You should always take care which dark alleys you walk down, for you never know where you might get mugged by the ambiguities of the Anglo-American relationship.
Take the alleys of Gotham City, for example. In a recent episode of the “Caped Crusader” miniseries on Amazon Prime, Batman investigates a highwayman ghost with an English accent who robs the poor and spares the rich. While Batman would like to keep his investigation scientific, his English butler Alfred delivers a potent dollop of old-world tradition, invoking Shakespeare on the supernatural and Arthur Conan Doyle on the laws of deduction, persuading the hero to pursue the ghost angle.
Upon researching the heraldry on the ghost’s saddlebags, Batman discovers that the apparition was once an 18th-century Empire Loyalist wastrel who blamed the lower orders for his misfortunes in the American Revolution (there is even a scene of the scoundrel burning a copy of the Bill of Rights). When the ritual to contain the aristocratic ghost calls for a dash of aristocratic blood, Alfred volunteers, for it turns out he is descended from the Duke of Devonshire. After the butler almost dies participating in the ritual, Batman tells him through gritted teeth, “I can’t do this job without you.”
There is, as the saying goes, “a lot going on here.”
Gotham City is as likely a gateway as any into the mysteries of the Anglo-American relationship, for the original Gotham — pronounced “goat-em” — is a village in Nottinghamshire. The name means “goat town,” and legend holds that its medieval inhabitants feigned madness to prevent the despotic King John — of Magna Carta and Robin Hood fame — from driving a public road through their town. Their foolish theatrics included building a fence around a cuckoo and trying to drown an eel. Long before the rogues’ gallery of Batman characters like Joker, Penguin, Riddler et al., a 1565 chapbook, “Merie Tales of the Mad Men of Gotham,” recounted the villagers’ antics.
Later incarnations gave the villagers the wry name “Wise Men of Gotham” and were known to writers of the early American republic. The Anglo-American revolutionary pamphleteer Thomas Paine used the phrase in “The Rights of Man,” in which he wrote that his Anglo-Irish rival Edmund Burke, in arguing for monarchy and hereditary succession, “puts the nation as fools on one side, and places his government of wisdom, all wise men of Gotham, on the other side.” Washington Irving, author of the first American short stories (“Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”), first linked “Gotham” with New York in the satirical periodical Salmagundi. Irving also provided a prototype of British Empire hauntology: the Headless Horseman who, in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” is the ghost of a Hessian — a German auxiliary from the British side who is purported to have lost his head to an American cannonball in the Revolutionary War.
The spooky corners of genre fiction have long proved meeting places of Anglo-American culture. Edgar Allan Poe, for example, attended schools in Scotland and London in the 1810s and based his stories “William Wilson” and “The Man of the Crowd” on those experiences. Arthur Conan Doyle acknowledged Poe’s Auguste Dupin stories, which feature a French detective, as a prototype for both Sherlock Holmes and the detective genre as a whole.
H.P. Lovecraft, the American “cosmic horror” writer of 1920s and 1930s pulps, was not particularly well-traveled — he never crossed the oceans in which his alien horrors dwelt — but he affected an ostentatious Anglophilia to the point, according to his biographer S.T. Joshi, of asserting the supremacy of British spelling. He wanted America to join World War I to defend its “ancestral homeland.” Britishness, in his cosmology, appears to have stood for blood purity in contrast to America’s melting pot. (Gotham City’s mental hospital, Arkham Asylum, is named for a town in Lovecraft’s fiction.)
More recently, Patrick McGrath, a British novelist who grew up on the grounds of Broadmoor, a high-security mental hospital in Berkshire where his father was superintendent, has carved out a niche of Anglo-American gothic Freudianism. His novel “Martha Peake” (2000) tells a tale of incest against the backdrop of the American Revolution. “Trauma” (2007) and “Ghost Town” (2005) address the psychological aftershocks of Vietnam and 9/11, respectively. In “Constance” (2014), “the angry black Atlantic” becomes a metaphor for the fractious relationship between a conservative British intellectual and his much younger American wife.
The gothic connection is hardly surprising. Britain and America are bound not only by kinship, but in collective death and bloodshed, having murdered each other’s people in two wars: the War of Independence and the War of 1812. The latter gave rise to Francis Scott Key’s “Star-Spangled Banner,” modeled on a drinking song from a London gentlemen’s club. During the American Civil War, Britain was a “hostile neutral”; although it had abolished slavery in its empire, it allowed British business to support the Confederacy.
The two countries began shedding blood as allies in World War I — something the “America First” camp has long resented, as have large swaths of the left, which dismissed the war as a clash of old-world imperialisms. World War II has gone down in history rather differently thanks to the retrospective moral clarity of having fought Nazi Germany, although “America First” sentiment — now revived under Donald Trump — kept America out of the war until 1941.
