If Americans Can’t Talk Honestly About the Queen We Can’t Talk Honestly About Ourselves

Here are two statements Joe Biden will never make:

“Queen Elizabeth II’s legacy is inextricably bound up with the legacy of British imperialism, which oppressed millions around the world.”

“Given the way China suffered under Western (and Japanese) imperialism, it’s not surprising that today’s Chinese leaders see America’s antagonistic posture as yet another Western effort to keep China down.”

I believe both these statements are true. They are not the whole truth, obviously. It’s also true that the Queen was a gracious, dignified woman beloved by many in Britain and beyond. It’s also true that China’s government has crushed freedom in Hong Kong, placed more than one million Uighurs in concentration camps, helps prop up some of the most odious regimes on earth, and menaces Taiwan.

But for Washington politicians, these latter truths are easy to acknowledge. What’s difficult to acknowledge—when talking about the Queen’s death or about America’s deteriorating relationship with China—is the legacy of Western imperialism. And these taboos are related. In many ways, America’s unacknowledged empire is the British empire’s heir. “Just as in science fiction people are able to live on through cryogenic freezing after their bodies die,” wrote the historian Andrew Roberts, “so British postimperial greatness has been preserved and fostered through its incorporation into the American world-historical project.” Because the US is, in many ways, continuing the work that imperial Britain began, the inability of American leaders to talk honestly about how people outside the West remember British imperialism is bound up with their inability to talk about honestly about how people outside the West view America today.

First, however, a word about this Friday’s Zoom call, for paid subscribers. We’ll be joined by Amal Elsana, someone I’ve had the privilege of knowing for a number of years. She’s the author of new memoir, Hope is a Woman’s Name, about her life as a “Bedouin, Arab, woman, feminist, Palestinian and Israeli.” It’s a moving story about the intersection of culture, patriarchy, religion, nationalism, and state power from a perspective that is rarely heard in the US. As always, paid subscribers will get the Zoom link on Wednesday and the video the following week.

Back to the Queen and US foreign policy. Since her death, a rhetorical battle has raged in the US media between commentators who emphasize the ugly history of British imperialism and those who think dwelling on Britain’s imperial crimes now is unseemly. That’s among journalists. But among American politicians, there’s not much of a debate at all: There’s virtually no discussion of the ugly stuff. In their joint statement mourning the Queen’s death, the closest Joe and Jill Biden came to acknowledging British imperialism was their claim that “by showing friendship and respect to newly independent nations around the world,” Queen Elizabeth II “elevated the cause of liberty.” That implies that the queen was a kind of Mikhail Gorbachev or F. W. de Klerk, who acted boldly to help liquidate an oppressive political system. That’s not true. The Queen, who in South Africa in 1947 famously pledged that her “whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great imperial family,” did not choose to liquidate British imperialism. She was forced to adapt to a reality she would almost certainly not have chosen on her own.

If the Bidens’ response were merely an expression of good etiquette, a refusal to speak ill of the newly dead, it wouldn’t matter much. But it also reflects an ideological reality: In official Washington, it’s hard to criticize British imperialism at any time. In 2001, when George W. Bush installed a bust of arch-imperialist Winston Churchill—who called Indians a “beastly people” and Palestinians “barbaric hordes”—in the Oval Office, he faced little controversy. But when Barack Obama removed the bust to make room for one of Martin Luther King, he set off a firestorm. Obama knew something about what British colonialism was actually like. His father had come of age in Kenya during Britain’s brutal suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion, in which, according to the historian Caroline Elkins, imperial forces imprisoned more than one million Kenyans in internment camps. Yet there wasn’t political space in Washington for Obama to condemn Churchill’s crude racism. Instead, under pressure from conservatives who suspected that Obama was anti-Churchill and therefore hostile to Britain and by extension the entire West, Obama defensively insisted that, “I love Winston Churchill. I love the guy.”

Why does this matter to US foreign policy today? Because America’s most important overseas relationship is with China. And recognizing the scars left by British imperialism—and Western imperialism more generally—is crucial to understanding how many in China see the world. In Washington, the analogies that most shape foreign policy are America’s confrontations with Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. That’s why Churchill is such a hero. But in China, as the historian Stephen R. Platt has noted, “every educated Chinese person knows about the ‘century of humiliation,’” which lasted from roughly the First Opium War in 1839 until the end of the Chinese civil war in the late 1940s. In the US, foreign policy pundits often ask: Is it 1939? In China, by contrast, the state-controlled newspaper, Global Times, headlined a 2019 column about alleged US bullying, “Is it Now 1840?”

Without understanding China’s history of being dismembered by Western and Japanese imperial foes, it’s hard to understand why China’s government is so obsessed with controlling Taiwan, an island that Japan seized from the Qing dynasty in 1895 and America’s Seventh Fleet prevented the Chinese Communist Party from seizing in 1950, after its Nationalist rivals fled there during China’s civil war. Without understanding China’s memory of Western imperialism, it’s hard to understand Beijing’s efforts to control the South China Sea, the waterway through which many of those imperial invaders travelled. And without understanding China’s memory of Western imperialism, it’s hard to understand why Chinese leaders were so unnerved by America’s regime change wars, which have left countries like Libya in the very fractured state that Western imperialists once left China.

Understanding is not the same as justifying or acquiescing. The US has good reason to assist Taiwan and to defend international law in the South China Sea. But because American politicians rarely acknowledge Western imperialism’s legacy, they dismiss as preposterous the notion that many ordinary Chinese see US behavior as threatening. One of the easiest things for an American politician to say about China is that China’s government fears the United States because it fears freedom. One of the hardest things to say is that China’s government—and many of its constituents—fear the United States because they see it as the successor to the imperial powers that ravaged China for one hundred years.

Ideology shapes how government’s behave. But so does national memory. And understanding the national memories that shape an adversary’s view of the world is crucial to crafting wise policy toward it. The refusal of US leaders to discuss the brutal legacy of Western imperialism doesn’t only produce bad history. It produces bad foreign policy. If America’s leaders could acknowledge how the Queen’s legacy looks from Nairobi, they’d be better able to acknowledge how American power looks from Chengdu.

Other stuff:

In Jewish Currents (subscribe!), read editor Arielle Angel’s beautiful and important essay about the organized American Jewish community’s politics of grievance.

The best single paragraph about Britain’s obsession with royalty comes from, unsurprisingly, the Irish Times:

“Having a monarchy next door is a little like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and has daubed their house with clown murals, displays clown dolls in each window and has an insatiable desire to hear about and discuss clown-related news stories. More specifically, for the Irish, it’s like having a neighbour who’s really into clowns and, also, your grandfather was murdered by a clown.”

See you on Friday,

Peter