We became the late 18th Century British. What now?

This article is part of an RS series reflecting on the 250th anniversary of American Independence and its impact and meaning for modern U.S. foreign policy, war, and peace.

In the run-up to America’s 250th anniversary, we’ve witnessed a few amazing spectacles, but not much historical reflection.

Insofar as discussions have addressed our history, attention has focused on American statesmen and warriors from back in the day. But there is more to be gained by looking from a different standpoint: that of Britain’s leaders at the time of the American revolution. They had an empire to run, as we now do, not a republic to create.

Great Britain had achieved, by 1763, a position widely compared to Rome in its heyday. It had won the great contest with France over control of the interior of North America, gaining Canada and a secure claim to the Mississippi River in the Peace of Paris in 1763.

But all was not well. As the victor, Britain possessed a keen sentiment that its North American colonies had to work to its advantage. It resented that it had borne so much of the costs.

The British thought the American colonists owed them a huge debt of gratitude for the victories that the mother country had won. They discovered a massive burden-sharing problem with the thirteen British continental colonies. The reforms in the system of trade and taxation undertaken by British ministries between 1763 and 1765 were intended to address these inequities. Their result, of course, was to inflame the spirit of the American colonists and launch the sequence of retaliations that produced the war a decade later.

In undertaking their reforms, British ministers led by George Grenville were “thinking continentally,” hoping for a rational adjustment imposing mutual cooperation between the mother country and the colonies.

Grenville, however, badly misjudged the sentiments of the colonists, who were shocked by the new impositions. They thought that they labored under onerous restrictions imposed by London. Weren’t they the basis of British wealth and power? Weren’t they the ones who were owed a debt of gratitude? In their Stamp Act Congress in 1765, they acknowledged that the colonies owed allegiance to the king and a “due subordination” to the British Parliament but they strenuously objected to the things the British government was doing by way of exercising its authority.

The more they thought about it, as the contest deepened, the more it seemed that their legislative assemblies had been equivalent in authority to the Parliament of Great Britain all along.

These contradictory perspectives and assessments made conflict between the two sides inevitable, though at first the British ministry and nation did not appreciate that there were “two sides.” They thought the thirteen colonies were incapable of concerted action and ineradicably provincial in their outlook.

After the provocation of the Boston Tea Party in late 1773, the British passed Coercive Acts intended to bring the Massachusetts Bay colony to heel and isolate her from her sister colonies. In this expectation of colonial disunity, they proved to be very wrong. “Divide and rule” was the British motto; “unite or die” the American. The war proved far more costly and protracted than either side appreciated at the beginning, but the American colonists, with vital French assistance, managed to attain a unity sufficient to turn back the assertion of British sovereignty over them.

No parallel is exact, but the U.S. position in the world in the early 21st century does resemble in salient respects that of Great Britain in the wake of its victory over the French in 1763. Both had gained legitimacy by the defeat of hated enemies (the U.S. over the Soviet Union). Both had made a bid for universal empire. And both had a massive burden-sharing problem with dependent allies.

Adam Smith was especially preoccupied by this vast disparity of burdens between protector and protected, which he addressed in the closing pages of his “Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations,” published in 1776. Smith wrote that the rulers of Great Britain had “amused the people that they possessed a great empire on the west side of the Atlantic.” But that empire, Smith held, had existed only in their imagination. “It has hitherto been not an empire, but the project of an empire; not a gold-mine, but the project of a gold-mine — a project which has cost, which continues to cost, and which, if pursued in the same way as it has been hitherto, is likely to cost, immense expense without being likely to bring any profit.”

Smith shared the metropolitan view that the British had laid out their wealth and power on behalf of the colonists — the reverse of the colonial perception. He suggested resolving this high-cost, low-benefit situation by giving the colonists representation in the British Parliament. Barring that solution, which he acknowledged that few on either side found attractive, Britain would have to give up the empire and adjust “to the true mediocrity of her circumstances.”

Two hundred fifty years on, the American empire has gotten itself into a set of predicaments resembling that which Britain faced in 1776. Both empires, one should think, have been less a gold mine than the project of a gold mine, less an empire than a project of an empire. Both have certainly entailed immense expense. Both have needed to adjust to the true mediocrity of their circumstances.

In each case, the dictates of power came to supersede the claims of right. In a 1777 letter to George Washington, the Virginia statesman Richard Henry Lee wrote that his British antagonists “paid little regard to good faith, or any obligations of justice and humanity,” whereas “the American Character” had to be especially concerned with “preserving its faith inviolate.” To Lee, the contrast proved “the disadvantage we are under in conducting war against an old, corrupt, and powerful people, who having much credit and influence in the world will venture on things that would totally ruin the reputation of young and rising communities like ours.” This seems uncannily familiar.

America’s forefathers sang a melody of anti-imperialism that continues to resonate today, as when Robert Morris, the financier of the War of Independence, wrote of Britain’s pursuit of “those schemes of universal empire which the virtue and fortitude of America first checked, and which it is the object of the present war to frustrate.” Two hundred fifty years of history has made for a Great Shapeshifting. We started out as a constitutional federal republic and ended as a universal empire. We became the thing against which our forefathers revolted.

The parallel between these two imperial predicaments in 1776 and 2026 is not exact, of course, for there were vital differences between how the provincial dependents of these respective imperial centers saw their situation. An ironic consequence of Britain’s sweeping victory in 1763 was that the American colonists no longer faced a security threat from France. That made the path to independence a lot less perilous than it otherwise would have been.

America’s dependents in Europe, West Asia, and East Asia, by contrast, believe they face real threats to their security from Russia, Iran, and China. That sentiment has kept them bound to the United States thus far, but there are clearly lots of agonizing reappraisals underway among all our significant others. The premise that America actually offers protection has received a deep wound from the Iran War, as also from Trump’s larger predatory conduct toward dependent states.

As James Wilson noted in a 1774 pamphlet, the obedience owed to the king had followed from his protection; without that, there could be no basis for allegiance or obedience from the subject. America’s allies thought they had enlisted in a league of peace; they learned to their surprise that it had become a union for U.S.-Israeli aggrandizement. What happens next could be the next great lesson in history, though this time America may not be on the “right” side of it.