The analogy isn't meant to be flattering so much as it's meant to be instructive. There are a lot of parallels drawn to Churchill, who spent the 1930s inveighing against Hitler and the Nazis from the Tory back benches and being derided as a stupid, reactionary idiot, and to the stubborn refusal of the Brits to quit in 1940 when the only allies they had outside the Empire were the Free French and the Poles. There are also comparisons made between the pacifist Left in England during the 1930s and our own antiwar Democrats.

All of these comparisons have some validity, but the point of my post (and the ones to follow) is that there are problems with the analogy which should make people wary of identifying America too closely with the British Empire in its twilight, just as they should be wary of people who draw analogies between America and the Roman Empire.