A Brief History of Asking for Help After Being a Total Dick

Britain learned this lesson the hard way

The King of Brobdingnag, and Gulliver | Library of Congress, British Cartoon Prints

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Every powerful country eventually learns the same lesson: you cannot spend years treating your allies like tenants behind on rent and then ask them to help you move a couch.

Kings, in particular, have struggled with this concept. Something about the job description — the crowns, the portraits, the people bowing when you walk into breakfast — breeds a certain delusion about how reciprocity works. You start to believe that loyalty flows in one direction: toward you. And it works, right up until the moment you actually need something, at which point you discover that everyone you’ve alienated has been keeping a very detailed burn list.

Which brings us to Britain in 1778, when the most powerful empire on earth looked around for friends and found the room empty.

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Here’s what nobody tells you about the American Revolution: By the time shots were fired at Lexington and Concord, the British had managed to achieve something genuinely remarkable in the annals of diplomacy — they had made an enemy of essentially everyone in Europe while simultaneously convincing themselves that everything was cool.

The backstory matters. In 1763, Britain won the Seven Years’ War so decisively that they essentially redrew the map of the known world. France lost nearly all of its North American territory. Spain ceded Florida. Britain controlled India, Canada, the Caribbean sugar islands, and vast stretches of Africa. It was the kind of victory that makes you insufferable at dinner parties, and Britain responded accordingly. They treated the postwar settlement not as a foundation for alliance-building but as a receipt proving they didn’t need anyone.

The first ally they lost was Prussia. Frederick the Great had been Britain’s key partner in the Seven Years’ War, tying down French and Austrian armies on the continent while Britain picked off colonies overseas. It was, by any measure, a mutually beneficial arrangement.

So naturally, Britain repaid Frederick by cutting off his financial subsidies in 1762 — mid-war — and negotiating a separate peace without consulting him. Frederick, not a man known for forgetting slights, allied with Russia instead. Britain’s only major continental ally simply walked away.

Then there was the small matter of humiliating France. The Treaty of Paris stripped France of an empire. The French foreign minister, the Duc de Choiseul, began planning revenge almost before the ink was dry, rebuilding the French navy and waiting for an opportunity. When the American colonies started making trouble, France didn’t see a philosophical debate about liberty — they saw an invoice coming due.

Spain had its own grudge. They wanted Gibraltar back. The Dutch were furious about British interference with their shipping. Even Russia, which had no particular stake in the Americas, was nursing resentment over British naval arrogance.

By 1775, Britain had achieved complete diplomatic isolation by treating every other country as if it existed solely to serve British interests.

The consequences arrived on schedule. France formally allied with the United States in 1778, sending money, troops, weapons, and — critically — a navy. Spain joined the war in 1779. The Dutch followed in 1780. And then came the most devastating blow of all: Catherine the Great’s League of Armed Neutrality.

The League was, in essence, the rest of Europe putting up a sign that read: “We’re not helping Britain, and if you try to search our ships, we will cut a bitch.” Russia, Sweden, Denmark, Prussia, Austria, Portugal, the Ottoman Empire, and the Kingdom of Naples all joined. By 1783, the scholar G.S. Graham concluded that Britain’s total diplomatic isolation was the principal factor in its defeat. Not Yorktown. Not Washington. Not even the French fleet.

The fact that Britain had no friends.

Now, to be fair, George III, despite what Hamilton would have you believe, was not the cartoon tyrant of American mythology. He was a constitutional monarch who largely deferred to his cabinet. George bore little personal responsibility for the Revolution through 1775 and simply followed his ministers’ advice. Lord North, his prime minister, privately thought the war was unwinnable after 1778 but kept fighting because the king begged him not to resign. Lord George Germain designed the strategy. Generals Howe, Burgoyne, and Cornwallis botched the execution. George III was less a villain than a man trapped in a machine that had already lost its steering.

In other words, Britain’s isolation wasn’t one man’s arrogance. It was institutional. It was structural. It was the accumulated diplomatic debt of a decade of post-victory swagger, compounded by a war that every other country in Europe saw as optional and self-inflicted.

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Which brings us to today’s clusterfuck. On March 16, 2026, the United States asked its allies to send warships to secure the Strait of Hormuz.

Australia said no. Japan said no. Germany said no — twice, through both its foreign and defense ministers. Spain said no. Sweden said no. Poland said hold my beer. Italy’s deputy prime minister said sending ships would mean entering a war they didn’t start. The EU voted against expanding its existing naval mission. South Korea said it needed “adequate time for deliberation,” which is diplomatic Korean for…ah, not a chance.

Germany’s Boris Pistorius asked, with what must have been exquisite restraint, what Trump expected a handful of European frigates to accomplish that the entire U.S. Navy could not.

Former Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves, who served from 2006 to 2016, was less restrained. It was, he observed, “a bit rich” to threaten Denmark, insult the memory of a thousand NATO troops who died in Afghanistan, and then ask everyone to come help.

At least Britain in 1778 had no friends because of ten years of institutional arrogance after winning the biggest war in a century. The current situation required considerably less time. Greenland invasion threats. Tariffs described by trading partners as punitive. A public claim that NATO allies never fought on the front lines in Afghanistan — a statement so incorrect that it functions as a diplomatic middle finger to more than 1,100 non-American NATO soldiers who died there.

The EU’s Kaja Kallas was more direct. After EU foreign ministers met in Brussels to discuss the Hormuz crisis, she reported the outcome in eight words: “Nobody wants to go actively in this war.”

The US basically launched a war without consulting a single one of our allies, followed by a demand that they clean up the mess. It’s a bit much.

The Grim History lesson? Catherine the Great called the League of Armed Neutrality an “armed nullity.” It didn’t need to fire a shot. It just needed to stand there, arms crossed, while Britain slowly realized it was alone. The league’s entire strategic contribution was not helping, and it was devastating.

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The Times, Anno 1783 | Library of Congress, British Cartoon Prints Collection. Public domain.

The Americans won their independence for a lot of reasons — Washington’s tenacity, French boots on the ground at Yorktown, the sheer logistical impossibility of projecting military power across an ocean in the age of sail. But underneath all of it was a simpler truth that historians sometimes understate: After being a giant bag of dicks, Britain had no one.

Not because alliances were unavailable. Because Britain had spent the previous decade making sure none survived.

Now, 250 years later, the country born from that lesson is now offering a masterclass in forgetting it.

Carlyn Beccia is an award-winning author and illustrator of 13 books. The Grim Historian is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.