Review: God and Gold Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World

GOD AND GOLD Britain, America and the Making ofthe Modern World Walter Russell Mead New York: Knopf, 2008. 449 pp, US$27.95 cl°m ISBN 978-0-375-41403-9In view ofthe author's interest in ideas and conviction that history is indeed relevant to the analysis of current affairs, this reviewer is predisposed to find God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making ofthe Modern World to be of compelling interest. In an international relations field too often dominated by philistines, fuzzy thinking, and technocratic policy intellectuals, Walter Russell Mead, the Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow in US foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations, represents a style of thinking about "the big picture" that is somewhat rare in official Washington today. And the chosen subject for his current book is nothing if not relevant to burning questions (yes!) of modernity, the rise and fall of empires, and the trajectory of historical forces in the early 21st century.Sadly, the author makes a hash of his opportunity. His argument, in brief, is that "the Anglo-Saxons" have dominated the world over the past three centuries because of their unique blend of capitalist democracy and Protestant religion at home, a largely benign hegemony abroad based on free trade, and an ingenious structure of international finance, and that all this has been undergirded strategically and militarily by sea power. This time-proven system, based on what Mead calls "the protocols ofthe elders of Greenwich" (360), should give us confidence - as against declinists like Paul Kennedy, the late Samuel P. Huntington, and others - that "the Anglo-Saxon ascendancy " will continue into the foreseeable future (271). "For Americans today, the chief lesson ofthe last three hundred years is easy to state as a principle, but much more difficult to put into practice," Mead writes. "Here is the lesson: the plan works. Stick to the plan. The 'protocols ofthe elders of Greenwich' are still the best guide to grand strategy" (361).In his conclusion Mead pulls out all the stops. In a triumphalist trumpet voluntary, the intellectual ornament of the Council on Foreign Relations effuses that "the values that have shaped the Anglo-American world and by which the Anglo-Americans have gone on to take the lead in the last three tumultuous centuries remain the values that bring success... these values are leading us westward and upward... America will continue rushing forward, however steep the slope or forbidding the terrain, bearing the banner with the strange device: Excelsior!" (413).All works of history, perhaps especially middle-brow renditions of history, inevitably reflect the intellectual and political culture of the era in which they are conceived and written. Whatever Mead's intention, the passages quoted above insensibly reflect the mindset of George W. Bush's America. They seem jarring, to say the least, in Barack Obama's America of flamboyant multiculturali sm, international financial collapse, massive trade imbalances, economic distress at home, and highly problematic military adventures "east of Suez," as an old-style American anglophile of the Ivy League -educated kind might well express the matter. Yet this reviewer has a hunch that Mead's deliberately archaic turns of phrase and anachronistic mindset will seem equally odd in today's multicultural London.Certainly Mead's reading of British history and of modern history generally is not likely to earn him an invitation to lecture at Oxford or Cambridge anytime soon. Mead laments that "the study of British history and culture has almost vanished from American schools today," and that lamentation is no doubt sincere. Moreover Mead (like Paul Kennedy, Niall Ferguson, and even Simon Schama) is right to insist that Americans interested in world affairs should study closely the history of Britain and of the British empire. …