America: you’ll miss it when it’s gone

3 March 2007

And Americans will certainly be inhospitable to Gordon Brown’s laudable efforts, as prime minister, to expand the role of international organisations in fighting poverty. Bush’s increased expenditures to fight Aids in Africa brought no applause, and even derision, so it might just be better to leave Africa to the Africans and, if they care so much, the Europeans and the Gates Foundation.

Which brings us to the special relationship. Americans are being treated to the spectacle of a prime-minister-in-waiting who, against his better instincts, finds it necessary to appease the Left of his party by promising to keep his distance from America, and a leader of the opposition who thinks it just dandy to use the anniversary of the attack on 11 September to promise to end what he sees as Britain’s ‘slavish’ relationship with America. The special relationship is strong enough to survive many blows, but add the media-driven and dinner-party anti-Americanism to which important American visitors are regularly treated in London, and you have a concoction that just might reduce Britain’s once-influential ambassador to the United States to begging for an appointment with some deputy assistant undersecretary of state.

The candidate that can tap into this neo-isolationism, who will speak softly and carry a big stick (cf. Teddy Roosevelt), but only for use when American interests — narrowly defined — are threatened, who will make certain that the world does not tread on us (cf. ‘Don’t Tread on Me’, the motto on the famous 1775 Gadsden naval flag first unfurled in battle against the British navy, and revived after 11 September), who will spend millions for defence but not one cent for tribute or the defence of former allies, will tap into the updated, 2008 version of the nation’s glorious history. His wife will be picking the drapes for the White House in January of 2009, unless her husband is revisiting the scene of past triumphs.

A world not to your liking? Then next time you are at one of those dinner parties at which it is a certain crowd-pleaser to defend the NHS by attacking America’s healthcare system for denying care to over 40 million, a staple of most dinner parties we attend (false: free care is available to all), American culture for debasing that of Europe, America’s President for incarcerating terrorists rather than returning them to Britain (fact: the UK government is begging Bush to keep them under lock and key), America’s soldiers for killing non-combatants during the war on terror (think Dresden), suggest that the world would not necessarily be a better place if the Yanks go home and stay there.

Do that, and Americans might just decide that they have friends who should not be abandoned; don’t, and Americans will want their new president to rid them of foreign entanglements (cf. George Washington).

Irwin Stelzer is director of economic policy studies at the Hudson Institute and a columnist for the Sunday Times.