Every great power eventually faces decline—but does decline inevitably lead to collapse?

In this episode, Fraser, Nick and Peter examine what it really means for a nation, empire or civilisation to decline. Is America's relative loss of global dominance something to fear, or simply the natural consequence of the rest of the world becoming more prosperous?

Drawing on examples ranging from the British Empire and Ancient Rome to the Ottoman Empire and modern China, the discussion explores how nations rise, transform and reinvent themselves. The team argues that decline is rarely a sudden event, but a gradual process whose outcome depends less on economics than on identity, institutions and the ability to adapt.

Along the way they distinguish between absolute and relative decline, debate whether empires ever truly disappear, introduce Nick's "Declinometer", and consider why Britain's transition from imperial power to modern nationhood was comparatively successful. The conversation concludes with a practical set of lessons for how countries, and perhaps even individuals, can learn to decline with dignity.

Hello and welcome to the Cognitive Engineering Podcast brought to you by Aleph Insights and produced by me, Fraser McGruer. I'm here with Peter Coghill and Nick Hare of Aleph Insights. On this podcast we look at a wide range of topics from an analytical viewpoint.

And today we're discussing how to decline. Nick, you look like an expert on this. Go for it.

I have some bad news for our American listener.

Oh, no.

Sorry, what was it previously?

Sorry, it was 40%. OK. Now obviously it's increased in real terms, absolutely no doubt about that, by multiples.

But in terms of relative economic power, the US has declined.

But not only that, I think it feeds into this longer term picture, feeds into a short term perception at the moment that they have this sort of chaotic, unpredictable government presided over by a narcissistic dotard and are becoming embroiled in un unwinnable wars in the Middle East. The spectacle of a mixed martial arts fight on the lawn of the, of the, of the once, you know, highly.

Respected building, not much class in their 250th.

Yeah, I mean, so, so, you know, in some sense. And that, that sort of. The pictures of the, the once beautiful reflecting pool, all with the paint peeling and algae everywhere, sabotage.

It's, it's, you know, that e. They're a global laughingstock.

And the decline is made even sweeter really by the schadenfreude associated with all of the decades of bombast and self entitlement that we've had to put up with from the US And I think the rest of the world is quite enjoying it. Well, anyway, I've got some good news for the Americans.

Well, we could say that because we've done it before.

We've done it before. We're here to help. Don't worry. We were all those things about 50 years ago. We were the empire that as a.

Country and as individuals we have some expertise in this area.

Indeed, indeed. And I think we're going to draw on that to think about, you know what?

Well, first of all, how do we know where we are in the decline trajectory if indeed we are there? Maybe we're being pessimistic. And what are the drivers of good and bad ways to decline, you know, so that we can give our.

Some advice to the Americans about how to handle this gracefully.

Right. So, yeah, we're talking about how to decline. We're checking how do we know if something is declining.

Right.

Yeah.

But also I think key to this is how do you do it in the best possible fashion.

Right, Indeed.

Got it.

Yeah.

Okay. Boom, here we go. Okay, Nick, so kick us off. You're quite, you're a bit of a definitions guy. I think we need some parameters here. Go for it.

Yeah. So we need to think about, well, let's say we want to get some data on what decline looks like.

So historically we want to observe some things and say, right, here are some things that decline. Well, here are some things that decline badly. Well, the trouble is, what kind of thing are we talking about?

Because a lot of people have talked about empires and you do hear the phrase the American empire, but actually the US is pretty unusual in that it's been a kind of global hegemon, but hasn't actually during, apart from 19th century. Obviously they accrued states to become the United States. But.

But actually it hasn't really been a kind of territorially acquisitive empire in the way that you're used to seeing when you look back in, you know, beyond. Beyond that in history. Neil Ferguson says that the US is an empire, but refuses to admit it.

But I mean, I think that the differences in the kind of imperialism, if the US has it is, is not so much you do this because I govern you, but more you do this because you depend on me militarily or I can coerce you in some way. So it's, you know, it's like it is a different kind of relationship.

In the old days, you might have had an empire, and in the empire there was a kingdom. And you would say, well, you're, you know, you're my subject, you king, so you have to do what I say or I'm going to send the troops in.

And the argument would be, I think, well, the US Basically does have that. It's, it has client states, it has countries which depend on it, and effectively they have that relationship.

But it isn't because those areas are considered territorially part of the U.S. but if we sort of widen it a bit and think about what we mean about what a nation is and when nations start and stop.

Yeah, because it doesn't have to be empire, it can just be a dominant country.

No, and I think the trouble is in the past those two concepts are completely aligned. So we are A little bit. We've got to think about something a bit subtler here. But what do we mean by, by a nation?

