In the introduction to his new book, Someone Else’s Empire: British Illusions and American Hegemony, Tom Stevenson proposes a promising work in three parts to show how Britain’s foreign policy is tied to American power, that the American empire does not need any British assistance, and that American hegemony is in no way benign.

Readers might expect then an engaging, even controversial new work well worth reading and a welcome addition to contemporary foreign policy analysis. Or perhaps a book that—as its publicists claim— “dispels the myth of a ‘Global Britain’ that punches above its weight,” explores the enduring nature of the American empire, and examines “the infrastructure of a US world order re-energized by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.” But Someone Else’s Empire falls short of these marks. It is neither a new work of careful, well-researched scholarship that explores key British foreign policy documents and decision-making, nor a work of contemporary, front-line journalism that explores causal links in foreign policy and its outcomes.

America Empire, British Appendage

Stevenson is a contributing editor to the London Review of Books (LRB) and writes regularly about energy, defense, and international politics. He has reported from Ukraine, the Middle East, and North Africa. He has worked as a freelancer for international media including the Financial Times, Africa Confidential, the New Statesman, Al Jazeera, and the BBC. In short, he would appear to have the background and experience to produce an informed and critical look at contemporary geopolitics in the Anglosphere—the Anglo-American sphere of influence exercised by countries with a common cultural heritage and language that maintain close political, economic, and military ties.

But Stevenson’s aim is not to make a dispassionate or fully informed assessment of Anglo-American foreign policymaking and how it is executed. He writes from a decidedly progressive perspective with more concern for social equities than awareness of the nature of realpolitik. There is much of what Douglas Murray has called “a war on the West” in Someone Else’s Empire as Stevenson himself makes plain. His intent, he writes baldly, is to expose “the ruinous effects” of policymakers that have been “spared scrutiny of their actions in favour of seductive abstractions or euphemisms about a ‘rules based’ international order.” The author’s work is a tirade:

Whatever is said in Washington or London, American empire was never an ideological construct, or a commitment to rules, or to liberalism, let alone to democratic government. The general argument of this book is that American power and its British appendage is founded on brute military facts and centrality in the international energy and financial systems.

America’s rampant militarism, Stevenson claims, and the “reflexive British contribution to the design of American empire,” only sustains America’s economic dominance in the world and ensures the free transit of energy resources around the globe that, apparently, only benefits the United States and its allies. According to the reckoning in Someone Else’s Empire, Britain gains little or nothing from the “special relationship” between the two Atlantic nations but serves, instead, as an “equerry,” little more than a loyal “lieutenant” with submarine-launched nuclear weapons.

There is no room in these arguments, of course, to acknowledge that nations craft foreign policy in their national interest. So, for example, while stability in the global economy underwritten by the free exchange of US dollars (as the international reserve currency) benefits all nations (including Britain), Stevenson complains this gives Americans the whip hand to use in world affairs. Economic sanctions, he writes, “have long been the ‘instrument of first choice’ in US foreign policy.” They fall disproportionately on ordinary people he claims, but then admits these measures are often taken to forestall the use of armed force.

Stevenson’s argument is simplistic and lacks the depth of research and insights of a work like Nicholas Mulder’s The Economic Weapon: The Rise of Sanctions as a Tool of Modern War. Stevenson includes an entire chapter of his muddled rhetoric about the use of economic power as an instrument of American foreign policy in Someone Else’s Empire. The chapter on this topic is merely a screed, wholly out of place in what is supposed to be a discussion of Britain’s support of American policy and the alternatives. 

The same is true of the chapter on energy, which focuses on the Middle East and American and British relationships in this region. According to Stevenson, “much of US power is built on the back of the most profitable protection racket in modern history.” If so, it’s a racket that uses American muscle and money—with forward-deployed naval, ground, and air forces—to maintain a tenuous peace in the region. Stevenson acknowledges that three-quarters of all Gulf energy exports flow to Japan, South Korea, India, China, and Singapore. According to the author, this is not an effort to enhance the energy-security of Asia and globalized Asian industries. The real goal is to keep a controlling American hand atop the oil spigot and perpetuate the “exploitive” and “colonial” nature of “Anglo-American domination of the Gulf.”

