Is America Repeating Britain’s Imperial Twilight?

What the Decline of Pax Americana Means for Israel

History does not repeat itself, Mark Twain allegedly observed, but it often rhymes. As we witness Washington’s dramatic turn toward protectionism and strategic retrenchment in 2025, the echoes of late imperial Britain grow difficult to ignore. For Israel — facing its most serious regional confrontation in decades while its principal ally retreats behind tariff walls — these rhymes carry particularly ominous overtones.

The Pax Britannica, spanning roughly from 1815 to 1914, rested on three interconnected pillars: naval supremacy securing global trade routes, financial dominance centred on sterling, and an ideological commitment to free trade. The Pax Americana constructed analogous foundations after 1945: overwhelming military capability, dollar hegemony, and a liberal trading order institutionalised through the GATT and WTO. Both orders promised not merely peace but prosperity, premised on the hegemon’s willingness to provide public goods while accepting the burdens of leadership.

What distinguishes the British trajectory from the American one is the sequence of policy choices made as each power confronted relative decline. Britain’s response offers a cautionary template that Washington appears determined to follow — with consequences that extend far beyond America’s shores.

The Protectionist Temptation

Britain’s commitment to free trade, crystallised in the 1846 repeal of the Corn Laws, was not merely economic policy but national identity. Yet by the 1880s, as Germany and the United States emerged as industrial competitors, voices calling for protection grew louder. Joseph Chamberlain’s tariff reform movement in the early 1900s explicitly linked protectionism with imperial preference. The Liberals’ landslide victory in 1906 postponed this reckoning, but the Great Depression finally broke British orthodoxy: the Ottawa Conference of 1932 established the imperial preference system Chamberlain had championed three decades earlier.

America’s trajectory compresses this chronology alarmingly. The post-war consensus favouring trade liberalisation has collapsed with remarkable speed. The tariff regime implemented in 2025 represents not merely a policy adjustment but a wholesale repudiation of the order Washington itself constructed. The Tax Foundation estimates these measures constitute the largest tax increase as a percentage of GDP since 1993, raising the weighted average tariff rate to approximately 14 percent.

The historical parallel most frequently invoked is Smoot-Hawley, the 1930 tariff act credited with deepening the Great Depression through retaliatory spirals that collapsed global trade by 65 percent. Crucially, Smoot-Hawley preceded Britain’s abandonment of free trade at Ottawa by two years. America is now reprising both roles simultaneously: the protectionist provocateur and the hegemon in retreat.

Israel: Collateral Damage from a Closest Ally

The tariff regime’s treatment of Israel illustrates how protectionist retreat corrodes alliances. In 1985, the United States signed its first-ever free trade agreement — with Israel. For four decades, this agreement symbolised the special relationship, granting Israeli exports duty-free access to the American market. That architecture has now been dismantled.

Israeli goods now face a 15 percent tariff, identical to rates imposed on the European Union, South Korea, and Japan. The 1985 agreement has been conveniently forgotten. The Manufacturers Association of Israel estimates the damage at $2.3 billion in annual export revenue and between 18,000 and 26,000 jobs at risk. Medical devices, optical equipment, machinery, and diamonds — sectors Israel has cultivated over decades — face a competitiveness shock. Should threatened tariffs on semiconductors and pharmaceuticals materialise, the damage could reach $4.5 billion annually.

The irony is bitter: 99 percent of American goods already entered Israel tariff-free before this policy shift. Israel pre-emptively eliminated its remaining duties on US imports in a last-minute attempt to secure exemption. It made no difference. When allies face duties indistinguishable from those imposed on adversaries — when a nation that hosts American intelligence facilities, coordinates regional security, and is actively engaged in a multi-front conflict with Iranian proxies receives the same treatment as competitors — the cumulative effect erodes the confidence on which alliance architecture depends.

The Alliance Dilemma: No Successor Awaits

Britain’s managed decline benefited from one crucial advantage: a willing successor. Harold Macmillan captured this aspiration in his famous observation to a colleague: ‘We are Greeks in this American empire. You will find the Americans much as the Greeks found the Romans — great big, vulgar, bustling people, more vigorous than we are and also more idle, with more unspoiled virtues but also more corrupt.’ Britain would guide the new Rome as Athens once had. The transition from Pax Britannica to Pax Americana, while hardly frictionless, occurred between powers sharing fundamental interests and values.