Although many of the antagonisms that beset the Anglo-American alliance have been half-forgotten, on the state-to-state level, Winston Churchill hoped the U.S. would help preserve the British Empire, a project that didn’t interest American leaders. On the people-to-people level, U.S. forces in Britain met a mixed reception. From 1941, George Orwell recorded British jealousy over U.S. soldiers’ pay — “the whole American Army is financially in the middle class” — and over the British women attracted to that disposable income and “the accent they are so used to in movies.” There was conflict over racial segregation too, which some white American soldiers expected in Britain’s public venues. A saying emerged among the British that “the only American soldiers with decent manners are the Negroes.” Another complaint was that “whereas Chamberlain appeased Germany, Churchill appeases America.” Orwell immortalized that bitterness in “1984,” wherein Britain is renamed “Airstrip One” for its peripheral role in a new, warlike, transoceanic empire.
It was Churchill, above all, who encouraged postwar “fraternity” as a Cold War imperative in his 1946 “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Missouri. “The Sinews of Peace,” as the address was titled, offered up the notion of a “special relationship” and of a conjoined civic sense rooted, as Churchill put it, in “Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Habeas Corpus, trial by jury, and the English common law,” all of which could be put at the service of the nascent United Nations. (Churchill’s mother, Jennie Jerome, was from Brooklyn.)
The uncanny substrate of the early Cold War alliance was perhaps most memorably dramatized in the 1946 Powell and Pressburger film “A Matter of Life and Death,” in which an English pilot facing certain death in a flaming Lancaster bomber falls in love over the radio with an American radio operator on the ground in England. After he miraculously wakes on an English beach because of a clerical error in heaven, he argues with the angel of death — represented by a jaunty, once-beheaded French noble — that “there must be a law of appeal.” There is, but the hitch is that his case is opposed by a deceased American patriot who died at Lexington and Concord and, acting as his prosecutor, is determined to put Britain on trial and scupper the Anglo-American union. In the end, the couple are reunited on Earth, having proved their love. The final scenes, soaring above the great hall of heaven, filled with all the nations and peoples of the world (or empire?) call to mind the Methodist Central Hall in Westminster, where the U.N. General Assembly convened its first session. The setting is salient to the nascent Cold War relationship: Communists don’t even believe in heaven.
Comic books, as it happens, were also among the fault lines of the postwar Anglo-American relationship. They were a symbol, for some Brits at least, of American ascendancy and unwanted Americanization. Orwell, for example, hated them. In a 1945 column, he wrote:
Recently a friend in America sent me a batch of ten-cent illustrated papers of the kind which are known generically as “comics” and consist entirely of coloured strip cartoons. Although bearing such titles as Marvel Comics or Famous Funnies, they are, in fact, mainly given over to “scientifiction” — that is, steel robots, invisible men, prehistoric monsters, death rays, invasions from Mars, and such-like.
Seen in the mass these things are very disquieting.
While he acknowledged that some of these comics might have had their roots in the fiction of H.G. Wells, Orwell believed that they had none of Wells’ scientific interest. He feared that American comics tended to “stimulate fantasies of power” and suggested that “their subject matter boils down to magic and sadism”:
You can hardly look at a page without seeing somebody flying through the air (a surprising number of the characters are able to fly), or somebody socking somebody else on the jaw, or an under-clad young woman fighting for her honour — and her ravisher is just as likely to be a steel robot or a fifty-foot dinosaur as a human being.
British anxiety about comics and American power persists. Alan Moore, a Brit who became the world’s most celebrated comic book writer in the 1980s and 1990s, has described his attraction to those same American comics as a working-class boy growing up in Northampton in the 1950s and 1960s. But he has since left both the superhero genre and the medium as a whole. Whereas Orwell’s critique expressed latent anxiety about American power, Moore’s is explicit. As he told The Guardian in 2010, “I’ve come to the conclusion that what superheroes might be – in their current incarnation, at least – is a symbol of American reluctance to involve themselves in any kind of conflict without massive tactical superiority.”
All of which brings us to Batman’s Alfred as an arguably unflattering American take on Britain as an accessory to American power. Alfred first appeared in the Batman comics in 1943 as a lo-res caricature of Britishness, combining aspects of John Bull (stout physique) and Sherlock Holmes (he carried a magnifying glass and wore a deerstalker cap). Here was Britain in its new, helpful, quaint but decidedly subordinate and superannuated role.
The character has since evolved to embody several aspects of postwar Britain. In his role as the the giver of sage and cultured advice, Alfred recalls British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s notion — first articulated during the war, when he was Churchill’s personal envoy to Dwight Eisenhower — that Britain’s future lay in an advisory role. As Macmillan put it to the future Labour politician and Cold War propagandist Richard Crossman (in a quote unearthed by Christopher Hitchens for his book “Blood, Class and Empire”): “We … are Greeks in this American Empire. You will find the Americans much as the Greeks found the Romans — great big, vulgar, bustling people, more vigorous than we are and also more idle, with more unspoiled virtues but also more corrupt. We must run Allied Forces Headquarters as the Greek Slaves ran the operations of the Emperor Claudius.”
