Taking the strain
A POINT OF VIEW
By David Cannadine

How long can Britain maintain its "special relationship" with the US, asks historian David Cannadine, who takes over A Point of View from Professor Lisa Jardine for the summer.

George Bush and Tony Blair have been seeing quite a lot of each other lately. Most recently in Washington to talk about the Middle East.

Before that it was St Petersburg and there's been a great deal of media muttering about their overheard exchange.

But it's not clear by which of their unguarded remarks the commentators have been more outraged: the British prime minister's apparent cravenness, or the American president's simplistic view of world affairs, or his less than elegant way with words.

The last of these criticisms can be easily disposed of. International conferences may - or may not - be decorous conversations, but there's abundant evidence that the vocabularies of world leaders are fully stocked with choice epithets which they don't hesitate to use when they feel the necessity arises.

Harold Wilson once observed, in un-diplomatic exasperation, that the Americans "couldn't tell their asses from their elbows". Lyndon Johnson's phraseology was often picturesque in the extreme, and the infamous presidential tapes released during the Watergate affair were full of gaps where Richard Nixon's expletives had been deleted for fear of offending the delicate sensibilities of the American people.


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The language used by politicians is an interesting subject, but the fact that it's occasionally bad language is neither here nor there.

As Bill Clinton once observed, when in robust campaigning mode, he was running for the presidency, not for sainthood, and he had surely made the right career choice.

Much more revealing, in the recent Bush-Blair interchange, is what it tells us about the current state of that most resonant yet ill-defined of international collaborations, the "special relationship" between the United Kingdom and the United States.

It was Winston Churchill who propelled that phrase into popular currency, when he delivered his "Iron Curtain" speech at Fulton, in Missouri, exactly 60 years ago this March.

He had, of course, embodied precisely such an Anglo-American alliance in his wartime friendship with Franklin Roosevelt - a collaboration, incidentally, carried on, at least in public, at a far more elevated level than that recently displayed by the current president and prime minister.

Mentor

The "special relationship" with the US has haunted most occupants of 10 Downing Street since, as they have striven to re-create what they believe was that earlier golden age of transatlantic friendship.

It was certainly true of Harold Macmillan who, like Churchill, boasted an American mother, played up his wartime links with President Eisenhower when he became prime minister, and claimed he was an influential mentor to President Kennedy during the Cuba missile crisis.

It was equally true of Margaret Thatcher, who regarded Ronald Reagan as an ideological soul mate, buttressed his relaxed presidential style with her inimitable brand of prime ministerial vigour, and allowed American planes to take off from British bases to bomb Libya.

And it's equally true of Blair, first with Clinton, and now with Bush. Like Macmillan, Blair has sought to cultivate close links with two very different American presidents. His friendship with Clinton was based on a sense of belonging to the same liberal wing of the baby-boomer generation and his closeness to Bush derives in part from their shared, Manichaean view of the world.

In their turn, Macmillan, Thatcher and Blair have each sought to follow the advice Churchill gave his colleagues at his final Cabinet meeting in the spring of 1955: "Never allow yourselves to be separated from the Americans."

Yet this has not been the whole of the story, even for Churchill himself, let alone his successors. Although he took pride in his mother's American ancestry, the idea that the English speaking peoples, united across the Atlantic, should be a major force in world politics only came to Churchill relatively late in life.

To be sure, he much enjoyed his visits to America as a young man, and he was grateful for its military help during the World War I. But he disliked what he regarded as Woodrow Wilson's overbearing and naive idealism, and by the 1920s he had become worried that the US harboured ambitions to supersede Britain as the greatest power in the western world.

Hostile

As things turned out, the threats posed to the UK by Hitler and to the US by Hirohito drove the two countries into the Anglo-American alliance which Churchill knew was essential if Britain was to win the World War II.

But his collaboration with Roosevelt was not all plain sailing. The American president thought Churchill was a reactionary Tory imperialist, which was not a wholly mistaken opinion. Churchill feared Roosevelt was hostile to the British Empire and wished to close it down, which was also at least partly true.

Even before the US joined the conflict, its aid to Britain in such forms as the bases for destroyers deal had come on very stringent terms. And later in the war, Roosevelt was determined to do business directly with Stalin, and found Churchill's attempts at mediation more a hindrance than a help.

As their wartime correspondence makes plain, Churchill and Roosevelt often disagreed, and as the balance of power tilted away from Britain and towards America, Churchill found himself increasingly marginalised and sometimes ignored.

Nevertheless, he remained convinced the best way for Britain to retain its influence in the world was to keep on good terms with the Americans. But he did not find this so easy during his peace time premiership of 1951 to 1955, and those of his successors who have shared his belief in the "special relationship" have had their own difficulties with it.

Harold Macmillan didn't exert the influence over President Kennedy that he later claimed, and the Americans forced him to accept Polaris nuclear weapons on humiliating terms. In 1983, Thatcher was enraged to discover that Ronald Reagan had sent American troops into Grenada, a former British colony, without informing her first.

The 2005 general election showed the high price that Blair paid for supporting Bush in Iraq, and their recent, leaked conversation lends little credence to the claim that, by backing America in this conflict, Britain has wielded disproportionate influence on policy-making in Washington.

Reputation

For Churchill, Macmillan, Thatcher and Blair, sustaining the "special relationship" has been hard and not wholly satisfying work. For other British prime ministers, the Anglo-American alliance has been at best difficult, at worst a nightmare.

As soon as WWII was over, America abruptly terminated its aid to Britain, which left Clement Attlee, the new prime minister, presiding over a nation facing bankruptcy. Not surprisingly, his relations with Roosevelt's successor, President Truman, were somewhat distant.

Anthony Eden fared even worse, failing to get American support just 50 years ago when Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal. President Eisenhower refused to help, Britain's military efforts collapsed, and so did Eden's health, premiership and reputation.

So, when Lyndon Johnson later asked Harold Wilson to send troops to join the Americans in Vietnam, it's not wholly surprising he said no. And Wilson's successor, Edward Heath, was more concerned with getting Britain into Europe's Common Market than in taking the Concorde across the Atlantic.

All this suggests that the Anglo-American "special relationship" has had its fair share of ups and downs across the last 60 years. Not least this week when Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett reacted angrily to news that a British airport had been used as a staging post for American planes en route to Israel with their cargo of weapons.

But this is not just a matter of policies and personalities, important thought these have been - and still are. For during that time, the UK has declined as a force in the world, whereas the US has become ever more powerful.

As a result, the "special relationship" between the two countries has become increasingly asymmetrical, so it's scarcely surprising that it's tended to be valued more in Britain than in America - where, revealingly, the term is rarely used by the State Department.

Bluntly put, Britain has needed America more than America has needed Britain. As Donald Rumsfeld made plain, Bush could have invaded Iraq without British troops, but Thatcher could not have regained the Falklands without essential - if covert - American military support.

More than 40 years ago, a former American secretary of state, Dean Acheson, caused something of a storm when he observed that Britain had lost an empire, but had not yet found a new role in the world. In the intervening years, that observation has in some ways become more valid, not less.

The "special relationship" pulls Britain in one direction, the Channel Tunnel in another. With varying degrees of determination and success, most British prime ministers since WWII have tried to hedge their bets. How much longer can they continue to do so?

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Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/5230612.stm

Published: 2006/07/31 09:51:55 GMT

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