September 27, 2007
Are There Any Great Powers? II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 03:55 PM EST I did indeed mean to invite a response, and I agree with most of Alexander Burns’s. So I have just a few comments. He asks, “is there any country other than the United States that must have its interests considered by every other one?” He doubts if Britain or France these days meets that high bar. Certainly they are lesser powers than the United States, which he agrees meets this definition of a Great Power. It seems to me, however, that where British and French interests are involved, any country would be very foolish indeed not to take them into account. India felt free in 1961 to snap up the Portuguese colony of Goa, on the west coast of the subcontinent (without bothering to ask the people of Goa whether they wished to be snapped up, although a U.N. Security Council resolution had called for self-determination) because India knew that there wasn’t a thing Portugal could do about it. However it negotiated over the course of 15 years with France to have French India merge with it. The merger was accomplished peacefully and legally, not with 40,000 Indian troops. The different Indian approaches to very similar circumstances, I think, must be due to the relative power of Portugal and France. While neither Britain nor France in the 1950s could have projected enough power in the Indian subcontinent to have prevented a military takeover of territory, they both were capable of exerting a lot of economic and diplomatic pressure. No country, I would think, would want a veto-holding member of the Security Council as a sworn enemy, and Britain, with the worldwide insurance and financial power of London markets, could impose painful economic sanctions unilaterally. The duc de Richelieu joked in 1818 that there really were six Great Powers: Britain, France, Prussia, Austria, Russia, and the banking house of Baring Brothers. Mr. Burns notes that India, Pakistan, Israel (almost certainly), and North Korea are also nuclear powers and therefore under one possible definition are Great Powers. I left them out because none of these countries has more than a regional ability to project nuclear power. North Korea not even that, as its one nuclear test was mostly a fizzle. The five permanent members of the Security Council, however, have the power to drop a nuke wherever they decide to drop one. Britain could have won the Falklands war in a few minutes, merely by moving one of its boomer submarines to the South Atlantic and lobbing the big one into Buenos Aires, thereby decapitating the Argentine state. I have every confidence that the British government never contemplated such a move and that the Argentine government was entirely confident that Britain would not. But I’m equally sure that even that gang of thuggish half-wits running Argentina in 1983 must have thought about it, along with other possible British responses. They gambled that Britain would swallow a military takeover rather than go to the trouble and expense of undoing a fait accompli. Margaret Thatcher turned out to be made of sterner stuff than they bargained for. Here, of course, is the trouble with nuclear weapons. While they are immensely powerful, they are also immensely expensive, in terms of public opinion, to use. which is a big reason they haven’t been since 1945. Britain, as a practical matter, could not have annihilated several million Argentinians to regain control of some rainy islands and a lot of sheep. But a nuclear deterrent with global reach makes one, ipso facto, one of the big boys, i.e., a Great Power. Charles de Gaulle said as much when he was building the “force de frappe” (with public American tut-tutting and private American help). But I agree that the term, very clear in 1900, is much less meaningful today and perhaps should indeed be buried. Maybe it’s a sign that we have moved (or at least are moving) beyond the day of the nation state as well.
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