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Always beware a declining superpower
Even under normal leadership, a status-anxious US would be lashing out.
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Relative decline can make a country behave erratically, even a superpower like the United States, says the writer.
PHOTO: AFP
Janan Ganesh
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 post-war 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.