Right, so what is, for example, did the US start with the Declaration of Independence or actually was that just one part of the rise of the US and that actually we can think of the United States as being continuous with, you know, the colonies and you know, the. As individual colonies, you know, there are different tiers of government. So an empire typically contains kingdoms.

Kingdoms contain duchies, you know, and duchies contain smaller units themselves. And.

And it's like, well, if we want to know what the fate of a particular entity is, we to know whether it declined or whether it ended or whether it continued in a different form.

So for example, if, to take Germany, the Third Reich, was that the end of a really brief empire or was it actually just more like an externally sponsored coup that replaced the government of Germany with a different, more cuddly, more cuddly than the Nazis type of government? You know, could we say that Germany is.

The Third Reich didn't end, it's actually just continued on as first of all west and East Germany and you know, and those two, did they, are they continuous with the concept of Germany? Did the Soviet Union end or is it actually just carrying on as Russia? You know, the British Empire, is that actually still in existence in the same.

In a meaningful form, but now it's the uk plus some other islands you can't find on a map and other things like the county of Strathclyde. Is that the modern day successor of the ancient kingdom of Strathclyde? So I'm going to say it's actually not very straightforward.

Did the US cease to exist during the US Civil War, or did it become a small bit of the US and a different country?

Or did it only really start after the Civil War?

So I sort of think, well, actually, look, we probably want to be as generous as possible here because the reason we're asking this question is you live through it, right? You've got to. People live through it. When the Third Reich ended, Germans didn't all disappear and get replaced with a different bunch of people.

And so I sort of think, well, let's say, you know, we're thinking about, you know, the end of the Soviet Union as a particularly chaotic time in Russia. Russians lived through that, right? So it makes sense to say, well, we're going to actually treat that as one continuous entity, right?

It was Russia, it was the Russian Empire back in the day. Then it was the Soviet Union and Then now it's basically Russia and possibly the other sort of parts of the Soviet Union.

But one way or the other, we'll, we'll just try and try and treat that as a continuous entity and talk about the experience going through of once upon a time being a certain level of power and now being a lower level of power.

So the point is, first of all, I think the point is that first we've got to define the thing that you're talking about. Right. To find that before you can even start talking about. Is this going. Yeah.

Because actually, sorry, just the important thing to say is countries, nations, political entities, they very rarely just end. Right. They don't very rarely stop existing and will actually just turn into other stuff.

So I think we want to kind of trace that through line and talk about those, the trajectory, you know, how you go from being the British Empire through to just being the UK and the Pitcairn Islands, you know.

Yep. Okay. Anything to add at this point, Peter?

Well, I think it's not just the US who are in trouble. I think we, the uk, I think post Brexit has really just sort of put a last nail in our declining imperial coffin.

Yeah, our imperial coffin, but also Europe. Europe is losing economic share to China. Yeah.

And we're suffering from democratic decline, rise of popularism, the strengthening of the right in Europe again. So you're not alone. United States, we're having troubles too.

Yeah.

I think it's worth focusing though, Peter, because Peter mentioned a few things and particularly this thing about losing share, which is an interesting idea.

Now, if we think about what, what it is that, that we mean by power, let's broadly say whatever this thing is that we're talking about, that, you know, you had, you had power and now you. And now you've got less power.

I mean, the things that we can measure generally, you know, don't capture precisely what I think we mean here, but obviously population is quite easy to measure. So that's, you know, historically is correlated really Perfect.

Both the biggest GDP in the world, so far as we can tell, and the biggest population.

And that's because productivity didn't really change very much, you know, product until the Industrial Revolution, really, they weren't massive differences in the productivity of individuals. So you wouldn't have had a country of 10 million people massively out producing a country of 500 million people.

But by the time you have the industrial revolution, you know, and particularly northern Europe and you know, in the US suddenly you have these enormous disparities in power where population is divorced from economic power.

And this is why it's not necessarily a bad thing because it just if as the rest of the world catches up, fully industrializes and then becomes advanced industrial producers, it kind of like that's that we're approaching a sort of kind of maximum productivity across the world. You'd expect the United States, Europe, who have had a head start, to lose out share.

But overall the overall productivity of the whole world is much greater.

Yeah, and I think this is zero sum game, right.

And in modern terms roughly half a billion quid of the whole British Empire. It's half a billion people. Our GDP now is about six times that just of the uk.

Doing in like absolute, in sort of measurable.

Yeah, in absolute terms.

Yeah, in absolute terms, you know, but obviously in relative terms it's fallen, you know, significantly because other countries have got even richer than that, you know.

