The Empire of Freedom: Where the United States Belongs: The Anglosphere

National Review, March 24, 2003 by Ramesh Ponnuru

We can't say we weren't warned. The end of the alliance between Western Europe and the United States has been predicted since before the end of the Cold War. The disappearance of the external threat to the Western alliance was bound to magnify its internal tensions. The fall of Communism also made the differences in political philosophies between continental Europe and America loom larger. At the same time, those differences actually grew larger, as America stumbled into a position of unchallenged predominance, and European resentment of that predominance grew. Partly as a consequence of that resentment, efforts to make a rival superpower of the European Union -- which was still known as the "European Economic Community" only 20 years ago -- accelerated. In the 1990s, the topic of a possible crack-up of the West became as much a staple of opinion journalism, especially on the right, as the possibility of American decline had been in the previous decade.

The end of the Western alliance has now moved out of the realm of conjecture. Almost everyone, it seems, is giving up on that alliance. The Soviets once rallied opposition to American policies at the United Nations, and many expected China to assume the adversarial role in the future; but in the event, it has fallen to France. The European street is filled with protesters against the Bush administration, and insults to Europe are heard daily in the American street -- sometimes from American officials. There is a material breach, as it were, in the alliance. The idea that NATO, at least in its present form, is obsolete is being seriously entertained.

There is no shortage of suggested new alliances. The distracting debate over "unilateralism" notwithstanding, very few Americans really want to go it alone. Soon after 9/11, some observers thought it was possible that a great-power alliance of China, Russia, and the United States might arise to combat terrorism. Since then, however, neither China nor Russia has been as helpful as Americans had hoped. Russia is in no condition to be a dependable ally. As Nicholas Eberstadt has explained, Russia is the sick man of Europe in a sadly literal sense. Ravaged by AIDS and alcoholism, the country is seeing its average lifespan continue to shrink. China has important interests opposed to ours, and may not be stable over the next decade either.

A Western-hemispheric bloc under American leadership may once have seemed attractive, but shows no signs of materializing. President Bush is eager to extend NAFTA southward, and described Mexico as our most important ally in the week before 9/11. But Mexico has been reluctant to back American policy toward Iraq at the United Nations; its economic reforms have stalled; and security concerns have forced the Bush administration to put its promises to Vicente Fox regarding immigration policy on the back-burner. South America is in wretched shape. In Venezuela, Argentina, and Brazil, the regnant style has been populist in politics, protectionist in economics, and anti-American in foreign policy. Only the absence of military coups has kept the Seventies revival from being complete. Colombia remains mired in guerrilla war. The United States could certainly stand to give the region more attention, but its potential as an ally is slight.

Other possible alliances offer real benefits and are worth pursuing, but cannot be a secure basis for the defense of American interests. India, Israel, and Turkey are important regional allies (or allies in the making), but hardly a replacement for Western Europe. Spain and Italy have been supportive during the Iraq controversy, but that stance has been more an electoral accident than the result of an underlying affinity for the U.S. Whether that support will survive the continued European integration that both countries favor is also open to question. That doubt also applies to our friends in "New Europe," which is to say in Eastern Europe, which is desperate to join the EU. Pro-American attitudes there may fade in tandem with memories of the Cold War.

The unsatisfactory nature of most of the alliances on offer may explain why interest is growing in another possibility: a closer relationship among the English-speaking nations. Although it is not without its difficulties, it is the most plausible alternative to the traditional Western alliance. The chief theoretician of this alliance is an American Internet entrepreneur named James Bennett. He calls his idea the "Anglosphere."

In the mid 1990s, Bennett started to write a book on how globalization was reducing the power of national governments. He posited that, in a world where the cost of travel and of communication was lower than ever before, geography would matter less and culture more. The "cooperation costs" between two countries that were oceans apart but culturally similar could be lower than those between two culturally dissimilar neighbors. "I started using the Anglosphere countries as an example," says Bennett. "The more I wrote about it, I realized (a) there was a huge potential here, and (b) the Anglosphere was leading the way and would probably get there first." Bennett shelved his first book and started working on a book on the Anglosphere, which he expects to be out later this year.