Much of this could serve as a high-flown expression of what was to become a close postwar intelligence partnership, formalized in the 1946 UKUSA Agreement. After marking its 75th anniversary in 2024, CIA director William Burns observed that only the U.S. and U.K. intelligence services had seen Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine coming and it was “pretty lonely for a while.” His relationship with Richard Moore, director of the Secret Intelligence Service, or MI6, was, he said, “a genuine friendship” — echoing Batman’s “I can’t do this job without you.”
The idea of Alfred as a sage with an intelligence background is a recurring one in the Batman mythos. In a 1995 Batman cartoon episode, titled “The Lion and the Unicorn,” Alfred gets abducted by some bad guys in London. Batman, investigating, tells Robin that Alfred was once “an attache in the British security services” and was “pretty formidable in his day.” Alfred, duly rescued, later intimates that he left England because of “civil service pay grades” and remarks to his London friends, “Give my best to Whitehall.”
In “The Dark Knight,” British director Christopher Nolan’s 2008 war on terror allegory, Alfred lays some wisdom about political nihilism on Batman as he takes on the Joker. Once, Alfred and his “friends” were in Burma, trying to buy off tribal leaders with precious stones on behalf of the local government. One bandit who was raiding the government caravans wasn’t interested in the stones and tossed them away in the jungle. The gist: not everyone’s interested in money; “Some men just want to watch the world burn.” Britain and America have never disagreed much about the desirability of money but have tended to underestimate their ostensibly kleptocratic foes’ willingness to, say, put up with onerous sanctions for the pleasure of menacing or attacking their respective neighborhoods.
The high-gravitas and somewhat morally ambiguous British man of mystery is, to be sure, a real 20th-century type. One recent piece of cinema lore concerns the actor Christopher Lee, who is best known for his appearances as Dracula in a slew of films from London’s Hammer Film Productions beginning in 1958. Late in his career, Lee appeared in the “Lord of the Rings” films as Saruman, a corrupt wizard who gets stabbed to death in the final film, “The Return of the King.” The story goes that, while filming the scene, director Peter Jackson asked Lee to scream when stabbed. In a YouTube video that has made the rounds, Lee recalls that he objected: “I did say to Peter, ‘Have you any idea what kind of noise happens when somebody’s stabbed in the back?’ And I said, ‘Because I do. … It’s “Uh!” because the breath’s driven out of your body.’” Lee, who died in 2015, served in the British special forces during World War II, fought in Finland’s “Winter War” against the Soviets, was decorated in four countries and spoke six languages, but was forbidden from discussing specific operations. So it seems the best-known Dracula of the 20th century had been blooded indeed.
America, it turns out, likes its villains English. Francis Ford Coppola chose Gary Oldman to star in “Bram Stoker’s Dracula.” (The very idea of an American Dracula is inherently comedic: See Leslie Nielsen in Mel Brooks’ “Dracula: Dead and Loving It.”) Other English or English-accented villains include Darth Vader, Hannibal Lecter, Magneto, Uncle Scar in “The Lion King” and Shere Khan in “The Jungle Book.” Perhaps the most jarring example is “Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves,” in which Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood sounds American while Alan Rickman’s sheriff of Nottingham remains diabolically English.
What lies behind this? Could it be the ancestral memory of “taxation without representation” and the War of Independence? Or even the fine print of the U.S. Constitution itself? America’s archetypal hero was George Washington, who was born in Virginia. American origin, to the delegates of the 1787 Constitutional Convention, was a prerequisite for their hero-leaders. As a way of ensuring loyalty, the delegates ruled that all future presidents had to be “natural-born U.S. citizens.” In those days, it was not too much for Americans to imagine a charismatic, carpetbagging Brit subverting the new republic. Is it too much to assume that that anxiety continues to play out on movie screens?
Or maybe the idea of the Brit villain is linked more to Britain’s postwar mix of compromise and desperation. U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson’s famous remark at West Point in 1962 that “Great Britain has lost an empire and not yet found a role” raised the question of what on earth the bankrupt Brits might be up to now.
One role available to them was the metaphorical sinister butler. In his 2022 book “Butler to the World,” the British investigative journalist Oliver Bullough recounts his conversation with an American academic researching Chinese-owned assets in London and what the British government was doing to ensure their owners had earned their wealth legally. Citing “their shared language,” Bullough writes: “Americans and Brits often think their countries are more similar than they are. … There was no concerted [British] law enforcement effort against Chinese money laundering. No investigator. No prosecutions. No research into where the money has been going, how it is getting there, how much of it there is.”
Britain’s relative lack of official transparency and plaintiff-favoring libel laws, Bullough argues, have put it at the service of villains in the form of kleptocrats and dictatorships. “Britain is like a butler, I said at last as I tried to explain to both of us what was going on,” he writes. “We’re not a policeman like you guys.”