But let's just, you know, make sure that we're very clear that relative decline, which is more or less what we're going to be talking about, does not mean absolute decline. Absolute decline is really rare. It's very unusual, does happen.

Obviously, you know, you think of Europe in the Dark Ages or the fall of the Roman Empire or whatever. I mean you absolutely do get situations where people's, you know, output declines in actual real terms.

But I think what we're talking about here is almost always, almost exclusively a matter of, of relative decline. And there's a question about whether we should care about that, whether we should. Given that we're all actually just richer.

Does it matter that the Americans are now only producing 20% of GDP if it's still more than what they were producing when they were producing 40%.

I'd just like to say even in an absolute decline case of Rome, life on a sort of tactical working, day to day level, life kind of still goes on.

The people who were the Britons who were part of the Roman Empire, when the Roman Empire kind of Disappeared, not quite overnight, but it disappeared. They still went on with life.

They still produced and lived and loved and died and doing what they were doing kind of before, just with a different boss. So it's not like it's. It's very. I think it's extremely rare that declare decline of a state causes huge, huge problems for everybody involved.

But also just to sort of come in with something which we might pick up later and it goes back to what we were saying, like when, you know, if something is declining or not, or how do you define a thing as it changes over time? Sometimes, you know, or what's really useful is perspective from time. It's only when we look back we can have a firmer view.

And it's when we look back as well as you might be a citizen in Britain circa 300 AD, let's say, and everything feels fine. And as you say, we continue to, you know, live life and live laugh and whatever it is.

But actually, objectively, later on we can look back and go, actually, even though that person was quite happy, if we compare them to a person at 200 years before or 200 years after, we can take a view on like it actually isn't that great for them maybe.

Yeah. I mean, there's a beautiful Anglo Saxon poem called the Ruin, which is written by someone contemplating. I think that.

I think it's not known who the author is, but it's contemplating the ruins of what they think is Bath, Roman Bath. And you know, and. And of course it's all sort of silt. The spring's all silted up and the buildings are crumbling and it's sort of like how.

Who were these amazing people in the past? Like, that's. That's what. That's what decline is. You know, I think that abs. That's what absolute decline feels like.

It's like we can't even do the things that some ancestors of ours did. You know, we're not in that position. The US is nowhere near in that position. So let's just all, you know, step back a bit.

But I mean, just so just to take the grand sweep of history, looking at the sort of last 2,000 years, you can more or less say that basically India and China have had its own up the whole time. I mean, that includes the Roman Empire, which was nothing compared to these Eastern empires.

I mean, you know, basically, I think in Western Europe we have a quite a very sort of Western European centric view of all this, where we think, oh, the, you know, the big empires of the past. Are the Romans and, you know that. But no, actually it's basically the Chinese and the Indians and. And it's been.

They just had a temporary blip.

Yeah. And then. And then, of course, they're back. They're back, baby. And. And, you know, and then, of course, you get this huge. You get the.

Even the British Empire was still only at its height, was only, you know, 10% of world GDP or something.

Yeah, so, I mean, I think, you know, where we are now with, you know, people pointing at China and India and saying, oh, look, you know, these guys are these new rising powers. Well, they're not. They're not.

They've always been big, you know, it's just that now, as we were saying, you know, productivity, we have this little cheeky productivity cheat that we discovered, but now that is being eroded because we're living in a global world. So anyway, I think putting all that.

Together, right, they just got distracted slightly by Maoism and now they're back.

There was a bit. Yeah, there was a bit of silliness going on also.

Just, actually, just to nail this down for a minute, basically, we're talking about the Industrial Revolution really here, aren't we? Is that about right? Yeah.

And I want. The idea of changes to your level of prosperity being something you experience in your lifetime is very new.

Like, people in the medieval eras lived with the same level of prosperity as their parents and their grandparents.

And the idea that, you know, you suddenly we have a whole new set of stuff and new technology and we living totally different lives and have different prosperity levels to people who are still alive is a very new recent phenomenon. So this idea of, oh, we can see decline happening in our lifetime, that's. That's new. And I mean, as Peter said, you know, in.

In the past, someone living in the Dark Ages would not have been conscious that it was the Dark Ages.

That's not what they called it themselves.

No, no, exactly. You. You can look back, oh, hang on, 500 years ago, there was these interesting people building these buildings.

We don't know how to build now, but it's not like, oh, the Romans are there building stuff, and then, you know, 50 years later, they're all gone. It's chaos and misery. Now. There have been periods like that, but let's just, you know, anyway, so what.

Are you going to bring us around to now?

Well, I think so. We've talked about how we measure prosperity and decline.

