RSS

Contact us

Monday 1 December 2008

Old World, New World: The Story of Britain and America

Strong family ties

Vernon Bogdanor

Her conclusion, such as it is, is that there is ‘a love-hate Anglo-American special relationship’ — but perhaps most special relationships are rather like that. She is more comfortable analysing the hard realities of military and economic power than the ideological underpinning of the relationship. That leads her perhaps to underplay those deep-seated sentiments of solidarity which persist even during periods of conflict. ‘We support you because you are British,’ an American senator declared during the Falklands crisis in the 1980s. ‘We were with you at the first. We will stay with you to the last’, insisted Tony Blair after 9/11.

In 1911, during the Agadir crisis, ex-president Theodore Roosevelt had analysed the Anglo/American relationship in explicitly power-political terms:

As long as England succeeds in keeping up the ‘balance of power’ in Europe, not only in principle but reality, well and good; should she however for some reason or other fail in doing so, the United States would be obliged to step in at least temporarily, in order to re-establish the balance of power in Europe, never mind against which country. In fact we ourselves are becoming, owing to our strength and geographical position, more and more the balance of power on the whole globe.

This was an astonishing prediction of the course of 20th-century history. And yet Anglo-American relationships cannot be wholly explained in terms of power politics. For the way in which nations perceive their interests depends upon how they think about both themselves and other countries, but also upon their instinctive reactions to events.

No doubt Britain and America often think about foreign policy in very different ways. Yet on most issues of foreign policy since the 1930s, Suez and the American invasion of Grenada in 1983 being the two notable exceptions, they have tended to reach similar conclusions. That is because their basic instincts are so similar. It is largely for this reason that British governments, with the single exception of Edward Heath’s administration, have so strenuously resisted the Gaullist notion that there is a fundamental choice to be made between Europe and America.

In no period since the great days of Bevin and Truman has Anglo/American co-operation been closer than under Blair and Bush. Though hardly ideological soulmates, both were liberal interventionists, whose outlook owed more to Gladstone and Woodrow Wilson than to practitioners of realpolitik. Blair has often been held to be Bush’s poodle, and yet the policy of liberal interventionism was laid out in 1999, well before the Bush presidency began, in Blair’s Chicago speech, when he declared of the intervention in Kosovo, ‘We are fighting not for territory but for values.’ Bush, by contrast, came to the presidency promising, in reaction to Clinton, a more ‘humble’ America, a promise he kept until 9/11.

Print this article  |  Email to a friend  |  Permalink  |   Comment   |  Apollo Art Books

Post this entry to:   del.icio.us | Digg | Newsvine | NowPublic | Reddit

Advertisement

Spectator Business | Apollo Magazine

Corporate | Advertising | Privacy | Terms

Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London, SW1H 9HP

All Articles and Content Copyright ©2008 by The Spectator | All Rights Reserved