Seventy years ago, Britain and France, partners in decline, tried to take the Suez Canal by force. The odd thing is that neither country was led by an obvious jingo. Anthony Eden, a scholar of Arabic and Persian, stands out as the most cultivated occupant of 10 Downing Street in the postwar era. It is just that status anxiety makes sensible people do rash things. France would fight a hopeless war in Algeria and Britain would stay out of a euro-federalist project that it thought had no future: misjudgments that affect both nations even now.
America’s decline is not as sharp as theirs back then, of course. It remains the strongest country on Earth, if by a reduced margin. But in another sense American decline is worse. Britain could always console itself that it was handing over to a democratic, anglophone and mostly white superpower. In contrast, the US has lost ground to China, with which it shares none of those characteristics. And so the deterioration of its status, though objectively much less steep than Britain’s, might be subjectively more harrowing. It rather matters which country you are declining against.
Throw into this equation someone of Donald Trump’s obsession with rank — his almost geological sense of strata — and you get the mistreatment of Greenland, the gunboat diplomacy in the Caribbean and other Suez-style attempts to recover lost prestige. (Only more successful, perhaps.)