I think what, you know, the key point is let's, let's try not to focus too much on this idea of empires and ending. We're not talking about how do you avoid ending? Because actually it's quite hard to say that empires and countries end.

They transform into other things what we want to do, you know. And also the other key point being we are. No one's declining in absolute terms. Okay, let's all just calmed down.

What we're talking about is relative decline.

So having said all that, can we then start looking at some trajectories of historical political entities and start saying, well, these ones are good and these ones are bad. Right. So that's, I think, yeah, what we probably want to move on to next.

Peter, have you got some examples for us?

Yeah, so I've got three historical examples. We've sort of mentioned them before, but I think it's worth going a little bit into detail.

Yeah, you, you guys can't project power.

Yeah. And it's interesting that you.

The Suez crisis wasn't in any way causally related to our decline, but it, but I think for a lot of people it was a really shocking symptom, like a revelation. Yeah. Oh my God, we can't just tell these Arabs what to do anymore.

Yeah, they don't listen to us. Yeah, they don't just take our word for it. Yeah. Minor exceptions like the Falkland Islands. We kind of kept it at a great distance.

But that was a pretty exceptional sort of minor thing in comparison. So what we. So what is a. What did we do? Well then that makes a success as opposed to Suez.

We really pivoted towards sidling up towards the United States and develop the special relationship while, you know, sort of by retaining and while sort of, while working on sort of soft power things like promotion of British English language, projection of schooling and things through sort of Foreign Overseas Service.

The Beatles.

The Beatles, yes. Culture, music and etc. BBC Financial sector in London and universities and projecting universities abroad as well. So this sort of.

All this sort of soft power stuff that meant that although the British Empire was gone, the idea that the concept of Britishness was never very far away from a lot of people's minds.

We don't quite have time for it here, but a lot of those to properly analyze it. But a lot of the factors that you've talked about, I think, are to do with the nature of that empire as well. Right.

And also a big one is language as well. Yeah, but, yeah, sorry, go on.

Yeah, it would help that we shared the same language as the emerging hegemon, really. So, yeah, other key things we did was we avoided any catastrophic war as a result of our decline. Particularly.

Particularly internal civil wars and that kind of thing, which is often a marker. Yeah, example. Example of one that went badly then.

Okay, yeah, I've got one in mind. But yeah, go for it.

So, yeah, the example of one that went badly. Rome collapsed, the Roman Empire. So Western Rome declined over about 200 years. Really kind of disappearing in about 4, 470, 450s, 470 AD.

It's still painful to think about. Anyway, sorry, sorry, Pete, it's just. It's too soon.

Nick's one of these men that thinks the Roman empire at least 10 times a day.

Yes, exactly. No, it's just really, really sad, the decline of. Because it feels so metaphorical for so many other things. Anyway, sorry, Peter, carry on.

And the sort of key features of this that really kind of did it for them were military overextension, really. Their entire economy was based on plunder and grabbing slaves and grabbing wealth from other places.

So when they ran out of other places, they kind of ran out wealth. They had own internal fiscal crises. The currency was massively devaluing for some various reasons. I didn't really go into political instability.

They had some pretty weird emperors and some pretty vicious fighting within the political system. They, towards the end, massive over reliance on mercenaries rather than a professional fighting forces, which is a big drain because then.

And then they always sack Rome when you don't pay them well.

Exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's no moment of trend, no sort of key moment, but just lots of. Lots of bad choices leading to decline.

And I think what it really means is, what it really shows is they didn't plan, they didn't have an exit strategy. They sort of took over Europe and they didn't know what they're going to do after that.

They didn't sort of then transition into consolidate that and into a working economy that they could sustain it. Just sort of. They kept the. Kept fighting.

So that's the bat. You've got a good one and a bad one. Have you got a sort of. In the middle one?

Yeah, I think in the middle one. Ottoman Empire, slow dissolution, so referred to.

As the sick man of Europe, famously. You can't. You're legally obliged to say that when you mention the Ottoman Empire.

They did manage various internal reforms, but they were a bit too little, too late. But the real killer was sort of a rise of nationalism, you know, a subject states wanting their own. Their own autonomy. So it's a very.

It feels, I think, a very sort of similar pattern to the British Empire, but they didn't manage it quite as well.

Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I feel like the Ottoman. The strength of the Ottoman brand in inverted commas, when they were powerful was precisely that.

It was a patchwork of lots of. And they didn't kind of go around and say, right, you're Autumn's, I'm going to force Ottomanism down your throat.

There wasn't a kind of, you know, there wasn't that much really over oppressive imperialism.