No such successor awaits America. China offers not continuity but revision, not liberalism but state capitalism. The Russia-China-Iran axis represents not a successor order but an alternative one. The BRICS bloc, now representing some 45 percent of global population and actively pursuing de-dollarisation, suggests how rapidly alternatives can crystallise once hegemonic resolve falters.

For Israel, this structural difference is not academic but existential. Britain could become Athens to America’s Rome because both powers shared liberal democratic values. Israel cannot pivot to any plausible successor. China’s alignment with Iran precludes partnership. Russia arms Israel’s adversaries. The European Union lacks hard power and faces domestic public opinion increasingly hostile to Israeli policy. Unlike European or Asian allies who might hedge toward strategic autonomy, Israel has no alternative patron and no realistic path to self-sufficient great power status.

India, forecast to become the world’s third-largest economy by 2028, represents a potential market and security partner — but not a substitute for American guarantees. New Delhi participates in the Quad while maintaining strategic autonomy; it courts American investment while resisting American alignment. India is neither successor nor revisionist but something genuinely novel, and its rise complicates rather than resolves Israel’s predicament.

Material Overstretch or Distributional Failure?

Defenders of America’s current course argue it reflects wisdom, not error — that Washington is correcting overstretch before it becomes fatal, learning from Britain’s mistake of maintaining commitments beyond sustainable capacity. The tariffs, in this framing, are strategic recalibration: forcing allies to share burdens, compelling adversaries to negotiate, rebuilding the industrial base that underwrites military power.

The argument founders on closer examination. Britain’s overstretch was material: the empire genuinely lacked resources to defend commitments from Singapore to Suez. America’s ‘overstretch’ is distributional: the nation possesses ample resources, but the domestic political economy has failed to share the gains from hegemony broadly enough to sustain popular support. The remedy for material overstretch is retrenchment; the remedy for distributional failure is redistribution. Tariffs address neither. Steel tariffs help surviving steel firms and their shareholders; they do not resurrect the communities where steel mills closed decades ago.

Against the declinist narrative stands one counter-argument: American dominance in artificial intelligence and advanced semiconductors represents a form of hegemony that Victorian Britain never possessed. But technological leadership and geopolitical hegemony are related, not identical. Britain remained a scientific leader well into the twentieth century — radar, jet engines, computing — without this translating into sustained strategic primacy. Technology diffuses; advantages erode. And crucially, tariff policy actively undermines the conditions for technological leadership: the semiconductor supply chain spans Taiwan, South Korea, the Netherlands, and Japan — allies now facing duties that strain relationships and fragment the very networks American primacy depends upon.

The Path Not Taken

Britain’s turn toward imperial preference in the 1930s did not arrest decline; it accelerated it by fragmenting the global economy and empowering revisionist powers. If America’s protectionist turn follows the same pattern, the consequences will be measured not in decades but years.

For Israel, the implications are stark. The distributional failures that have eroded American domestic support for internationalism require domestic American remedies — investment in displaced communities, portable benefits, genuine retraining. These are harder than tariffs, slower than executive orders, less satisfying than declarations of national emergency. They are also more likely to preserve the alliance architecture on which Israeli security depends.

In the meantime, Israel must act. The January 2026 EU-India free trade agreement — ‘the mother of all deals,’ as both sides called it — offers a template: accelerate negotiations with Brussels despite political headwinds, deepen the defence partnership with New Delhi, and invest in domestic defence industrial capacity that reduces dependence on American supply chains. Above all, Israel must reckon honestly with the possibility that American security guarantees, however robust they appear today, may not be unconditional or permanent.

The Pax Americana is not ending because America embraced free trade too long but because it is abandoning the principles that made American power legitimate and durable. Mark Twain’s aphorism about history rhyming may be apocryphal, but its insight endures. America is not fated to repeat Britain’s imperial twilight. But the rhyme is growing louder, and Israel — lacking any Athens-to-Rome transition of its own — has more reason than most to hope the verse changes before it is too late.