Let’s play a game of make-believe.

Suppose that tomorrow the Philippines were to band together, send delegates to Davao, and draft a document detailing all the reasons they resented being a de facto outpost of the American empire. (READ MORE: Time for an Asian NATO?)

Presuming that the world took them seriously (perhaps because the band of misfits in question blew up an American cargo ship or attacked the U.S. Naval base in Santa Ana), there would be an immediate reaction.

Within 48 hours (and probably much sooner than that) the U.S. president, all of Congress, every celebrity, and at least half of the people on the internet would have informed the rest of the world exactly what they thought about the development — and it’s more than likely that heads of state in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East would have chimed in with their opinion on the next best course of action.

Of course, only a very small minority of those reactions would be well thought out and diplomatic.

We live in an age of instantaneousness; we expect immediate reaction regardless of the thought required to give any rejoinder. But the world wasn’t always that way.

When the 13 colonies of the North American continent announced that they were declaring their independence, Britain had no idea that it had happened. News took a month to cross the ocean, so Britain would remain unaware of the turn of events until Aug. 10, 1776.

Some Brits were outraged, others were understanding of the colonist’s position, and some hoped that the declaration could be retracted and that the wayward Americans could rejoin the fold — but what King George III thought about it was anyone’s guess. (READ MORE: The Limited Government We Don’t Have)

It wasn’t until Oct. 31, 1776, that the king deigned to respond to the document, which is especially odd since the colonists had named the king — not Parliament — in their catalog of complaints.

Almost three whole months later, George III addressed the British Parliament on the matter of the revolutionary Americans, lamenting that the dastardly colonists had established a government, levied taxes, and were now making their own laws: “The rebellious war now levied is become more general, and is manifestly carried on for the purpose of establishing an independent empire,” he said.

Whether or not we (or our forebears) agree with George III’s statement, you have to admit that the speech as a whole was well thought out. The king didn’t make the mistake of blaming all of the colonists — instead, he accused the Founding Fathers of being hungry for power and misleading his people to get it, pointing out that they were the beneficiaries of the American Revolution. (READ MORE from Aubrey Gulick: Suicide or Murder: The Mysterious Death of Merriweather Lewis)

George III knew that a people set on independence would likely detest the idea that a small, elite group of wealthy individuals had hatched a plot to take power for themselves. What he didn’t anticipate was that the colonists liked the idea of a distant tyrant even less.

Four years later, the British surrendered to the colonists at Yorktown and the Americans got a government that took less than four months to circle back.

This article originally appeared on Aubrey’s Substack, Pilgrim’s Way, on Oct. 29, 2023.