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They are thick as thieves. They back one another on global issues. They share intelligence in real time. Cut one, they all bleed.
The five colonial Anglo-Saxon cousins have much in common: language, culture, history. They issue closely coordinated key policy statements. They vote in concert on United Nations resolutions.
The colonial brotherhood is led by the United States. Second-in-command is Britain. Australia and Canada pull their weight. New Zealand, the smallest of the cousins, tags along.
In 1700, none of these five countries existed. North America was a smattering of European colonial settlements, displacing indigenous people who had lived there in peace for millennia.
England and Scotland at the time were independent kingdoms. They would merge only in 1707 to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain.
Australia and New Zealand were inhabited by, respectively, Aborigines and Maoris. The gaze of newly formed Britain had not yet fallen on them. It would at the turn of the 18th century, to the discomfiture of Aborigines and Maoris.
Bonds between the colonial brotherhood were strengthened by sport and war. England, Australia and New Zealand played one another in cricket and rugby. The US and Canada joined their Anglo-Saxon cousins in war. All five fought side-by-side in both World Wars.
Despite growing immigration, the US was still a largely white Anglo-Saxon Protestant nation in the mid-1900s. Racism against black Americans, descendants of African slaves, was rampant. But new arrivals from Italy and Ireland too faced the whiplash of discrimination. They were Catholic.
It took the US nearly 200 years after independence in 1776 to elect a Catholic president, John F Kennedy.
Global hegemony
Historian Niall Ferguson wrote a landmark article in Bloomberg in January 2024 on how Pax Britannica morphed smoothly into Pax Americana in the early 1900s and why American global hegemony is at the end of its historical life cycle. The article triggered angry retorts from US academics. Pax Americana, they argued, is as powerful as it has ever been.
But is it? The short answer: it isn’t. Despite China’s economic slowdown, Beijing poses a serious challenge to Pax Americana. Washington is confronting that challenge by deploying the instrument it regularly uses as a proxy for economic war: sanctions.
It has banned sales to China of advanced semiconductor chips manufactured by US companies as well as by firms among its allies. Notwithstanding the semiconductor ban, China has outstripped the US on the number of scientists researching advances in artificial intelligence (AI).
Pax Americana faces internal challenges as well. Its social fabric is torn. The 2024 US presidential election between two geriatrics with a combined age of 160 years will expose the dark underbelly of America: gun violence, broken single-parent families, and a growing gap between the very rich and the very poor.
Bonds weakening
The progenitor of the colonial brotherhood, Britain, meanwhile continues to punch above its geopolitical weight. But the exhaustion shows. Threats of violence against British members of parliament for supporting the US-Israel war in Gaza have forced several MPs to stand down at the next general election, due later this year.
Mike Freer, Britain’s minister for courts and legal services, told The Guardian on January 31, that he will not fight the 2024-25 general election “after a series of death threats and an arson attack on his constituency office”.
Freer added: “By the skin of my teeth I avoided being murdered. There comes a point when the threats to your personal safety become too much.”
The assailant Freer was referring to was a man called Ali Harbi Ali who had murdered an MP, Sir David Amess, in 2021.
Freer added: “I was very lucky that actually on the day I was due to be in my Finchley constituency, I happened to change my plans and came into Whitehall. Otherwise who knows whether I would have been attacked or survived an attack. Ali said he came to Finchley to attack me.”
According to The Guardian report, “The MP and his staff wear stab vests when attending scheduled public events in his constituency after learning that Ali had watched his Finchley office before going on to murder Amess.”
China factor
Australia strongly criticised China in 2020 over its role in spreading the Covid pandemic. In the old days, the five colonial cousins would have come together to sanction China.
Instead China sanctioned Australian wine exports, forcing Canberra this year to finally make a peace offering to Beijing, which then lowered tariffs on Australian wine.
Britain stood aside during the dispute. It regretted the humbling Australia had received at the hands of China but said it couldn’t intervene because trade with China was far too important for Britain to risk annoying Beijing.
Between them Pax Britannica and Pax Americana have set the rules of the world order since the late 1800s. That era is on its last legs.
The question is: what will replace it?
Pax Sinica? Pax Indica? Or a multilateral world order?
That world order would have a role, though a much diminished one, for the colonial cousins. The centre of gravity has, however, shifted to Asia. The combined economies of China, India, Japan and South Korea are already larger than the US economy. The gap is widening.
The Anglo-Saxon brotherhood created instruments of security and finance following World War II to preserve its neo-colonial hegemony: the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Group of Seven (G7). It set the rules — and, whenever it suited them, broke them.
The endgame for that world order has begun.