Acheson was wrong, Bullough argues: “Britain had lost an empire, but it had already found a role, as an amoral servant of wealth wherever it could be found, using the skills it had built up over centuries of empire-building.” As he explains, “It’s an amoral enabler for hire, an enforcer for cash, which hides the reality of what it is doing behind quaint traditions, literary allusions, immaculate tailoring, references to the Second World War, and a supercilious manner.”
So you have heard it from a British journalist: A mystique has attached itself to postwar Britain, and it is not wholly to be trusted. Bullough’s main targets are bankers, lawyers and realtors (recall that Count Dracula was a discreet investor in London real estate), and his book focuses mainly on London.
But a case can be made that similar suspicions bedevil Anglo-American intellectual life.
That is not to say that British exiles have done badly in America. Indeed, many have enjoyed a warm reception and a generous hearing. Aldous Huxley, who moved to Los Angeles in 1937, had a major impact on the American counterculture through his writings on Eastern religions, mysticism and psychedelics. W.H. Auden, who moved to New York in 1939 and established himself as a public intellectual, became a contributor to The New Yorker and won a Pulitzer Prize in poetry. Alfred Hitchcock, who moved to Los Angeles in 1939, memorably melodramatized the postwar landscape through his wildly popular films and television show.
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, outsize British personalities flowed toward America through television, especially through interview programs like “The Dick Cavett Show” (1968-1986), which brought audiences the opinions of Richard Burton, Laurence Olivier, John Lennon, Mick Jagger, David Bowie and — introducing a major flashpoint in British politics — the Conservative Party politician and classical scholar Enoch Powell. In his 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech, Powell invoked Virgil to criticize immigration from the former British Empire and stoked a hostile environment for nonwhite immigrants, particularly those from South Asia and the Caribbean.
The first Brit to break into American TV in a big way was the comedian and journalist David Frost, who fused with the 1960s zeitgeist by hosting a tribute to the assassinated John F. Kennedy on his BBC program “That Was the Week That Was.” His American career, which began in 1968, saw him interview people as disparate as Tennessee Williams and Muhammad Ali. His big “get,” in 1977, was a paid interview with Richard Nixon, who admitted on camera that he had “let the American people down” over Watergate but also claimed, “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal” (a formulation that Trump recently echoed in his social media post, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law”). Frost’s was a subtle style of “gotcha” journalism that has been imitated (with less subtlety) by such recent imports as Piers Morgan and Mehdi Hasan.
The 1980s and 1990s saw an influx of influential British writers and magazine editors. The New Yorker writer Ben Yagoda, author of the 2024 book “Gobsmacked! The British Invasion of American English,” has noted the cultural influence of four British figures who made America their home: the polemicist Christopher Hitchens, the Vanity Fair and New Yorker editor Tina Brown, the Vogue editor Anna Wintour and the New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan. Most of them knew each other back home. Hitchens and Brown were part of the same Oxford set that included Hitchens’ friend and Brown’s one-time boyfriend Martin Amis, who satirized 1980s America in his novel “Money” (1984). Hitchens briefly dated Wintour (the only non-Oxford graduate of the group). The younger Sullivan, who befriended Hitchens in Washington, came from a conservative, Thatcherite Oxford set that included the historian and future Henry Kissinger biographer Niall Ferguson.
Hitchens and Ferguson, in particular, offer illuminating examples of British influence on the American scene, particularly when America was open to trans-Atlantic insight and encouragement after the shock of 9/11.
For many Americans who came of age in the 2000s, the archetypal British intellectual import was probably Hitchens. It has been little remarked upon that he came to America via comic books, as he recounted in his 2010 autobiography, “Hitch-22”:
Comic books were certainly my own introduction to the Yank style: in spite of endless parental disapproval and discouragement I would sneak off to the corner shop and waste my pocket money on cheap Western and gangster stuff. It was easy to read, rather more “real” than Rupert Bear or Dan Dare or the other insipid English equivalents, and it made America seem huge and violent and coarse, and in places half-wild.
In the same book, he describes the thrill of turning up in Gotham for the first time in 1970, as an Oxford graduate: “I was near-delirious. Gazing up at the pillared skyline, I knew that I was surveying a tremendous work of man. … There was … a tensile excitement in the air that made one think — made me think for many years — that time spent asleep in New York was somehow time wasted.”
In the course of his further American travels in the second half of that decade, he remained appalled by capital punishment (which Britain last used in 1964) and the Vietnam War, but was also impressed by the comportment of the press and the courts amid the Watergate scandal and attracted to the very real protections of freedom of speech and information that Britain has never much cared to match:
A great number of the “issues” that I confronted in the 1970s, both as a journalist and as a political activist, had to do with censorship and press freedom and public information. Reporters in Britain were arrested for trying to investigate matters touching on “national security”: the Official Secrets Act had a clause that made even the “collection” of information an offense. In the United States there was a Freedom of Information Act that at least made the presumption of innocence when it came to disclosure. In London, an editor could be served by the state with a “D-Notice” preventing him or her from publishing a story that might embarrass the government. In the United States, the First Amendment to the Constitution — as had been reaffirmed in the case of the Pentagon Papers — forbade “prior restraint” of the press.