It was like, well, you know, we're made up of all these different people and loads of different languages and, you know, tolerance of different religions and all of that feels like a big strength when you. When things are on the up. But in the decline suddenly now, well, there's nothing holding it all together.

Yeah, well, look, and just to finish off Ottoman Empire, they arguably did. They did manage it reasonably well because they sort of essentially took the decision to downscale and form a functioning state.

And today we have Turkey, which is a functioning member of the international community. It's quite a big economy. Quite influential. Quite influential, especially given its size and its location is key to lots of things. So.

Yeah, good for them.

Okay. So it seems to me, I mean, just intuitively, but now we're going to drill into it.

It feels to me, from the three examples that you've given, that there's so much tied up in the nature of the thing that is going to help people manage it or not on the way down. That's what it feels like. Yeah.

Yeah. Nick.

I think so.

I've got a declinometer. Yes.

I've got a declineometer, which. Which basically is a. Is a thing you can use to measure how badly your decline is going, right? And it goes from one to seven and it's a scale.

So you kind of look for the thing that is the worst thing that's happened to you and that's the, that's the score you get. Right. So let's first of all. Well, actually there's a zero, which is you're not declining at all, but we'll forget about that.

Number one is you simply lose relative economic power. I think that's the uk, that's the British Empire kind of situation. Number two is you cede lots of bits of land and become a sort of territorial rump.

I think that that's something a bit more like what Peter was talking about with the Ottoman Empire. And then the British Empire obviously kind of gave stuff away.

You can lose to military independence movements, so you can be forced to give, give up land to, to nationalists and so on. Or now number four, an actual civil war. This is a civil war in your core, if you like. This is a fight over control of the. They are bad.

And now we're at the point where I think we can say these are definitely bad things that you want to.

Avoid getting to Roman Empire territory.

Exactly, exactly. As soon as you, as soon as you've got a civil war going on, think you're in bad territory.

Five, you can lose a war to an external power and get invaded and lots of people can die. But five on five, your state in some form continues.

And I think we'd say that the Third Reich or be a good example of that, you know, kind of invaded by lots of other people, but Germany wasn't completely destroyed, you know, and, and it was, it was bad, but it could be worse. Let me tell you. Let me introduce you to six. Six is where you get invaded by another power.

All the same badness that you get in five, but now you get actually absorbed into that other power. You get, if, you know, potentially forcibly colonized, you become a region inside another power and, and so you're autonomy is lowered as a result.

Great.

But you still exist. Like Poland in the Russian Empire, for example, you know, or France during, during World War II, you know, that's. So that's, that's a bad outcome.

But number seven is the very worst thing that can happen to you. And this is where you get invaded. It's very rare, but you get invaded by another power, everyone is killed or enslaved.

Your end of the entity is, in all meaningful terms, ceases to dissolve. Yeah, so, so, you know, and I think the, the, the example that will spring to any Westerner's mind here is Carthage. Yes, so, exactly so.

And so I think we've got a scale of kind of the United Kingdom to Carthage in terms of how bad your declines can be. And so I had a look at a sort of. Well, where do most declines go? And there's a small number of three.

So three is you're kind of losing to independence movements, you're ceding lots of power, retreat to a rump kind of thing. But actually I think, and I think this is where you want to be when you're declining.

The British Empire, Portuguese Empire, Spanish Empire, Spain did have a civil war, so arguably they're actually a four. But then I think the modal outcome here is actually five. The sort of.

At some point you've lost a war, you've been invaded, but the state manages to continue. And that would include France, Germany to some extent Russia, Qing dynasty, China.

So now we're looking at the sort of, the bad, the, the, the, the worse empires where your kind of state meaningfully stops, kind of is absorbed into something else or is broken up because of being invaded. And you know, you kind of lose you, you sort of lose your existence a bit.

And, and that would include the Western Roman Empire, I think, I think you could say the Soviet Union, you know, just more or less the thing dissolved. Hawaii, Byzantium, Austria, Hungary.

But yes, the, the, the sevens, which are absolutely what you don't want to happen to you is very, very few of these. But Carthage, Aztecs, the Incas, you know, so, so that's what we're really trying to avoid.

Right, but, but I reckon you can get away with a three or below. I, that's where we want to aim here.

So quick question just in your data, in your research, was there any pattern in terms of. Let's say there's been a hundred declines, for example, in all history that we can identify.

Is there any sort of movement in, Is there any pattern in terms of outcome, the kind of decline and when it occurred? As in. So, for example, do we see. Earlier in history.

I think it was worse. I think back in the day, if you get defeated by the Mongols, that's really bad. You know, they're likely to enslave and kill.

