of Mandatory Palestine into the rest, which was his own kingdom. To this end, the king even negotiated in secret with Jewish representatives to foil Husseini’s bid for a separate state.

A not insignificant minority of Zionists were also unhappy with the partition plan. They argued that the mandate had already been partitioned once in April 1921 when Arab Jordan was created from 77 percent of the Mandatory domains; why should there be a further partition to deprive the Jews of even the little that was left? If the Arabs wanted a state out of the Mandate, they already had one in Jordan.

The Revisionist Zionists, led by Ze’ev Jabotinsky until his demise in 1942, had argued that Israel should extend across the river Jordan such that all the Biblical holy sites fell in the Holy Land. The Smol Ha’Yarden, a poem by Jabotinsky that later became one of Betar’s famous songs, encapsulated this ideal extent of Israel’s borders as that of the British Mandate. Several Zionists were unwilling to give up Judea and Samaria, what is today more commonly known as the West Bank, because it holds so many of their religious places.

This was not an uncommon view even among those who were more receptive to Resolution 181. Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, pleaded with his colleagues that they accept the UN resolution as it would constitute a formal international endorsement – for the first time – of the Jewish state. If the boundaries of the plan were not to their liking, he told them, they could later be redrawn. It was with careful thought, thus, that the boundaries of Israel were not announced in the declaration of independence. In fact, one of Ben Gurion’s biographers, Michael Bar Zohar, reveals that the prime minister clung to this notion even during the Suez Crisis of 1956, withdrawing Israeli forces from Sinai with great reluctance and only after repeated pressure from US president Dwight Eisenhower. The southern boundary was finally set, despite fierce domestic disapproval, only in 1979 during the Camp David accords between Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat.

Between the in-house Zionist squabbles, the Arab machinations, and the international warm-up to the Cold War, a narrow window of opportunity opened for a brief moment for the creation of Israel and was quickly shut. The political tumult of the past is obscured in the light of Israel’s military, economic, and political successes. Almost two thousand years after the last Jewish king – Herod Agrippa II –  had ruled, Israel would rise up again. And just as when it had fallen last, it had no allies but those it might be lent it for a fleeting moment by time and fate. Like Galba, Otho, and Vitellius; like Maisky, Andrei Gromyko, and, perhaps, Stalin.

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A World Shaped by the Anglo Race

20 Sat May 2017

Posted by Jaideep A. Prabhu in Book Review

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Anglosphere, ANZUS, Australia, Britain, Canada, identity, Iraq, New Zealand, race, Srdjan Vucetic, Suez Crisis, United States, Venezuela

AnglosphereVucetic, Srdjan. The Anglosphere: A Genealogy of Racialized Identity in International Relations. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011. 272 pp.

It has become increasingly difficult since World War II to study race in international relations. After the excesses by Nazi Germany, most Western officials were shamed into at least keeping their thoughts on racial characteristics private. This is not to say that the problem of race in international relations was solved, but, like sex in Victorian England, became something that was not mentioned in polite company. However, there has been a fair amount of scholarship recently that has reintroduced race as a method of analysis in diplomacy with interesting results. In The Anglosphere: A Genealogy of Racialized Identity in International Relations, Srdjan Vucetic takes a look at the most enduring and perhaps only genuinely special relationship in international relations, primarily that between the United States and Britain but also with Australia, Canada, and New Zealand thrown into the mix as junior partners. Vucetic’s contention is that the bond between the Anglo nations of the world was forged not out of realpolitik but along racial lines in the late 19th century. Over the next century, these bonds would be tested by evolving values of state, nation, empire, and liberalism.

It was an English historian and diplomat Edward Carr who wrote in 1939 that the Anglos were consummate international hypocrites, bent on spreading their forms of politics under the guise of morality and neutrality. Vucetic explores this thought through several crises – Venezuela in 1895 and 1902, the Pacific Pact in 1951 binding the United States to the security of the far-flung former British possessions of Australia and New Zealand, the Suez Crisis in 1956, the Vietnam War, and the build up to the Second Gulf War in 2003. In each case, the author finds compelling reasons for the Anglo powers not to have sided with each other as they did and suggests that their behaviour was brought about by a feeling of kinship.