Some time after he moved to the U.S. in 1981 — to take up his role as a mordant, unorthodox Marxist critic of Reaganism for The Nation magazine — he found himself satirized as the character Peter Fallow in Tom Wolfe’s best-selling 1987 novel “The Bonfire of the Vanities,” in which Wolfe also dramatized — and his narrator advocated for — a degree of prejudice toward the British imports who seemed to get by on attitude and accent:
One had the sense of a very rich and suave secret legion that had insinuated itself into the cooperative apartment houses of Park Avenue and Fifth Avenue, from there to pounce at will on the Yankees’ fat fowl, to devour at leisure the last plump white meat on the bones of capitalism. … They were comrades in arms, in the service of Great Britain’s wounded chauvinism.
Pulling one over on the Yanks was one thing, but in Hitchens’ view the greater danger might be writing words that served, say, a particularly popular president. Tellingly, one of the more acid terms in Hitchens’ lexicon during the Reagan era (and later) was “servile.” The essence of Orwell’s work, he wrote, was “a sustained criticism of servility.” Christianity’s holy texts were a “warrant for servility” in the face of slavery, genocide, monarchy and patriarchy. The Salvadoran establishment in the era of death squads and U.S. government patronage evinced simultaneous “servility and resentment.” The U.S. press issued “servile bleats” for the restoration of Reagan’s “authority” in the wake of the Iran-Contra scandal. And so on.
Hitchens was willing to stand apart from his leftist Nation colleagues on foreign policy from an early stage — notably supporting Margaret Thatcher’s move to fend off the Argentinian dictatorship’s attempted 1982 takeover of the Falkland Islands, which had been under British control since 1841 — but the sensitive question of the relationship between British experience and American power came to a head most memorably over Iraq.
In 1990, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Hitchens was in Aspen, Colorado, where Thatcher was attending a summit with President George H.W. Bush. He noticed Thatcher “puff out like the ruff of some great cat in her enthusiasm for a fight. Here was an area of the world where the British had bases and traditions and expertise.” It was a “Greece to their Rome” moment.
Hitchens, too, had history in Iraq, dating back to a reporting trip he had made for the New Statesman in 1976, when Saddam was still vice president. As he recounts in “Hitch-22,” Iraq’s postcolonial status, ostensible secularism, recognition of its Kurdish minority and investment in infrastructure and health had appealed to his socialist sensibilities. And while his piece acknowledged political repression, he later came to regret not emphasizing the climate of fear he had seen taking hold in the country.
While he opposed the 1990-1991 U.S.-led war against Iraq as having begun on false pretenses (U.S. Ambassador April Glaspie signaled to Saddam that Washington was indifferent to his claims against Kuwait) and objected to the U.S. military’s conduct, including the incineration of retreating Iraqi troops along the so-called “highway of death,” he experienced a conversion of sorts while traveling in Iraqi Kurdistan and witnessing the aftermath of the regime’s 1988 chemical weapons atrocity in the city of Halabja. While roaming the region with two Kurdish peshmerga fighters, he commented on a portrait of George H.W. Bush taped to their windscreen. “Without your Mr. Bush we think our families would all be dead,” they told him, referring to the no-fly zone that protected them from aerial assault. So America could, after all, play a heroic role.
Fast forward to the post-9/11 moment. The U.S. was in shock, unsure of what to do with all its strength (“You have nothing! Nothing to do with all your strength!” the Joker taunts Batman in “The Dark Knight”). The inarticulate George W. Bush, who had run on an isolationist, anti-“nation-building” platform in the 2000 election, now wanted to take on his father’s old adversary and use American power to spread democracy across the Middle East. And there was Hitchens, with his eloquence, his on-the-ground experience in trouble spots, his liberal interventionist proclivities (not least from his recent stand in defense of Bosnia) ready to lend his old-world gravitas, historical recall and literary allusions to this utopian — and misbegotten — scheme in Mesopotamia.
At the root lay not a “swing to the right,” as lazy obituarists characterized it when he died in 2011, but a conversion — less easily perceived but of greater intellectual and psychological interest — from revolutionary socialism to the spirit of 1776. The journalist George Packer, in his 2005 book “The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq,” which begins with an intellectual history of the war, found Hitchens relishing the invasion in Trotskyist terms, as a “revolution from above,” and emphasizing his long-standing ties with members of Iraq’s exiled anti-Saddam opposition, especially Kanan Makiya — also, like Hitchens, a former Trotskyist.
“After the dust settles,” he told Packer, “the only revolution left standing is the American one. Americanization is the most revolutionary force in the world.”