They're not going to be terribly interested in maintaining your culture.

Exactly. You don't get so much of that these days.

Yeah, you know, so, so I think, I think luckily we're in a world where we've kind of all decided that seven is quite bad and we shouldn't impose. We shouldn't really do that to people.

Well, yeah, it doesn't bode well for. For managing them as a vessel state if you. If you've totally disaffected them.

So where do we go from here? Now we. Now we want to talk about.

Well, I think we should.

Well, let's, let's talk about America. So, you know, and I think the Americans have noticed that they're at one and they're going.

So they said they're at the relative economic decline and they're going, you know what? We didn't used to be at 1. That's bad. What if we start to get to 2 or 3? Does that mean we're going to get to 5? Is a new civil war on the way?

Are we going to get invaded by someone you know? Is China going to invade the US and absorb.

Yeah, so if you talk to some people on the right, they say they are being invaded.

Well, well, exactly.

And if you talk to people on the left, they'll. They quite often talk.

I think it's symptomatic, actually. You know, this kind of tension is symptomatic of decline.

But anyway, so before you go on, Nick, I've just got a quick question which is, are we gonna. Because we're talking about us and sort of now analyzing that, say what's happening against what we've described.

But is the intention then to talk about how one might.

Right. Manage that in both the US and elsewhere? We want to. We want to talk about what, what. Where you end up on this. Right.

So,.

Yeah, I think with the U.S. what would 4, 5, 6 look like? I think things like losing California and New York would be. Then we'd be onto it.

You know, if those states decided to secede or something like that, then you would start to say, well, we are getting further down this path. And then, you know, if there is actually, once you have armed independence movements, perhaps like the film Civil War, you know, that then we've.

I think we've gone too far at that point.

So the point is, how can we make sure we don't get there if we're the US So I'd say number one thing which has come out from what we've discussed is try to avoid having a decisive military confrontation over the fate of your country, whether internally or externally.

Sounds like good advice.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So we even, I mean, at the end of the British Empire, we, We, you know, we lost. Well, we lost America itself. I don't know if you.

They used to be part of US did they?

Yeah, the ungrateful so and so's decided to go then. You know, we lost India, we lost huge chunks of Africa. You know, we nearly got invaded in World War II, arguably, so. So. But we.

A lot of that was not the, that military.

I mean, if you, you know, there were definitely armed independence movements, but actually we didn't give up the empire, mainly because people wrested it from us. We said, oh, actually this is not really worth doing anymore.

It wasn't a fighting withdrawal.

No, exactly. It was like, okay, fine, here you go, have your country back. Yeah, slightly reluctantly, but. But the. And another key thing here is, is a. Is a core.

The concept of a defensible core, I think, seems to be. So Japan, for example, the Japanese Empire, massive great thing. Dan Carlin calls it the supernova.

You know, suddenly, suddenly goes from nothing to enormous, but then sort of very quickly back down to just Japan. That's okay. It's like, well, Japan, we still got Japan. And the core of your identity is associated with that small bit in the middle.

And I think that's why, you know, the loss of all the Roman Empire bit, it doesn't feel bad, but the loss of Rome really does, you know, and why. I think a lot of people find it a bit weird to think of the Eastern Roman Empire as continuous with.

The Roman Empire or even the Holy Roman Empire. And it. And it does. Right. You can see, you know, how it does. But nonetheless. Sorry, go on.

Yeah, because I mean, it's like, look, but you're claiming to be the Roman Empire, but, sorry, FYI, Rome's been sacked by barbarians. You know, you've missed the point.

You need to rebrand now.

Yeah, exactly. And I think Austria has done that quite well.

You know, Austria, again, used to find a lot of these empires actually still actually can identify with the bit they've got left. And I think in some sense, if you imagine taking away New York and California.

Or the east coast of the us, it's not clear to me that what's left would feel like the core. It would feel like actually we've lost quite a big thing, which we consider to be the US here. So willingness to back down. We didn't fight it, did we?

We've got to be the bigger man. And you've got to say, well, I'll tell you what, this is. British Empire seems expensive to try and hold on to.

Can I introduce you to the concept of the Commonwealth? It's this new cool idea. You can join. It's like a club and you get to go to conferences doesn't mean a great deal.

Yeah, I think, you know, the, the acceptance of relative decline make a virtue of it.

Absolutely. Yeah.

So we're richer than our parents, we're not starving.

You got to reframe it as a choice.

And hey, maybe it wasn't all good for everyone. The thing that has declined.

Right.

And maybe we need to come to terms with that.

Rebrand.

Exactly.

And I think this actually is the. Is. Is where like the concept of your national identity is what is going to drive your sense of decline.

