On the eve of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, David John Moore Cornwell — better known by his pen name John le Carre — published an easy in The Times entitled “The USA Has Gone Mad.” In this essay, he warned of disastrous consequences faced by the Americans if they went ahead with their latest venture into the Middle Eastern desert. He believed such an invasion would prove “in the long term potentially more disastrous than the Vietnam War" and "beyond anything Osama bin Laden could have hoped for in his nastiest dreams.”
Like many “classical liberals” left floating in the receding tide of post-Cold War Europe, he later extolled liberal fever dreams such as the “rise of fascism” supposedly brought about by Brexit and the emergence of governments in Hungary and Poland that were slightly deviant of the global neoliberal project. But despite being as blinkered as the rest of Europe’s flailing elite when it came to political diagnostics, his predictions about the U.S. invasion of Iraq could hardly have proved more accurate. He understood the ways in which an empire could bring itself to a slow-bleeding death by overextension.
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, a 2011 film based pretty faithfully on Le Carre’s 1974 novel, is a gloomy spy film concerning just such a slow-dying empire. If James Bond represented British cope — a dazzling version of itself that it saw through drunken eyes in the nightclub mirror — Tinker Tailor’s George Smiley (played by an excellent Gary Oldman) represents what it in saw in that same mirror the next day, as reality came crashing in with the morning light. Smiley’s life as a spy is not one of exciting car chases or exotic beach excursions. His career is one of exhaustion, his world reduced to the pathetic spectacle of a once-great nation chasing its own tail as the real players use it to bait one another.
The plot concerns the search for a mole within the uppermost echelon of the British intelligence community, an institution known as the “Circus.” Smiley has essentially retired, but a contemporary recently forced out of the Circus comes to him with a rumor that has bounced around the European espionage world: the Russians have an informant right at the top of British Intelligence, and he’s been there years. Just about the worst tactical defeat a nation’s intelligence service can suffer. This contemporary believes that Smiley is uniquely suited to find the mole, seeing as he’s a throwback, a veteran of the Second World War and a quiet British professional of a type endangered in the 1970s. Smiley is tired and haggard, but merciless in a very British way, finding weak points in his targets and pressing on them until they squeal. Through a few skilled moves he manages to corner and identify the traitor.
Smiley seems more upset with the man for sleeping with his wife than for betraying his country. His reaction is more exhaustion than victory. That he takes over the Circus at the end could be taken as just reward for his faithful service, and maybe for a while the return of command to the traditional English shop-keeper class may keep some of the rot at bay. A nice story to tell the young lads during training.
The reality was that the British intelligence service was indeed deeply and irreparably comprised by the 1970s, and was essential run by communists at that point. The Cambridge Spies, a group of elites recruited while in college by Soviet intelligence, rose through the ranks until they sat near the top of the Circus. Farcically, the section of MI6 responsible for catching people like the Cambridge Spies was itself run by a Soviet agent, one the Cambridge men themselves weren’t even aware of. Despite Tinker Tailor’s happy ending, it’s clear le Carre knew all this at least in a holistic sense. Smiley is old, and the generations below him are wracked by a lack of national confidence, if they aren’t actual enemy subversives. Smiley is a stop-gap measure, nothing more. The rot will continue, as indeed it has in Britain since then.
Over time, le Carre must have imbibed the forces of disintegration that had descended on his country like a thick fog. This isn’t surprising given that spies are disintegrators by nature, donning and shedding masks in such a way as to make lasting identity impossible. In the 1980s, as a vanguard spokesman for the suicidal multiculturalism that was already becoming state policy in Britain, he refused to defend Salman Rushdie after the author had an Islamic bounty put on his head for writing The Satanic Verses, saying “nobody has a God-given right to insult a great religion and be published with impunity.” When the Cold War ended in 1991, le Carre was a proponent of the “End of History” thesis. As a staunch neoliberal, he was convinced that the lazy and decrepit liberal West that he painted with such gloomy precision in his novels was the just and inevitable ruler of the new world order.
Great Britain’s time was well and truly over, but she was a dutiful arm of the Global American Empire now. Still in the game. And while he was so good at illustrating the haplessness of the British in the modern geopolitical chess match, perhaps just staying in the game was what le Carre really wanted.
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