By any yardstick of historical precedence, the United States was almost destined to become Britain’s rival if not enemy in the late 19th century. Yet, a rapprochement took place. The United States sought to secure the Western hemisphere for itself by repelling and expelling all foreign presence in the region. It moved against French, Russian, Danish, and Spanish possessions by coin or by Colt – except for the British. Washington never threatened the territories of its Anglo cousin in Canada, Newfoundland, or the West Indies. In the Venezuelan Crisis of 1895, for example, Venezuela claimed Essequibo and Guayana Esequiba from British Guyana. The United States forced Britain to abjure from the use of force and accept an arbitration (which awarded London 90 percent of the territory anyway). In 1902, the United States did not move against a blockade of Venezuela by Britain and other European powers for the failure to compensate for damages caused during the Venezuelan Civil War (1859-1863).

The general explanation preferred by many Liberals for US behaviour is democratic peace theory which posits that the behaviour of two democracies is always tempered by their institutions such that they never go to war. Realists, however, argue that London’s imperial commitments elsewhere around the globe and distance from the New World meant that it did not pursue a more muscular policy in 1895. Both overlook, however, the human element of diplomacy – the racial statements made by prominent figures on both sides of the Anglo Atlantic. Joseph Chamberlain and Arthur Balfour, for example, who had long called for a “race alliance” between the two carriers of liberal modernity, declared war between America and Britain to be “unnatural,” “fratricidal,” a “horror,” and a “crime against the laws of God and man.” Archibald Primrose and Lewis Harcourt, members of the Opposition, agreed that war must be avoided at all costs. This sentiment was reciprocated on the other side of the Atlantic – Secretary of State Thomas Bayard, for example, asked why “two trustees of civilisation should fight over the mongrel state of Venezuela.”

During the Second Boer War in 1899, the United States stayed neutral and its secretary of state John Hays argued that the “fight of England is the fight of civilisation and progress and all our interests are bound up in her success.” Washington’s neutrality was seen as repayment or gratitude for British neutrality during the Spanish-American War in 1898. Even one of America’s most preeminent strategic thinkers, Alfred Mahan, targeted Germany and Japan but not Britain when he made a case for a strong navy to counterbalance the influence of the United States’ rivals in Europe and the Asia-Pacific. In discussions of foreign policy, it is often forgotten that the 19th century was an era in which race mattered immensely. The American Civil War had ended barely a generation ago and immigration was strictly controlled in favour of Anglo Saxons. It is not clear why international relations scholars would assume, then, that their domain remained unaffected by this prejudice.

There were, at the same time, perhaps linguistic and religious cleavages with other world powers. The French were an Other because of their Catholicism and the Germans were the impulsive and brutal Teutonic Other. The Anglosphere was thus imagined as a largely white, English-speaking Protestant federation. Such distinction is clear from how the American media, for example, differentiated the German bombardment of San Carlos and the British role in the flattening of Puerto Cabello during the Second Venezuelan Crisis. The former was uncivilised and disproportionate while the other was judicious and restrained. Similarly, the expansion of German imperial domains was seen as threatening to US security interests while Britain continued to add to her colonies without much comment from the United States. Thus, as political scientist Daniel Deudney provocatively states, “the most important and successful interstate alliance of the twentieth century is actually a type of non-state national unification,” one that did not officially achieve even a customs union let alone a dissolution of borders or single polity.

The New Zealand historian James Belich has an interesting observation about the histories of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand independent states: no one knows when they truly began. In 1950, the Australasian territories were more British than independent and the people saw themselves as “neo-Britains” or “better-Britains.” They made sure to always distinguish themselves as part of the Old Commonwealth, the real or original community that included Canada and South Africa while the New Commonwealth comprised of India, Ceylon, and Pakistan. In fact, the Anglosphere was not even stated in the English penal colonies but remained an implicit presence and was most visible during the early years of the Cold War.

In 1950, for example, the Sydney Morning Herald opined on the security arrangements against the Communist bloc by reminding Canberra that “our religious faith, our national philosophy, and our whole way of life are alien to Asia.” Rather than buttressing Asian democracies against communism, what the audience wanted was Canberra to join the Anglo-led West in containing all of Asia. Interestingly, the United States was not interested.

With the Soviet Union playing up the status of blacks and other non-white people in the United States, Washington could not afford to be publicly seen entering into white alliances around the globe. The racist undertones of Australian and New Zealand diplomats was sidestepped by John Foster Dulles by proposing a Pacific Ocean Pact in which ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand Army Corps) would prop up the isalnd states of Japan, the Philippines, and Indonesia; the United States also refused British membership in this pact because it did not want to create a “closed club for Anglo Saxons,” Dulles explained to the British ambassador in March 1951. Australian and New Zealand officials were irate, pointing out that an alliance with the Philippines or Indonesia but not Britain was unthinkable and any move to turn Japan from an enemy to a firm ally overnight would have serious political ramifications domestically. As Vucetic shows, Manila’s request to be included was rebuffed by Canberra and Wellington on grounds of shortage of time and money. The final result was ANZUS – “about Asia, but not of Asia,” as historian David Lowe once described.

