Brown has outsourced foreign policy
Brown has outsourced British foreign policy
The special relationship is between Washington and Brussels
When Gordon Brown exclaimed that he would never have appointed the man who wears his hatred of the American president and the neoconservatives as ‘a badge of honour’ had he known how offensive Malloch Brown would be to George Bush and the Americans, there was an inclination to believe him, even though it taxed credulity to think the Prime Minister had been so badly briefed. When the Prime Minister ‘went out of his way to be unhelpful’, in the words of one participant at the Bush–Brown meeting in Camp David, there was some willingness to attribute Brown’s frosty behaviour to his need to placate the Labour Left by distancing himself from Tony Blair’s approach to the President, and to a natural Scottish reserve. And when Brown’s Secretary of State for International Development and close political ally, Douglas Alexander, chose to unburden himself of a speech that attacked America in not-very-oblique terms for everything from unilateralism to relying too heavily on ‘what they could destroy’, old Washington hands were willing to guess that the intended insult had escaped the review of a new Prime Minister, still organising his office.
But since then it has become clear that one of the important foundations of Gordon Brown’s foreign policy is to distance himself from America. Long after he could use as an excuse the disorder attendant upon his move from No. 11 to No. 10 Downing Street, his Development Secretary was again in the United States, again at work to embarrass the President. One day after Bush called for tougher sanctions on Burma, Alexander convened a meeting in Washington to call for ‘aid, trade and debt relief’ for that country. Bush might wield the stick, but humane Britain would rely on the carrot. ‘Senior figures in Mr Bush’s National Security Council,’ according to the Times, said that Alexander’s initiative ‘was seen as undercutting Mr Bush’s announcement and giving confused signals to the junta. The Administration certainly wants to know why the UK failed to discuss this with them in advance.’ A source high up in the Foreign Office argued to me that the timing of Alexander’s not-so-subtle attack on the President’s position was the result of a lack of co-ordination — the decreasingly plausible cock-up explanation. One anti-American speech by a close intimate of Gordon Brown might be carelessness, two is a misfortune for relations between the US and Great Britain.
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Celeste
November 24th, 2007 3:00amThank you Irwin, for telling it like it is. Gordon Brown's selective vision on the'SpecialRelationship'provides a great opportunity for the Tories. Will they make the most of it?
Ian
November 24th, 2007 11:58amAnd with his vision he will find his exit from office. This is exactly the sort of damage a left of centre government does to Britain. In a globalised world we cannot survive by redistributing ever larger quantities of a diminishing share of world trade to an increasing underclass who are more and more workshy and drug addled the more benefits we re-distribute.
wilson
November 28th, 2007 10:34pmNo wonder Gordon Brown is happy to get approval of the EU's Amending Treaty through the House of Commons. He's become a Europe and is content to surrender our sovereigty to the emerging superstate. Once that Treaty is signed, member states won't be consulted any more. The Commission will decide Europe's future. Brown's Britishness is a lie. He's a closet Europhile.