Although Hitchens was never an apologist for the Soviet Union — quite the opposite — his disillusionment with the Bush administration’s prosecution of the war came to recall nothing so much as H.G. Wells’ account, in his 1921 travelogue “Russia in the Shadows,” of the Bolsheviks not knowing how to solve everyday problems using Marxism-Leninism. Hitchens had simply overestimated American competence and foresight. Of his conversations with his friend Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy defence secretary during the American occupation of Iraq, Hitchens observed:
What I should have been asking … was: ‘Does the Army Corps of Engineers have a generator big enough to turn the lights of Baghdad back on?’ Or perhaps ‘Has a detachment of Marines been ordered to guard the Iraqi National Museum?’ But, not being a professional soldier or quartermaster, not feeling myself able to advise those who were, I rather tended to assume that things of this practical sort were being taken care of.
To Hitchens’ credit, he called the U.S. torture of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib “a moral Chernobyl” and the Bush administration’s incompetence “impeachable.” He also condemned as torture the administration’s use of waterboarding (after undergoing the process voluntarily himself) and joined an ACLU lawsuit against the National Security Agency, seeking a ban on the warrantless wiretapping that Bush had authorized. He also published a bestselling anti-religious tract, the bluntly titled “God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” during what may have been the last earnestly Bible-thumping administration in U.S. history.
His support for the Iraq war was not a case of servility, but rather of projection, of a perceived confluence of interests that was ill-fated. This somewhat resembles how comic book writers approach superhero properties: projecting their ideals and concerns onto preestablished heroic templates. Sometimes it works out, and sometimes the fans scorn the result. Intellectuals have been known to do the same thing with superpowers.
American antipathy to British intellectuals’ participation in U.S. policy is rarely made explicit, but there are exceptions. During a recent podcast debate over U.S. policy in Ukraine between Niall Ferguson, the conservative historian and Kissinger biographer, and the libertarian American radio host Scott Horton, Horton argued that NATO expansion had provoked the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and Ferguson argued that it had not. When Ferguson pressed Horton on whether the U.S. had been right to support Ukraine against Russian aggression, he refused to be drawn, and instead launched into a nativist rant against his Scottish interlocutor:
Horton: I’m an American and I truly resent British people coming over here and telling us …
Ferguson: I’m also an American, Scott, I’m a U.S. citizen.
Horton: Well, nominally, but you represent …
Ferguson: Oh really, you’re going to call my nationality into question and my naturalization into question, that’s fun …
Horton: Well everything out of your mouth is against America’s interests, so I don’t know why anyone would listen to …
Ferguson: I don’t think it’s in America’s interests to hand Ukraine to Russia, which is what you seem to want to do.
Underlying Horton’s attack was Ferguson’s support for the 2003 war in Iraq, and the fact that he had invoked the British Empire’s legacy to argue his case.
Ferguson, a distinguished and prolific historian with a soothing Glaswegian lilt, left Oxford to teach at New York University in 2002. Still in his mid-30s with three acclaimed books behind him, he pitched himself to C-SPAN as “a British subject who loves the United States” and a “liberal fundamentalist” with views rooted in 19th-century Victorian liberalism. He became a U.S. citizen in 2018 and is now at the conservative Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His first book to appear following his move was 2003’s “Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power,” which he has described as a “cost-benefit analysis” and presented as offering lessons for American statecraft.
American empire, he told C-SPAN, could be a good thing: “Unlike most empires, both the British and American empires aspire, aspired, to export representative government in some way, over some time frame. The idea was that ultimately, everybody should get a share in this particular system of government. That would be my definition of empire.”
His support for the war was, however, followed by misgivings about America’s low levels of military force and commitment. One of George W. Bush’s main errors in Iraq, Ferguson argued, was “imperial denial” and telling Americans their country was “not in the empire business.” American anti-imperialism, he emphasized, had more to do with Vietnam than 1776.
In a 2004 New York Times op-ed titled “The Last Iraqi Insurgency,” he argued that Americans should junk their anxious analogies with Vietnam, look to the British presence in Iraq in the 1920s and “get over the American inhibition about learning from non-American history.” Whereas America had tried to prop up an existing government in South Vietnam, the “regime change” objective in Iraq more closely resembled the British struggle in 1920 to present themselves as liberators from Ottoman rule while crushing an armed rebellion with a ruthlessness — involving village-burning and “punitive” aerial bombardment — that shocked Winston Churchill. After detailing the parallels, Ferguson laid out the upshot for America: Putting down the current insurgency and facilitating an orderly handover of power would “require severity.” Iraqis would lose out if the U.S. cut and ran. “Fear of the wrong quagmire,” he wrote, could consign Iraqis “to a terrible hell.”
