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........

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