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Monday 13 October 2008

A rather less than special relationship

Now we know: Brown is a European, not an Atlanticist

The next best friend of the US may well be France

Unfortunately, not all change is in Britain’s interest. Which brings me to the by now, or at any rate soon to be, forgotten visit of the Prime Minister to President Bush’s retreat at Camp David. You know — the visit that the press hailed as a triumph for Brown because he (a) forced the ever-courteous George Bush to forswear his cowboy boots and open-necked shirt in favour of a jacket and tie, (b) described the discussions as ‘full and frank’, the unpleasant diplomatic term usually reserved for meetings with such as Bashar al-Assad, and (c) generated headlines from the right (‘End of the affair’, Daily Mail), left (‘Brown fails to praise Bush at summit’, Guardian, front page) and centre (‘Mr Brown noticeably failed to return such compliments’, the Times) that represent PR coups of the sort that have made David Cameron what he is today. Jonathan Freedland put it in his typically sober way when he wrote that Brown went ‘about as far as a British Prime Minister could reasonably be expected to go in putting an America president at arm’s length’. Lest the point be lost on American followers of British politics, the New York Times offered a helpful translation from Brownspeak into plain Americanspeak; references by the PM to ‘our great shared history’, and his refusal to refer to the President by the familiar ‘George’ when Bush called him ‘Gordon’, come down to: ‘It’s the United States we love, not George Bush.’

The electoral advantage of these triumphs is not to be doubted: Bush is not wildly popular in the UK (or in the US, for that matter), Brown has no desire to have the ‘poodle’ label affixed to him, and he certainly would not show to particular advantage in ‘a pair of ball-crushingly tight dark-blue corduroys’. The long-term advantage to Britain is more problematic.

One way or another, Iraq will not be centre stage for much longer. British troops will be headed home or moved into safe bases, an American withdrawal (read, ‘retreat’) will begin, and attention will shift to other international problems, including not least of all Iran’s move to acquire nuclear weapons. If Bush learned one thing from his ‘full and frank discussions’ with Brown, and from the Prime Minister’s insistence on accentuating the blandly political over the intensely personal, he learned that he cannot ignore those of his advisors who are telling him that the special relationship is dead, or at least on life support. Brown’s statement that America is Britain’s most important ‘bilateral relationship’ means little, since it leaves room for the multi-nation EU to be Britain’s most important relationship.

Remember, Brown’s trip was designed to offset the impression created by Douglas Alexander’s talk to the Council on Foreign Relations — a talk that his office went to great lengths to portray to the press as an attack on American foreign policy — and by the appointment of Mark Malloch Brown to a seat at the Cabinet table. The very man who prides himself on subverting America’s UN representative and on his anti-neocon views.

More articles from: Irwin Stelzer | this section

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