While it would have been ignoble indeed to have abandoned the Iraqis in 2004, Ferguson had, by that time, little faith in George W. Bush or the neoconservatives in his Cabinet and dismissed what he called the “messianic, optimistic” idea that “with one almighty flash of shock and awe you can democratize the Middle East.” Bush, he said, was pursuing “an entirely revolutionary project” with which he didn’t identify. “I’m more of a realist,” he said — as if this point had no bearing on his initial confidence in America’s war aims. (Most “realists” opposed the Iraq war precisely on these grounds.)
Like Hitchens, Ferguson had projected his own ideals onto the war, albeit from the polar opposite position. Whereas Hitchens had favored the overthrow of Saddam as “the opposite of a Kissinger policy” — meaning that it did not involve supporting or co-opting a dictator — Ferguson was to go on to become the authorized biographer of that controversial “realist,” secretary of state and national security adviser. He was, as he put it in the first volume of his Kissinger biography, to play “Boswell to Kissinger’s Johnson” (or, one might imagine, sidekick to Kissinger’s idealized superhero alter ego “Super-K,” as he was depicted on the cover of Newsweek in 1974).
Ferguson’s introduction to the biography is a curious thing. He quotes Boswell on the need to show “shade as well as light” and to pursue the project “without falling so much under the subject’s influence that the reader ceases to believe the disclaimer that the work is a life and not a panegyric.” He emphasizes the terms of his legal agreement with Kissinger, which he says gave him independence and left Kissinger no right to edit or amend what he wrote. He also suggests Kissinger wasn’t pleased with everything he wrote. And yet his account of being approached by Kissinger to do the book (after another British historian, Andrew Roberts, had demurred) seems to play rather too gamely into Kissinger’s cultivated public persona:
It was in London, in a bookshop, that Boswell first met Johnson. My first meeting with Kissinger was also in London, at a party given by Conrad Black. I was an Oxford Don who had dabbled in journalism, and I was flattered when the elder statesman expressed his admiration for a book I had written about the First World War. I was also impressed by the speed with which I was dropped when the model Elle Macpherson entered the room.
Kissinger’s critics, notably his New York Times obituarist David Sanger and his chief antagonist, Hitchens, have tended to debunk Kissinger’s playboy image as a form of misdirection, built more around photo ops than sex appeal. Ferguson acknowledges that, before taking the project, he feared being “savaged” by Hitchens, whose 2001 book “The Trial of Henry Kissinger” sought to indict Kissinger for war crimes. Ferguson has dismissed it as thinly sourced. In a 2023 Hoover Institution podcast, he also appeared to accuse Hitchens of being motivated by antisemitism in writing the book, which called to mind a false claim of Kissinger’s — which Ferguson didn’t mention and which Kissinger dropped following legal action from Hitchens — that Hitchens was a Holocaust denier. “Nobody has ever published ‘The Trial of Dean Acheson,’ or for that matter ‘The Trial of Hillary Clinton,’” Ferguson said. “One can’t explain that double standard any other way.” (Hitchens had in fact published a book critical of Bill and Hillary Clinton in 1999, “No One Left to Lie To”). This looks like a case of Ferguson having quaffed a little too much of the Super Kool-Aid, and his complicity in Kissinger’s image-making bespeaks an awkwardly adulatory view of an important but unheroic figure in American history.
Yet for his many flaws, Sir Niall, who was knighted last year by King Charles, has authentic British liberal impulses and can strike a gallant figure. He has shown a willingness to hold the conservative center against nativism, populism and worse. On a 2024 episode of the British podcast Triggernometry, he tore a bright red strip off an amateur podcast historian, Darryl Cooper, for claiming in an interview with Tucker Carlson that Winston Churchill wanted to start World War II while Hitler wanted peace. The interview recalled, Ferguson said, Carlson’s earlier interview with Vladimir Putin: “It seems as if Tucker is happy, in fact eager, to give platforms to people whose positions are a tissue of lies and politically aligned with real fascism.” In an era of populist anti-immigration sentiment, he has put in a good word for new waves of migration and the acceptance of asylum-seekers as a corrective to demographic decline. Ideas and institutions, which can be adopted by anybody, are what matter, not ethnicity, he argues.
For most of his time in America, Ferguson has aligned himself with Reaganite political figures like John McCain — he has called the late Republican senator “a true friend as well as an authentic hero” — and Mitt Romney, both of whose presidential campaigns he advised. The rise of Trump has wrong-footed him. He called the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol a “disgrace” and “a banana republic coup attempt.” But he has since been seen dancing to the Trump campaign anthem “YMCA” at Mar-a-Lago and has walked back the significance of Jan. 6, calling the events “this combination of a genuine belief on [Trump’s] part that the election was stolen and a catastrophic failure of policing that doesn’t look entirely accidental.”
