Britain came close to governing the world in 1918, when Ireland decided to part company with it.

Britain’s only rational purpose in making war on the German, Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires and destroying them was to establish itself in World dominance.  For a moment in 1918/19 it thought it had done so.  Winston Churchill was certain of it.  He looked forward to several generations of British magisterial sovereignty in world affairs.

The Irish electorate voted to leave the United Kingdom and govern itself as a Republic.  An Irish Parliament was assembled from the Deputies elected in the December 1918 General Election.  Three-quarters of those elected Deputies met in Dublin in January 1919—without being called, or permitted, by the Crown.  They acted in accordance with the principle of national self-determination, which had been one of the big British slogans in its World War.

The Irish Parliament declared Irish independence and appointed a Government.  That Irish Government then proceeded to take the administrative system established by the British Government in Ireland out of British hands insofar as it was electorally based.  And, where it was not electorally based—Army and Law—it set up its own Army and its own Courts.

Some years ago a voice from Trinity College said that the whole Irish enterprise was invalid because that Irish Government was not recognised b y any other Government and recognition by another Government was necessary under the principle of national self-determination.

We pointed out that, when Ireland declared independence and began to govern itself, the world of diplomacy was controlled by Britain.  Britain dominated the Versailles Conference which was remaking the world.  It locked the representatives of the elected Irish Government out of the Versailles Conference while including representatives of states which it intended to establish, but which as yet had no actual existence, e.g.  the Czechoslovak nation and the nation on which a Jewish State was to be erected in Palestine.

The experience of world dominance is inebriating.  It is properly speaking, not an experience at all.  It is transcendental.

The British Empire sent the world into meltdown by the way it fought its Great War.  It replaced war as a means of resolving material conflicts by compromise in the light of trial by combat with war as a conflict of Good and Evil—in which compromise is impossible because Evil must be destroyed.

At the turn of the year 1918/19 Britain lived in the delusion of having destroyed Evil.  It had deluged itself for four years with the propaganda that it was making war on a force of Evil that stood in the way of perpetual peace.  It had defeated that force of Evil and now it stood alone in dominance in a world that would be what it willed it to be.  The Prime Minister, Lloyd George, saw it like this:

“The whole state of society is more or less molten and you can stamp upon that molten mass almost anything as long as you do it with firmness and determination”  (quoted in J.W. Miller, Contesting Democracy, Yale 2011).

But what determines the will when it no longer has material obstacles to cope with  omnipotence is disorientating.  It leaves one spoiled for choice.  Caprice comes into its own.

England did reshape the world capriciously during its moment of megalomania in 1918-19.  But it was not able to stamp hard enough to give substance to its capricious creations when English power—or the illusion of it (the two are not entirely distinct)—collapsed in 1922 in the face of effective Turkish resistance to the ‘Treaty’ which Britain attempted to impose on it in 1919.

The attempt to enforce the Turkish ‘Treaty’ by means of Anglo-Greek invasion of the Turkish mainland was beaten off by Kemal Atatürk—and the British War Cabinet fell at the moment when Michael Collins was enforcing the Irish ‘Treaty’ by means of civil war.

Britain became the greatest Empire the world had ever seen in November 1918.  The War Coalition won the General Election of December 1918 by a landslide.  The world was its oyster.  Sinn Fein was the only fly in its ointment!

It broke the Sinn Fein party in December 1921 when Michael Collins undertook to act for it in imposing a ‘Treaty’ on the Irish.

It was itself broken in 1922 when the War Coalition fell in the face of Turkish resistance.  

The process of Imperial decay set in with the 1922 Election.  In the course of its decay it was responsible for many great atrocities—the greatest being the Second World War—with each atrocity being a step in its decline.

It is currently engaged in a war of defence against Iran, which has not attacked it.  It did not take part in the surprise assassination attack on the Iranian leadership by the American/Jewish alliance but, when Iran responded to the attack on it by striking at American bases and assets in the Gulf statelets, the British Government claimed that it had a legitimate interest in those statelets and that Iran was attacking those interests in the way it defended itself against the American attack on it.  It would therefore allow the Americans to fly bombing raids on Iran from English bases, treating them as defensive responses to Iranian strikes at British assets in the Gulf States.

The Americans, who are exulting in their sheer brute power—as Britain once did—are contemptuous of this kind of thing.  They are British offspring and they know it, and are becoming puzzled by it.

British adventurism forced their entry into world power politics by drawing them into its two European World Wars when their natural line of development was across the Pacific.  English millenarianism was the nucleus of their development.  They are a WASP [White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, ed.] and are well aware of it as being the factor that made them so different from everything ‘down Mexico way’.  And they now seem to be close to the position that England reached in 1918-19.

The demagogic megalomania climaxed in President Obama’s declaration that America was the only indispensable nation.  

It seemed for a moment that President Trump was aware of the Omnipotence dilemma and that his purpose was to save the US from it by relocating it as a state amongst the states as a fact—rather than as the polite fiction it has been since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But the Millenarian impulse which created the United States had its way with him!