Taking the strain

A POINT OF VIEW
By David Cannadine

Continuing the transatlantic friendship

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.

Churchill had an American mother

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.

Wilson said no to Vietnam

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.

Thatcher fell out with Reagan over Grenada

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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Below is a selection of your comments:

This article is a great analysis and shows that relations between nations, no matter how friendly, are often complex things to manage. In the end, the US and Britain do share a real organic relationship that transcends official treaties and statements of friendship. As an American who lived for years in England, the special relationship is very real to me. Our countries have stood together during very difficult times and we will continue to do so.

I know that US policy is unpopular at the moment among some of the British people but so was support for the British position during WWI and WWII among many Americans. Public opinion is not always the best direction that leaders can follow in trying to solve existential problems; most of European public opinion was against the removal of Hitler. In the end, Bush and Blair are acting not just because of the "special relationship" but because they share liberal values that are currently under threat by a weird alliance of Islamist radicals, Middle Eastern dictators, and a nihilistic political class in Europe who only believe in managing world problems than solving them.
Chris Cutrone, Austin Texas USA

Why do the British people put up with this? What country would support policies and accommodations of such servitude that Blair, according to the British press is now referred as Bush's poodle? Where is the once lauded British pride?
Charles C. Young, Chicago, Illinois, USA

Your piece is clear and concise in its observation that dominant nation states rise and fall, and that those oscillations depend as much on necessity as personalities. The old adage of politics, "The enemy of my enemy is my friend," is as sad a state of the human condition in international relations as is the psychic shock of the loss of "great nation" status. The tenets of the Melian Dialogue remain true across the centuries; the diminishing must either band together, or curry favor with the strong to remain relevant. Eventually, the U.S. will be where Britian is because even America is not more powerful than history. Britain, and every supplanted world power has dealt with that usurping as graciously as possible. I pray for the same grace when it is the United States' turn to pass the hegemonic baton.
Don Merrill, Salt Lake City, UT

You say that "Thatcher could not have regained the Falklands without essential - if covert - American military support." This might be true, but the problem could have been sorted without loss of life if Mr Reagan had intervened immediately after the Argentinian soldiers set foot on British soil, rather than hedging for two weeks. Deaths on both sides should be blamed directly on Reagan and the UN for not upholding sovereignty, the way they did in Kuwait. Of course, there's no oil in the Falklands.
Carol, Portugal

I don't really know how the relations between the UK and the US are percieved in the UK, but, and this is not vitriolic rhetoric, here in Europe the general view is one of the UK being incapable of any independent foreign, and in some cases internal, policy without first consulting the US.

Sadly, while it seems that there is some denial about this, it doesn't really give the UK government much credibility abroad, and what's more, given the general English fear of a non English speaking world, it's not likely to change any time soon.
Theo, Zürich

There is no "special relationship" between America and the UK. Luckily for America but most certainly not for us Brits, we seem to have developed under President Blair an even more deferant attitude to all things America. Ask yourselves, when did we last openly criticise America? Yet this is the country that refuses to cut down on pollution, went to war for no apparent justifiable reason, then refuses to stop 100s of innocents from being killed in Lebanon...then it wonders why everyone, including most Brits, dislikes them so much! I think it says a lot about Blair that he is so excruciatingly deferent to a person who, politically speaking, is the exact opposite, does he have any principles? Me thinks not.
Peter, Nottingham

I say to hell with the Americans and the EU, we should return to a free trade market within the Commonwealth. We could becomne the leading nation in the fight against poverty and disease in the Third World and those nations not already in it would be clambouring to join, just like Mozambique.
Jon, High Wycombe, UK

While the phrase "Britain has needed America more than America has needed Britain" might be true in the most cynical sense, the British people should realize that America would jump in front of a train for the U.K. The current situation may not be as Britain (or the US, for that matter) would like, but the USA never forgets its friends.
Joe, Boston, MA

Let's cut through the smoke and mirrors of marginal differences, both past and present, that supposedly separate our two countries. As the American Empire declines, we will need your sage advice on how to cope and your shoulder to cry on. That "special relationship" that Churchill spoke of will long endure regardless of governments here or there. The admiration and respect for the British people is wide and deep. No one in my fairly wide circle of friends and acquaintenances feels otherwise.
Wayne A. Clark, Rock Hill, SC USA