Vucetic argues that this showed that it was balance of race that was important to the Anglosphere, not balance of power. He writes, the fact that “Washington deliberated with its junior allies during the negotiations and lost, instead of simply overruling them, reveals the operation of collective identity in practice…it is a sense of shared identity that compels friends to accommodate each other, regardless of extant hierarchies and asymmetries.”

The influence of race on the foreign and security policies of the Anglosphere diminished over time but still remains dormant. Furthermore, the shared sense of brotherhood that was forged in the early 20th century is still with us to this day. The first sign of a shift came in Canada’s discomfiture at the British invasion of Egypt in 1956 to seize the Suez Canal. A liberal internationalism and the urge to distinguish itself from its southern cousin motivated Ottawa as was seen in its response to Vietnam as well. Australia, however, contributed boots on the ground in every major engagement the United States found itself in. Even in the Second Gulf War, while Britain and Australia saddled up to go to war in Iraq, New Zealand and Canada stayed on the sidelines though gave ambiguous blessings to their racial cousins by pontificating on the ethics of liberal interventions. Americans did not rename, however, as Vucetic points out, Canadian bacon as they did French fries.

The end of white-only immigration policies – in 1967 in Canada and in 1973 in Australia – catalysed the emergence of multiculturalism in the Anglosphere, especially as the number of non-white immigrants surpassed white immigration after the mid-1990s. Yet the reinvention of the Anglosphere as a community of (still English-speaking) liberal, democratic, capitalist states still carried undercurrents of a racial bond. The conflict in Afghanistan, wherein the Anglo powers bore the brunt of the warfare, fed the conservative and Hochromantik imagery of a small band of Anglo states preserving civilisation and standing against the tides of barbarians. Picking up from where Chamberlain and Churchill had left off, the British historian Robert Conquest proposed a political association of English-speaking states and American businessman James Bennett argued modern technology had finally allowed Anglophone societies to create a globe-spanning network commonwealth of liberal democracy, free trade, and labour movement. As Duncan Bell wrote in his 2007 The Idea of Greater Britain,

“Grandiose fantasies of Anglo-Saxon unity and superiority continue to exert their mesmeric power, shaping visions of a future world order, and drawing people back into the dangerous orbit of empire.”

There are several narratives of the rise of the English-speaking powers – rags-to-riches, revolution-to-rapprochement, autocracy-to-democracy, racism-to-multiculturalism, colony-to-nation, or imperial-war-to-international-law. The Anglosphere contains many of these frameworks, though undergirded by bonds between settler colonies – even penal ones – that have so far been overlooked. Vucetic notes that today, “all core Anglosphere states and societies define their liberal identities, not simply against present authoritarian Others but also against their own racial past. The mainstreaming of antiracism…has had a paradoxical effect of reifying racialized structures of meaning. Instead of reducing race talk, national census-style racial categories have contributed to it.”

Is it possible that Vucetic has been oversensitive to the race angle? After all, critics may point to the idea of a bill of rights, trial by jury, habeas corpus, the centrality of private property, a man’s word of honour and several other aspects of Anglo culture other than race and sect that bind together the people of the English-speaking first world countries. This, however, is a Churchillian view, premised on the belief that other cultures did not understand property rights or other social and political liberties. Furthermore, the notion that race and religion, two of the most powerful categories in the Age of Imperialism, did not play a role in foreign relations is rather farcical.

Talk of race these days is meant to get our hackles up. However, it is difficult to deny that there exists a sense of kinship that can be forged from racial, linguistic, ethnic, or religious identities. What makes the racial identity of the Anglosphere any more pernicious than the religious bonds of the ummah? Such natural commonality does not banish acrimony in relations but it does create a greater willingness to compromise and maintain ties. Wise or not, the inherent appeal of such bonds should be clear to most of us who meet a fellow countryman when travelling abroad.

Regardless of one’s views on the role of race and religion in foreign affairs, The Anglosphere is an intriguing book whose central thesis asks us to open our minds enough to consider yet another framework to international relations and alliance politics. Vucetic’s argument is not necessarily novel but charts new territory in the direction earlier scholars such as Michael Hunt and WIlliam Inboden had already suggested. In that, it stands firmly on the shoulders of excellent historical research and explores further the implications of what has only recently fallen out of fashion.

The Anglosphere is a valuable addition to foreign relations scholarship that is a must-read for anyone looking to equip their intellectual toolkit to the fullest.

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