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
There is worse. Brown hopped off the presidential helicopter into the presidential ‘Golf Cart 1’ to join a president who has been fully briefed on the implications for American foreign policy of Brown’s plan to sign on to the new European constitution, as the Prime Minister calls it in private and even, when he slips, in public. That ‘treaty’ makes it clear that a purely British foreign policy will be a thing of the past as soon as Brown puts pen to paper. Britain ‘shall’, orders the treaty, have the EU represented at the Security Council by its new foreign minister (a rose by any other name...) speak for it on any issue on which the EU has taken a position. Not ‘may’, or ‘should consider’, but ‘shall’. Why bother with Brown or his Foreign Office when they are no longer players at the Security Council? Indeed, when Council membership is reviewed, as it will be when India, Japan and Brazil finally make their voices heard, why have any single EU member at the table? After all, France and Britain are permanent members, and perhaps three other European countries are usually represented among the 15 seated at the Council table. All five ‘shall’ vote as directed by the EU representative. Why not ‘One Union, one seat’, as John Bolton has suggested? This is the one issue on which Bolton and Malloch Brown agree: as reported in the Daily Telegraph, the new Foreign Office minister and former UN deputy secretary-general and apologist for UN corruption has long argued that Britain should give up its UN seat to the EU.
Washington is well aware of the implications of the ‘treaty’, and many in the administration see what I have just described as a desirable endgame. Henry Kissinger once famously wished for a single telephone number he could dial to find out Europe’s position on various issues, and the State Department has always favoured just such an arrangement. They might be wrong to wish to lose an independent Britain as an ally, but they are close to having their way.
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