And I think, you know, the British people don't really have a problem about what being British is. It's hard to define, but we know, we know it. The French certainly know who the French are.

And when, you know, when they lost Algeria, it wasn't really a threat to the concept of Frenchness. Not quite as clear that an Austro Hungarian or an Ottoman could, could, could feel like an Austro Hungarian. You know, they were much more patchworky.

You know, a Soviet citizen and a Russian. They, those weren't. There was a bit more pasted on feel, I think about those, those things. So. So.

And I think another key part of this is whether your national identity is premised on your great power status.

I think there are some types of state like, but like Germany in its Nazi period or Imperial Japan or Napoleonic France where they, they are sort of having an identity which is premised on we are this great rising power.

Well, there's an interesting dimension to the Soviet Union, I think because it was. They didn't appeal to nationalism at all. First and foremost it was, you are a worker, you're a member of the, you're an international.

Doesn't matter if you're Polish or Czech or Russian or anything. What matters is that you are a worker. That is where you get your power and where your prestige from. And as a sort of type of people, we unite.

Yeah.

And I think, I think you know that obviously then suddenly you need them to suddenly be super nationalistic when World War II happens and you've got to start doing something different. So I think there's this concept of a sort of mission.

Power is your country premised on some kind of great mission which I think makes it harder to decline.

And I think the British, the British way, Pax Britannia was something that, that's probably what people in Britain struggled most with, was the idea that Britain was bringing civilization to the world. And the fact that, you know, we had given the empire back in some sense meant civilization had retreated.

Just to be clear I'm not saying that's the case. I'm saying that's how people perceived it.

Yeah, it is tricky. You know, American exceptionalism is going to be a barrier to this, I think.

Yeah. You've got to get over it. Yeah, yeah.

So, yeah, it doesn't stand up to scrutiny when most people don't agree with you.

Well, that's it. And I think. And I think the other thing is continuity.

And I think the British Empire really benefited from the fact that it was founded on a country which was already pretty old. It was already hundreds of years old by the time the British Empire got going.

And I think the US has existed for, let's say, 100 years before it started becoming a global power. Not quite long enough in my book. You need to make sure your institutions are separate from your empire, from your global status. And, you know, so.

So there's that.

And I think, I think one final thing I'd say is do realize that decline, things getting worse just isn't as bad as it seems in, you know, quite a lot. A thing called the impact bias, where people think that big changes are going to be more impactful than they are.

So people who win the lottery turn out not to be as happy as they thought they would be.

But similarly, people who become disabled or lose their job or get divorced and they, you know, they think those things are going to ruin their lives. Well, it doesn't. They adapt. Fine.

And the, the us, if you get the other things right, if you can change your sense of mission, if you can change your identity to be one that is not based on being a global power, but perhaps embodying some American values which most people will sign up to. You know, all the kind of the freedom, the liberty, the pursuit of happiness. People love those. Right. So make yourself.

We're going to be the embodiment of that and not. We're going to be a global power and we're going to push down people, but we're going to sell that. Yeah.

And, you know, then you'll find that it's really not so bad turning into just, you know, just another country.

It's not so bad being British.

No, I've got a few distilled points.

Yeah, go on. Because.

From the British Perspective.

Yeah, go for it.

How we did it with such grace in decorum, that might help the Americans.

Yeah.

It's a good job there's no Indian here.

Well, yes. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think the first thing you should do is reframe everything as a choice. So we didn't lose India, we gifted it independence.

That's so nice of us.

That's the narrative that we often tell ourselves is complete nonsense, but that's what we sell ourselves. We didn't lose the navy. It was not that we couldn't afford the navy anymore, just we downsized it to a boutique fleet of ships so.

That we could spend more on intensive care units and that kind of thing.

The key thing is to emphasize the boutique bit, you know, they're exquisite. Rather than just mass. Speaking of the nhs, retain one impressive thing and polish it obsessively.

BBC, nhs, the proms, all these sorts of things help develop an extraordinary national hobby. Gardening, baking, competitive queuing, things like that.

Yeah.

Kind of make a virtue out of mundanity.

Make a virtue out of mundanity and that becomes like part of your identity. Yeah, it's sort of. That's what people often think about is,.

I think the Americans have got all that, haven't they? They've got loads of those to choose from. They've got surfing, barbecuing.

Yeah, keep going.

So, yeah, it's like you're no longer projecting hard power, but you're projecting soft power instead of.

Oh, the Americans. Aren't they the people who keep invading places and with all the. All the massive military. No, they're the people who do the barbecues at weekends.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Cultivate a magnificent eccentricity of brand.

