Irwin Stelzer: U.K. and U.S. Can Repair Relationship
[Irwin Stelzer is the director of the centre for economics policy studies at the Hudson Institute, and editor of the book Neoconservatism.]
So Scotland Yard is complaining that its overly "edgy" American counterparts almost blew the arrest of the terrorists convicted this week of plotting to blow up several transatlantic flights, by moving prematurely to have one of them arrested in Pakistan. It just shows, say those who deny there is a "special relationship" between the US and the UK, how America ignores the advice of its partner. Not so: the key point is that our countries' security services worked in (imperfect) harmony for several months, and to a successful conclusion. Thousands of lives were spared.
Last week's anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War also produced unkind words about the special relationship. The indictment of America for treating that relationship as a one-way street, one in which America demands much of Britain in return for little, is not new. After the war, when President Truman abruptly ended Lend-Lease, Britain was forced to negotiate a loan that, despite the best efforts of its brilliant negotiator, John Maynard Keynes, many viewed as onerous. Worse even than that, in some eyes, was what they saw as Dwight Eisenhower's scuppering what would have been a successful effort to unseat Nasser after he nationalised the Suez canal.
Fast-forward to more recent times and we have the Iraq war, into which special-relationship deniers say Tony Blair led the nation merely "to get up the a––– of the White House and stay there", as your then-ambassador, Christopher Meyer, so elegantly described his instructions.
You get the idea: the special relationship is a myth, useful when Winston Churchill wanted to induce Franklin Roosevelt to come to his aid, but increasingly a delusion that results in a British foreign policy that serves American interests.
But consider this. Truman's decision was in considerable part due to America's unwillingness to fund Britain's emerging welfare state, or to make it easier for Britain to maintain its empire, with the associated barriers to American exports. And Eisenhower's position on Suez might have done less to end that adventure than what Harold Macmillan's biographer, Charles Williams, asserts was Macmillan's misrepresentation to the Cabinet of the allegedly dire state of your nation's finances.
All that is the stuff of historians' arguments. This mere journalist is more impressed with realities on the ground. Ask yourself this: is there any nation that has comparable access to the corridors of power in America: the White House, Congress, the Pentagon? By virtue of a common language; Britain's selection of extraordinarily capable ambassadors to represent it; the appreciation of Americans for Britain's heroic effort to hold off the Nazis while we dithered; and your support in two wars in Iraq and willingness so far to carry a disproportionately large part of the burden of the fighting in Afghanistan, Britain punches so much above its weight in America that to call our relationship with it other than special would be to ignore reality...
Read entire article at Telegraph (UK)
So Scotland Yard is complaining that its overly "edgy" American counterparts almost blew the arrest of the terrorists convicted this week of plotting to blow up several transatlantic flights, by moving prematurely to have one of them arrested in Pakistan. It just shows, say those who deny there is a "special relationship" between the US and the UK, how America ignores the advice of its partner. Not so: the key point is that our countries' security services worked in (imperfect) harmony for several months, and to a successful conclusion. Thousands of lives were spared.
Last week's anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War also produced unkind words about the special relationship. The indictment of America for treating that relationship as a one-way street, one in which America demands much of Britain in return for little, is not new. After the war, when President Truman abruptly ended Lend-Lease, Britain was forced to negotiate a loan that, despite the best efforts of its brilliant negotiator, John Maynard Keynes, many viewed as onerous. Worse even than that, in some eyes, was what they saw as Dwight Eisenhower's scuppering what would have been a successful effort to unseat Nasser after he nationalised the Suez canal.
Fast-forward to more recent times and we have the Iraq war, into which special-relationship deniers say Tony Blair led the nation merely "to get up the a––– of the White House and stay there", as your then-ambassador, Christopher Meyer, so elegantly described his instructions.
You get the idea: the special relationship is a myth, useful when Winston Churchill wanted to induce Franklin Roosevelt to come to his aid, but increasingly a delusion that results in a British foreign policy that serves American interests.
But consider this. Truman's decision was in considerable part due to America's unwillingness to fund Britain's emerging welfare state, or to make it easier for Britain to maintain its empire, with the associated barriers to American exports. And Eisenhower's position on Suez might have done less to end that adventure than what Harold Macmillan's biographer, Charles Williams, asserts was Macmillan's misrepresentation to the Cabinet of the allegedly dire state of your nation's finances.
All that is the stuff of historians' arguments. This mere journalist is more impressed with realities on the ground. Ask yourself this: is there any nation that has comparable access to the corridors of power in America: the White House, Congress, the Pentagon? By virtue of a common language; Britain's selection of extraordinarily capable ambassadors to represent it; the appreciation of Americans for Britain's heroic effort to hold off the Nazis while we dithered; and your support in two wars in Iraq and willingness so far to carry a disproportionately large part of the burden of the fighting in Afghanistan, Britain punches so much above its weight in America that to call our relationship with it other than special would be to ignore reality...