Anglo-American Rivalry and the Growth of Militarism¶
Core Argument¶
Chapter Digest: Anglo-American Rivalry and the Growth of Militarism¶
This chapter argues that the fundamental antagonism shaping the post-war world is not between capital and labour, but between the United States and Britain. The dollar has decisively outweighed the pound sterling, and this economic preponderance inevitably finds political expression. America now produces two-thirds of the world’s oil and dominates global production of wheat, coal, iron, steel, copper, and motor cars; these figures decide everything. Britain, by contrast, has seen its exports fall to 76% of pre-war levels, with an unprecedented adverse trade balance and crisis in basic industries. American observers conclude that British industrial production has had its day, reducing the island to a middleman for the United States. British shipbuilders warn of bankruptcy and ruin. The displacement of the world economic axis from Britain to America will continue until the proletarian revolution.
The British bourgeoisie consoles itself with the illusion that it can guide its inexperienced American rival, but America is learning quickly. At the Washington Naval Conference, the United States forced Britain to accept naval parity. Britain retreats step by step, breaking its alliance with Japan and renouncing the fortification of Singapore. Yet contradictions of unprecedented explosive power are accumulating. War between them is not excluded; at a certain point, Britain will resist with arms, though all the odds are on America’s side. America will ‘liberate’ colonial peoples, summoning Indians, Egyptians, and the Irish to rise. The era of ‘pacifist’ Americanism only lays the groundwork for new wars of unimaginable monstrosity.
The only stable element in this era is the automatic, uninterrupted growth of militarism, regardless of which party holds power in Britain. The United States, previously non-militarist, became a militarist power through the imperialist war, routing Germany against Britain’s wishes and establishing a powerful France to counter Britain. Britain’s post-war ‘pact’—the Locarno Conference of October 1925, which confirmed Germany’s western frontiers and mandated the complete demilitarisation of the Rhineland—makes Britain Europe’s guarantor, but is directed against the Soviet Union. British ministers, including Joynson-Hicks and Churchill, accuse the USSR of plotting Britain’s destruction, despite Britain’s own record of colonial plunder and espionage. The unexampled economic superiority of the United States will not permit European capitalism to recover, automatically driving Europe toward revolution. Britain, losing markets and facing unemployment, threatens the USSR with war, but if war comes, the revolutionary proletariat of Europe will emerge victorious. Trotsky’s prediction proved accurate when the General Strike commenced on 4 May 1926.