Empire Building

On 6 May 1946, the renowned journalist Alistair Cooke said this on Letter from America, his decades-long radio broadcast programme:

"Americans are not particularly good at sensing the real elements of another people's culture. It helps them to approach foreigners with carefree warmth and an animated lack of misgiving. It also makes them, on the whole, terrible administrators on foreign soil. They find it almost impossible to believe that poorer peoples, far from the Statue of Liberty, should not want in their heart of hearts to become Americans. If it should happen that America, in its new period of world power, comes to do what every other world power has done: if Americans should have to govern large numbers of foreigners, you must expect that Americans will be well hated before they are admired for themselves."

It was a remarkably prescient piece of his inimitable mind, and his trans-Atlantic thought should inform American policy on adventures in Iraq and other parts of the wide world. I cannot help but think that unless you have the genuine blood of Empire in your veins, to the point that you understand you live to serve the Empire and not to dictate terms over it, you will never be a good administrator in a foreign land.

Worse still, you may be hung up to twist in the wind by those you tried to rule.