Brutish Anglo-Settler Militarism

While Stevenson is sharply critical of Britain’s “supine” support of American policies, his most acerbic remarks are leveled at the military cooperation and coordination of “Anglo-Settler” nations and the United States. For example, Five Eyes (FVEY)—a foreign intelligence collection-sharing effort among the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—is lambasted as being “for those in favour of constant global surveillance” who are “willing to allow the erosion of democratic principles.” Stevenson does not identify what principles, if any, have crumbled, nor does he discuss the mutual benefit the arrangement provides the participating nations.

The author also derides a “permanent bellicose consistency within the Anglosphere” that magnetically pulls FYEY nations into American military misadventures that included deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan. At the strategic level, he claims that Canada, Britain, and Australia are little better than American proxies providing overseas bases, logistical support, and expeditionary forces. The same is true at the tactical level. Freedom of Navigation operations conducted by Anglo-American naval forces do not maintain free passage of contested international sea lanes of communication. These are, instead, “operations intended to rile Russia and China” done at the bidding of American organizers.

Stevenson also lambasts Anglo-American support of peacekeeping and security assistance forces. Counterinsurgency, he writes, is “the respectable term for trying to suppress domestic resistance to a military occupation.” The reader is left to take it on faith that this is a heroic resistance even as it manifests itself as drug-running and human trafficking; strong-armed robbery and extortion; the torture, rape, and murder of civilians; the kidnapping of women and children; and training and equipping of suicide bombers and child soldiers.

Even more remarkable are Stevenson’s wholly unsubstantiated claims about Anglo-American military forces. For example, he describes the elite and highly disciplined special forces professionals of the US Joint Special Operations Command, as “a collection of thugs, kidnappers, and battlefield assassins that continue to do a great deal of America’s dirty work.” He also makes the startling claim that Britain’s “armed forces have been a consistent source of evil in the world; any diminishment in expeditionary capacity would be a good in itself.” The UK should move “away from the problem of maintaining expeditionary functions” given Britain’s “long term relative decline.” With only the sixth largest GDP in the world, the author claims “that the UK will soon become a third-tier economy alongside the likes of Brazil, Mexico, and Indonesia” which “mean[s] proximity to countries with traditions of non-alignment.” Stevenson views this as a welcome development that will shake Britain loose from the US and lead to a “principled non-cooperation with American designs.”

Someone Else’s Empire is a disjointed book of hyperbole, sensationalized remarks, odd digressions, and entire chapters only tangentially related to the topic of the intersection of American and British foreign policies. In one instance, a chapter entitled “Successors on the Earth,” Stevenson describes the rise of the Islamic State (IS). After making an obligatory accounting of IS atrocities by writing “the horrors of IS rule are well known,” Stevenson blunders on for several pages listing how IS codified laws and, even more noteworthy, sanitary regulations “that stipulated more frequent bin collections than in New York.” Even less germane to the supposed topic is a piece of investigative journalism in a chapter titled “In Egypt’s Prisons.”

Nowhere in this book does Stevenson fully acknowledge the growth in international prosperity and the global stability anchored by the Anglosphere. Nor it seems, is he cognizant of the bulwark the Anglosphere built and held against the Soviet Bloc for decades. Instead, Stevenson snipes at what he perceives as shortcomings, failures, and missteps by nations of the Anglosphere and Britain’s seemingly slavish adherence to American designs. This sort of writing and editing (or lack thereof) comes from shoehorning fourteen old LRB essays—some dating back five, six, and even seven years—into a book of sixteen chapters that are little more than exercises in polemics. The result is something akin to yesterday’s newspaper: not timely, only historically relevant on the margins, and hardly worth reading.