The Firth of Forth sounds confusing to American ears. It is an inlet of the North Sea, called a “firth,” produced by the river “Forth.” On this body of water in Eastern Scotland sits Rosyth, the location of the manufacture and drydock service for the U.K.’s only two aircraft carriers.
The flagship aircraft carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth, still “new” in naval terms, is visiting Rosyth—not to assert British naval prestige but to begin maintenance. Commissioned in 2017, the ship had already spent most of 2025 under repair after corrosion was found in its propeller shaft. Now, despite recent $4.3 billion refits, it’s once more out of action for further upgrades and inaccessible-system inspections, pushing its availability deeper into the future.
Three thousand miles to the west, a Canadian-born civilian sits on her living room couch, contemplating her approaching death. She isn’t terminally ill, but the state won’t provide the medical home care she needs. Canada has promised health care via socialized medicine, but it will instead administer a lethal injection within days. This is the regime of MAID, Canada’s euphemistically termed Medical Assistance In Dying legislation that legalized assisted suicide in 2016. This “choice” is presented as a compassionate right. However, in practice it underscores a disquieting fact: the machinery of death is more functional than that of living care.
These two scenes, thousands of miles apart, are sewn with the same thread: governance through surrender—be it in defense, health care, or the stories the state tells. In both countries there’s a clear willingness to cede the capacity to preserve life, the life of a polity or of a person, in favor of an easier, cleaner exit.
The non-American Anglosphere, from Ottawa to Wellington, is drifting into a post-sovereign condition. Their governments still perform the ceremonies of independence, but in their essential duties of defense, stewardship of demographic cohesion, and protection of vulnerable citizens, they have begun to relinquish the will to endure.
Abandoning Hard Power
Measured by the Force Projection Index—a composite score of large-deck naval aviation, aerial refueling, heavy airlift, and afloat support—Canada, the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand have all seen their capabilities decline relative to the United States since the mid-1990s.
The United Kingdom
In 1995, the U.K. maintained three light carriers, a robust escort fleet, and sufficient auxiliaries to sustain global deployments. Today, it has two large carriers, roughly 60 F-35Bs, and persistent escort shortfalls. Its “Global Britain” branding masks a hard truth: without American or allied integration, it cannot independently project decisive force far from home waters.
Canada
The Royal Canadian Navy retains no area air defense capability, its submarine fleet is often laid up for maintenance, and the Army fields more senior officers than tanks. Canadian airlift relies heavily on U.S. and chartered support for major deployments. In any peer conflict, it would fight as a component of a U.S. task force, not as an autonomous actor.
Australia and New Zealand
Australia has made modest investments in amphibious capacity with its two Canberra-class LHDs, but its tanker and escort fleets remain thin for sustained operations. New Zealand has no carriers, no heavy airlift, and negligible replenishment capacity beyond regional constabulary roles.
This is the satrapy problem: states claiming full sovereignty but operating as subordinate provinces in strategic terms. In the Persian Empire, satraps administered their own territories but relied on the Great King for defense. In the modern Anglosphere, Ottawa, London, Wellington, and, to a lesser extent, Canberra rely on Washington.
The MAID Regime
If defense is the state’s external immune system, health care is its internal one. In Canada, the immune system is inverting: the state can more efficiently end a citizen’s life than sustain it.
When MAID was legalized, it was sold as a tightly regulated mercy for the terminally ill. Less than a decade later, it accounts for 1 in 20 Canadian deaths nationally, and over 7% of all deaths in Quebec. This outpaces Alzheimer’s and diabetes as causes. Eligibility has expanded to include those with chronic conditions, disabilities, and soon (in 2027) mental illness. The Canadian Parliament has also considered extending it to minors and permitting advance directives for patients who will later lose capacity.
The justifying principle is patient autonomy. But in practice, many “choices” are shaped by deprivation: inadequate disability support, long surgical wait times, and inaccessible mental health care. One quadriplegic man sought MAID after developing a bedsore due to being left on an ER stretcher for four days. A woman with ALS chose it because she could not secure enough funded home care hours to avoid institutionalization.
