We are repeating a colossal mistake made more than 260 years ago.

December 13th, 2023 by Tom Lynch

The year was 1763. Britain had just defeated France in the Seven Years War, what we in America call the French and Indian War. During the war, the British national debt had nearly doubled, going from £72 million to more than £130 million. Its budget had risen tenfold from £14.5 million to £145 million.

The 1763 Treaty of Paris, which ended the war and gave Britain triumph over France ceded to Britain all of Canada and the great trans-Allegheny plains in the valleys of the Ohio and Mississippi, which were populated by unruly Indian tribes and more than 8,000 French-Canadian Catholics. Not  completely expelled from the continent, the French still held Louisiana and the mouth of the Mississippi, from which the British feared they might stage a comeback.

To defend this territory the British thought they would need a force of about 10,000 soldiers. How to pay for this expense became the question of the day.

The logical answer was to raise revenue from the colonies, revenue that would contribute to their defense. How to raise the needed revenue? Taxation, of course.

Since 1732, when Sir Robert Walpole was Prime Minister, Britain had tried, often in vain, to tax the Americans as a means of providing revenue to the Crown. This came to a head in 1760 when Parliament Passed the Writs of Assistance, which were search warrants allowing tax collectors to enter any home, business or sailing ship to look for contraband. Because the British Navigation Act forbade the colonists from  manufacturing anything, “even a horseshoe nail,” they had taken to smuggling forbidden items out of the country to Caribbean and European ports, which diminished British tax revenue in the Americas to the paltry sum of £1,800 pounds in the late 1750s.

The Writs of Assistance were the first of many British attempts to suck money out of her American colonies. James Otis, a lawyer whom John Adams considered America’s finest orator, challenged the Writs in 1761. The trial was held at the Old Boston Statehouse. His argument lasted five hours, and during it he uttered the phrase which was to become the American slogan leading up to the Revolution: “Taxation without representation is tyranny.”

Otis lost his case, but the Writs were ineffective. In subsequent years, Britain tried the Cider Tax, the Stamp Act, the Townshend Acts, and more, all of which led to greater and greater resentment throughout the colonies.

I bring this important history up to make two points.

First, and this may surprise you, from the end of the Seven Years War in 1763 until the firing of “the shot heard round the world,” the British never sent a single Minister to America to investigate the profound discontent of the colonists. During the entire 12-year period, British leaders consumed themselves in factionalism and internal, petty squabbles, while America slipped away. The colonists had non-voting, non-speaking representatives in Parliament, but they were ignored, and the Crown had appointed governors in each of the colonies, but they had little power back in Britain.  No one of any serious standing had ever crossed the sea to analyze anything. This pattern continued throughout the entirety of the Revolution. Britain sent generals, but never a statesman. And as a result, King George lost his colonies.

This was a vivid example of a great power, arguably the greatest in the world at the time, acting resolutely against its best interests.

Second, as of the moment I am writing this, it appears the United States Congress is mimicking the British Parliament of 1763 in acting resolutely against America’s best interests. As  Britain remained laser-focused on taxing her colonies, rather than trying to understand them, rather than trying to negotiate a mutually profitable future with them, so is our Congress laser-focused on extorting draconian  concessions  from the Biden administration, rather than doing what is in the country’s best interests by funding and sending desperately needed arms to Ukraine.

Our Congress is demonstrating the same type of power-hungry factionalism and petty squabbling that lost Britain America 234 years ago. If we lose Ukraine — and that is entirely possible given current circumstances — we will set the stage for a potential worldwide conflagration, because Vladimir Putin has demonstrated time and time again that he will not stop until he is beaten soundly.