So British people are often thought of as being, you know, the quintessential British person is eccentric. If you can't be powerful, be interesting, basically.

Oh, I love it. Yeah, nice.

And that gives you enormous power internationally because, you know, Japan has a similar kind of gentleman, gentlemanly concept about their identity.

And then others, like America, just get confused and don't really get it, but you become a focus of, you know, tourists want to take a picture of you, don't they? Strategic self depreciation. Yeah, self depreciation. So you don't complain, you never explain.

You're sort of pre emptive national self roasting, basically. You just sort of always make jokes about yourself.

So self deprecation, self deprecation.

Export your culture while pretending not to. To care. So, you know, the we English, we export, we export the legal system, TV formats, pretty good at that.

Lots of creative industry. Yeah.

We don't push it. It just happens naturally.

Well, that's. That's what it should look like and.

Feel like we did in class. Right. And then finally, you know, develop a special relationship.

Always find big mates with the people.

Always big mates with the big. With the big guy. The bully at the school. Slight, you know, the slightly dimmer threat. Have a slightly dimmer friend. Is very powerful.

Make them feel clever, agree with them in public and sneer at them in private. I think that's the. These are all.

These are all. Well, who should they. Who should be that friend to the Americans? Are we saying the China, perhaps Chinese.

Yeah, yeah.

Or I mean, they got to choose between China and India, haven't they? They've got to make a choice which one they go with.

Yeah. And then just come on. Foreign policy. Turn up to everything, but commit to nothing. So, you know, sounds like you used.

To work for the fco.

Yeah, well, it's kind of like the mantra, the fco. It's always soft power, soft power. So, you know, we managed to secure ourselves a UN Security Council veto, which is pretty amazing.

But use it very, very sparingly. But the key thing for us is always that the Americans think it was their idea.

So, you know, we just sort of let them take the lead and we'll support them.

Okay. Okay.

Now, there isn't time to go into this, but I think it's interesting to me that you could take all of Peter's advice for the Americans and apply it to your own personal self. You know, all of that. How to decline with grace.

Yeah.

Accept that you're not as strong as you used to be. Change your. Be interesting if you can't be powerful. I think there's a lot of good personal advice in this.

I agree.

And I'm gonna try and hold on to these when that time comes.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, it may not be for many decades.

Yeah. I think it gone well. Yeah. It's such a shame. I actually have to confess, we need to wrap up here.

But I confess to feeling slightly frustrated by this because I think we could easily, easily have a part two of this podcast of this episode. Don't worry, listeners, I'm not. We're not gonna do that. Or who knows? Because I think there's so much more to go into here, actually.

But just to wrap things up, I'm actually not very optimistic for our friends in America. I think a lot of the things you were talking about, you know, how you got. It's really difficult to talk about this objectively.

And I can imagine if you're not British listening to this podcast, you'd go, what a bunch of tosses.

Absolutely insufferable.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

And particularly if you're from one of the former colonies. I do apologize.

Yeah, exactly.

We're trying to explore the perceptions that we have and not what we actually think is the case. Yeah.

Because I think there's so much tied up in what you said, Peter, all of which I agreed with, that are very much related to going back to this point about the nature of the thing itself. Right. That is in decline. And I think longevity and stability is a big part of it.

I think also, you know, I'd like to test this out in terms of rationalism, enlightenment, and how that ties into. If that's the thing, if the thing that's declining was.

Had a big part to play in something like the enlightenment, let's say, then it becomes increasingly difficult to square away empire with things like democracy. And if being intellectually honest about it and having the stability and confidence to do that is important in the decline.

But what I was going to say is that I think we're not out of the woods yet. I think globalization is interesting.

Culture wars is interesting, how it plays into that and polarization, which we see in the UK and certainly in the us but the big thing, I would say, and you were saying it, Nick, is about acknowledgement, recognition, and I think there are some real barriers to that, dare I say it, in the US and connected to exceptionalism, I would say. Yes, I'm actually massively.

What you're saying is they need to.

Get over themselves a little bit, if I'm honest.

Unless there's plenty of people in the UK who also kind of need to get over themselves.

And this is what. Exactly. Exactly, like I say, in the uk, we're not out of the woods yet.

Yes, but I mean, as long as it stays in the cultural space and. And we don't get armed militias rising up and trying to, you know, we don't get Liverpool trying to.

Trying to become independent or something like that.

But anyway, we need to send more of the secret police to Liverpool is what you're saying. I get it.

Sure.

Okay, let's wrap up there. You've been listening to the Cognitive Engineering podcast, brought to you by Aleph Insights and produced by me, Frase McGruer.

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