How England Taught Us Imperialism : BLOOD, CLASS AND NOSTALGIA Anglo-American Ironies <i> by Christopher Hitchens (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $22.95; 398 pp.; 0-374-11443-9) </i>

I discovered that Prince Charles was going to marry Lady Diana Spencer while I was sitting in a diner in the middle of Kansas. The local newspaper had featured wire reports of London gossip on its front page. Why, I wondered as I chewed on my spare ribs, was a high-society English wedding of such interest in the cornfields of mid-America?

Across the Atlantic, the British preoccupation with things American focuses on power rather than culture. Most British leaders since Winston Churchill have tried to cling to Uncle Sam’s coattails by invoking a “special relationship” with Washington. Margaret Thatcher made Ronald Reagan the centerpiece of her foreign policy.

Christopher Hitchens explores these bonds of culture and power in a book that, unlike many about Anglo-American relations, is aimed at the U.S. reader. A British journalist and writer, now resident in Washington, he starts off with cultural Anglophilia--the Red Lion pub off Wilshire Boulevard, the Queen Mary marooned at Long Beach. But he investigates it as the residue of a larger, though now waning, power-political axis that has shaped modern America. For he considers “the special relationship” to be “a transmission belt by which British conservative ideas have infected America, the better to be retransmitted to England.”

After World War II, Tory politician Harold Macmillan developed the conceit that Britain, though declining in power, could play Greece to America’s Rome--civilized tutor for the brash, new global giant. Instead, says Hitchens, what really happened was “the Romanization of the United States via the British connection,” as good republican virtues were corrupted by the lure of empire. Here is a different classical analogy. Not Greek slaves running the court of the Emperor Claudius--Macmillan’s image--but Caesar subverting the Rome that Brutus cherished.

Hitchens depicts John Bull helping to stage-manage Uncle Sam’s gradual emergence on the world stage. He sketches several vignettes. In 1898, poet Rudyard Kipling supposedly played “John the Baptist to the age of American empire” through his poems and his correspondence with the likes of Teddy Roosevelt and John Hay.

“In the first half of the century, British intelligence was principally a machine for involving the United States in war on the British side . . . a simple enough task when coordinated with the ‘right’ social strata.” Hitchens instances the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, “which more than any other single incident prepared U.S. public opinion for a war” in Europe, British handling of Zimmermann Telegram in 1917, and their “astonishing interventions in American domestic politics” in 1941.

Britain was also, for Hitchens, godfather of the Cold War. In 1918, intervention by Allied and U.S. troops against the Bolsheviks was “preeminently a British policy” pushed by Churchill. This set the mold of ideological confrontation. And Churchill’s “iron curtain” speech at Fulton in March, 1946, shaped American postwar thinking. The following year, the stimulus for the Truman Doctrine, declaring a global struggle against communism, was Britain’s decision to pull out of Greece and Turkey.

British manipulation of U.S. policy was successful, Hitchens argues, because it exploited ties of race and class between the two elites. He has chapters on the bonds of marriage and “Anglo-Saxon” racial feeling at the turn of the century, and on the common use of English and the struggles of anti-British patriots from Noah Webster onward for a truly American language. Nor does he neglect the supposed machinations of “Establishment internationalists”--young Rhodes Scholars being groomed for power in ancient Oxford, or think-tankers monitoring the special relationship amid the charms of nearby Ditchley Park.

Yet Britain played midwife to America’s empire at the expense of losing its own. That, for Hitchens, is the crowning irony. His essay on World War II centers on Churchill’s “ ‘Second Front,’ to protect the British empire, against his putative ally,” Franklin D. Roosevelt. After 1945, the once junior partner supplanted its British ally almost entirely. Yet--a final irony--the Pax Americana is itself now on the wane. Hitchens ends with a plea that both countries rediscover republican virtues “in a world without conquerors.”

Hitchens emphasizes that this is not a history of the Anglo-American relationship, but a series of “incisions, made at selected crucial points.” Such a format assumes prior knowledge of the story, and parts of the book may be hard going for the general reader. But the prose is lively, the range intriguing. Some of the essays are truly incisive--such as the survey of the nuclear relationship. And the sharp polemical tone makes it an entertaining and provocative read.

That very tone, however, also makes it a frustrating book. Hitchens presents himself as the great iconoclast, smashing the myths of the Atlanticist Establishment and its scholarly acolytes. In fact, his book relies heavily on two decades of scholarly research, since the British and U.S. archives were opened. The themes of competition and rivalry, of British influences on key U.S. policies, of debunking and demythologizing are all staples of recent historical writing. Hitchens’ debt to this work would have been more apparent had he elected to supplement his brief bibliographic essays with proper footnotes. Nor is his simplified version of these arguments entirely persuasive. Can we equate the British and American “empires”? What of the distinction between “formal” and “informal” imperialism--colonies as against commerce? Remember the observation of theologian and commentator Reinhold Niebuhr in 1930: “We are the first empire of the world to establish our sway without legions. Our legions are dollars.” To describe American hegemony as “imperial” obscures as much as it reveals.

Furthermore, isn’t Hitchens exaggerating the success of British manipulation? Often the American roots of U.S. policies are insufficiently acknowledged. Economic opportunism and Wilson’s assertion of full neutral rights kept America right in the U-boat’s line of fire in 1915-17. By early 1947, the Pentagon and State Department were readying themselves to assume responsibility for the Eastern Mediterranean, before the pull-out was announced.

And while it may be strictly true that “the first steps” of U.S. involvement in Vietnam were taken in 1945-46 when British troops engineered the French return to Indochina, the road to Khe San and Kent State was a long one, and America made that journey alone.

Hitchens’ incisions leave him no time to cut away the surrounding flesh and expose the full anatomy. A skillful and perceptive writer, he has an eye for intriguing connections. Yet irony is no substitute for analysis. Congruence is not cause--read his chapter on the supposed sources of Churchill’s “iron curtain” speech. And conspiracy theories, though fun, are by their nature one-sided.

That, of course, is not to dismiss their importance. Hitchens’ argument has striking echoes of the greatest American conspiracy theory of all--one that he does not explore. This is a pity, because it also centered on a plot by a corrupt empire to subvert republican virtues. And without it the Declaration of Independence could not have been written.