The analogy to military policy is exact:
Canada’s MAID regime is, in this sense, the social-policy equivalent of mothballing your fleet and calling it “smart power”: it reframes a failure of stewardship as an act of compassion or efficiency.
Too Much Spice
A third pillar of civilizational self-preservation is the maintenance of cohesive civic identity in the face of demographic change. Here, the U.K. provides the clearest case.
Since the late 1990s, the U.K. has experienced sustained net migration at a scale unprecedented in its history. In London, less than half the population is white British; in some boroughs, schoolchildren speak dozens of languages at home. This is not inherently destabilizing, as nations have integrated newcomers before. However, integration capacity is finite. The pace of change, combined with a fragmented national story and political reluctance to enforce assimilation, has produced rising social friction. When the spices overwhelm the dish, no one wants to eat, and the restaurant dies.
The political consequences are visible: polarization over immigration policy dominates electoral cycles. Public services strain under increased demand. And the armed forces face challenges in recruitment and cohesion, particularly when national identity is contested. “Who” am I fighting for? No one fights for an “idea” alone.
Canada follows a parallel course. Large-scale immigration is framed as a moral project, largely insulated from integration metrics or regional economic realities. Ottawa’s self-image as a “post-national” state dovetails with its military dependency and its social-policy posture on MAID: identity, like defense and life preservation, is reimagined as a matter of individual preference rather than collective stewardship.
Managed Decline
Across the domains of defense, health care, and demographic policy, the same pattern recurs. Foundational capacities are allowed to wither because their maintenance is politically costly. Elites reframe retreat as moral progress, an extension of blind positivism. MAID expansion is “compassion.” Why? Because the government approves it in a positivist fervor. Morality is whatever the government decides.
Similarly, military dependency becomes “smart multilateralism.” Immigration without integration is “openness.” Yet all the while independence and national agency are sold to the lowest bidder, and public consent is managed through symbolic independence and moralized rhetoric, masking the depth of dependency or dysfunction.
This is civilizational inversion, as the machinery of preservation such as fleets, hospitals, and national narratives are left to decay. It is not that these states cannot afford preservation—it is that their governing classes no longer see it as a non-negotiable duty.
The convergence of these trends produces a strategic and moral vulnerability, an open wound exposed to every sort of contagion, with the following symptoms of declining health mirroring the aging parent who can no longer care for themselves:
Strategic paralysis: In a crisis, neither Canada, the U.K., nor New Zealand can act decisively without U.S. cover. Australia can act regionally but not sustain independent operations.
Moral hazard: In health care, a state that can offer a quick death but not timely life-preserving care teaches citizens that endurance is optional, and even perhaps undesirable.
Cultural fragmentation: Rapid demographic change without robust integration erodes the social trust needed for collective sacrifice in war, an economic downturn, or a prolonged crisis.
These are not discrete failures. Together, they point to a post-sovereign Anglosphere periphery: still politically independent, but strategically, socially, and morally dependent—and outsourcing the hard work of survival to allies, markets, or fate.
Choosing Not to Endure
The British and Canadian statesmen of a century ago, whatever their faults, assumed that their nations were meant to endure, which required ships, men, industry, and cohesion. Today, their successors preside over polities that speak of compassion, openness, and “smart” defense, but whose practical policies dismantle the very capacities those virtues presuppose.
The decline of the non-American Anglosphere is not inevitable. It is the result of choices: to depend rather than deter, to end life rather than preserve it, to import populations faster than they can be integrated, and to dress all of it in the language of moral advancement, yet leaning on a foundation that said morality was eternal. These are reversible decisions. But reversal would require something rare in today’s political class: the will to endure.
If that will is not recovered, the carriers will keep needing escorts they do not have, the syringes will keep going into arms that might have lived with support, and the national stories that once bound these societies will be replaced by a post-sovereign mythology. The machinery of survival will remain only in memory, and the Anglosphere minus America will complete its slow suicide—quietly, efficiently, and with a smile.