He also convinced himself, ahead of the inauguration, that Trump was committed, like Reagan, to “peace through strength” — including, fanciful though it may seem, in Ukraine, where he thought the new president would provide a corrective to the Biden administration’s failures of deterrence. But whereas his work on Kissinger left him vulnerable only to book critics and the appearance of hitherto unreleased historical records, his sanguine about-face on Trump has left him hostage to fortune more broadly. Indeed, as this piece was going to press in the third week of February, after Trump opened bilateral talks with Putin, blamed Ukraine for the war with Russia and slighted and sidelined America’s European allies, Ferguson commented on X that “The events of the past week have bitterly disappointed those who thought they had conveyed to the new administration the seriousness of the threat posed to the West by the Axis of China, Russia, Iran and North Korea.”
Any hopes Ferguson may have harbored of wielding a modicum of Alfred-like influence over the American electorate’s unlikely new hero had already come to naught.
The drama of Trump’s electoral victories, particularly the one last year, was in a sense foreshadowed in two 1966 episodes of the old Batman TV show, in which the shady social climber the Penguin runs for office. While Batman trusts the system and the voters, Robin is alarmed:
Robin: Did you hear those rumors in the lobby? The Penguin, running for mayor!
Batman: It’s a free country, Robin.
Robin: It won’t be if he’s elected!
It’s soon decided that only Batman stands a chance of defeating the Penguin and must run for mayor. The very picture of East Coast noblesse oblige, Batman runs a comically high-minded campaign, trusting that the Penguin’s lowbrow showmanship and cynical pandering will be his undoing.
When the Penguin pulls ahead in the polls, he calls up Commissioner Gordon to gloat about the bizarre appointments he has planned: Joker for police commissioner, Riddler for police chief. But in the end, the polls can’t be trusted, the better angels of Gothamites’ nature prevail and Batman wins (in the finale, he also gets a call inviting him to run for president in 1968).
In his 1992 film “Batman Returns,” director Tim Burton reprised the “Penguin for mayor” storyline: The Penguin blackmails a Trump surrogate called Max Shreck — a crooked gothic tycoon with an unruly shock of blond-white hair — into backing him for mayor. Batman undoes their plot.
But as of November 2024, the Batman mythos can, along with the polling agencies, be said to have misjudged the society it portrays.
So where has it gone awry?
Moore, the comic book writer from Northampton, reckons the mythology’s fatal flaw is its misplaced faith in the courage and beneficence of billionaires and their philanthropy. From his 2022 BBC Maestro writing course:
The idea of Batman is a lovely, charming idea that we have this billionaire who is for some reason prepared to go out as an unlikely bat-themed vigilante and protect ordinary people from the oppressions of crime and villainy, to risk his life for all these ordinary people. And I’m sure that you can give me lots of examples where Jeffrey Bezos or Bill Gates, or Elon Musk or any of these people have actually done these things, in costume or not. No, of course they haven’t … this leads me to suggest that perhaps superheroes are a compensation for a culture that does its best not to help anyone out.
Maybe. Except that several of America’s founding fathers were wealthy men of civic virtue, and it is on their example, arguably, that Batman’s rich-guy alter ego Bruce Wayne was unconsciously based.
And while Trump lacks civic virtue and despises constitutional checks on his power, he has risked his life, has dodged a bullet, not for ordinary people, but in pursuit of his own aggrandizement. Galling though it may be in view of his medical deferment during the Vietnam War, he showed some courage in the process. As blood poured from his grazed ear, a kind of gothic charisma attached itself to him. It was the perfect spectacle for our antiheroic age, in which the Joker has his own film franchise, and the Penguin his own Sopranos-style TV series.
Ahead of his inauguration, Trump held court for such unsurprising British allies as Reform UK leader Nigel Farage (a key figure in the 2016 Brexit campaign) and the Bush-era neoconservative pundit turned Trump-understander Douglas Murray (who in his cool, Eton-Oxford drawl, has praised Trump’s plan to force Palestinians out of Gaza). Both men, like Ferguson, have since been whipsawed by Trump’s appeasement of Vladimir Putin and have felt compelled to challenge the American president’s lie that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a dictator.
Official-level British attempts at Trump-whispering are unlikely to turn out much better. Even before the election, British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer and Foreign Secretary David Lammy were at Trump Tower in New York, admiring the views, chatting with Trump about the royal family and swallowing their oft-stated antipathy toward him in the service of Britain’s precarious post-Brexit national interest. The royals themselves have been on duty: In December, Prince William was dispatched to the reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral to win Trump over. Servile, butler-like tones have been in evidence: In January, Peter Mandelson, Britain’s new ambassador to Washington, who had once called Trump “a danger to the world,” said his past comments had been “ill-judged and wrong” and that Trump had won “fresh respect” with his “dynamism and energy.”
The British have found themselves, not for the first time, in the presence of a new, unfamiliar, half-wild American archetype — one that, this time, is categorically antiheroic, even villainous. Some of them have decided there is little recourse but to pander to Trump’s nostalgic preoccupation with blood, class, empire and lucre, and to play at being the new Wise Men of Gotham.
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