The French government, too, grew increasingly dismayed in the postwar era as the Algerians revolted, the Vietnamese routed France’s armed forces, and its empire disintegrated. The problem is not that we were once in charge, but that we are not in charge any more.” In 2002, Boris Johnson – currently Britain’s prime minister – wrote contemptuously that Africa “may be a blot, but it is not a blot upon our conscience. And the fact that Britannia no longer ruled the waves continued to sting. governments, British ofﬁcials felt deeply humiliated. Blocked in their reassertion of imperial power by the Soviet and U.S. In 1956, Prime Minister Anthony Eden, angered by the policies of Egypt’s revolutionary leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, launched a British invasion, along with France and Israel, to retake control of the Suez Canal.

Suppress independence struggles and bitterly lamented the decline of imperial grandeur. In the aftermath of World War II, as decolonizationgathered momentum throughout the far-flung British Empire, the guardians of the Old Order worked to Disconsolate Russian ofﬁcials have their counterparts in Britain. During a televised address on February 21, 2022, Putin again invoked the past, claiming that Ukraine was “historically Russian land.” In fact, of course, a Ukrainian nation, with its own language and culture, had existed for many centuries and had been ruled by a variety of nations during that period. As early as 2005, he told the Russian parliament that the collapse of the Soviet empire was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century” and “a genuine tragedy” for “the Russian people.” In July 2021, he published a long historical article (“On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”) contending that there had never been a Ukraine independent of Russia. Imperial nostalgia has long pervaded Putin’s thinking. This February, Putin launched a military invasion of Ukraine, with horrendous consequences. Ultimately, under the leadership of Vladimir Putin, they decided on the latter, employing Russian military power to attack neighboring Georgia, win a civil war in Syria, annex Crimea, and instigate a separatist revolt in Ukraine’s Donbas region. But the implosion of the empire in 1991 left Russian leaders adrift, uncertain whether to steer their nation toward a more modest role in the world or to revive what they considered their country’s past imperial glory. Traditionally referred to as the “prison of nations,” Russia, in its Czarist and Soviet phases, controlled a vast Eurasian land mass of subject peoples. The Russian empire provides a striking illustration of this phenomenon. Although great empires rank among the most powerful engines of world history, they are also among the most dangerous, especially as they brood over their decline.

Imperial glory coop