Lee P. Ruddin: How to Rebuild the Special Relationship
[Lee P. Ruddin is Roundup Editor for HNN. He lives in England.]
Barack Obama is the first American president since the Second World War not to be touched in any way by the triumph over fascism which forged the so-called special relationship. Both George W. Bush and Bill Clinton had fathers who fought alongside Brits in the 1940s and both went on to become pillars in the Atlantic alliance as commander-in-chief. Unlike the 42nd President of the United States—a Rhodes scholar, no less—Obama grew up in the Pacific and his memoir, Dreams From My Father, reminds us that his grandfather was tortured by the British during colonial times and his family was a victim of the Mau Mau Uprising.
It was of little surprise, then, to read op-ed pieces asking “Will Barack Obama end Britain’s special relationship with America?” in the weeks after he was sworn in as the 44th president. The question remains an unanswered one, notwithstanding Obama telling then prime minister Gordon Brown “This notion that somehow there is any lessening of that special relationship is misguided.”
They say actions speak louder than words, though, and this certainly is the case with the Obama presidency. Pinning the blame on the Old Country for the oil washing up on the Gulf coast is just the latest act in what is fast becoming a tragedy. Commentators in the UK have made much of Obama returning Winston Churchill’s bust, his refusal to endorse British sovereignty in the Falklands oil dispute, and the fallout from the release of the Lockerbie bomber.
Obama made his feelings abundantly clear when it came to Afghanistan. Reducing Brown to guesswork throughout his eighty-odd days of deliberations, save a walk-and-talk through a UN kitchen, made a staunch ally feel that being America’s friend had never felt so unrewarding. Reports of U.S. officials blaming the UK for the rise of Islamic extremism in the wake of the Christmas bomb plot made 2009 an annus horribilis as far as Atlanticists were concerned.
2010 started no better. Parliamentarians reacted to Obama’s “unsentimental view” toward Brown’s Britain by telling Brits to give up on the special relationship. The House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee said that the relationship was now more associated with the support Tony Blair gave to George W. Bush in 2002-03. Yet commentators, somewhat naively, mistook Obama’s political acumen for being unsentimental, and overlooked that his view was colored by the fact that he might be dealing with Conservative leader David Cameron after the UK general election.
His instant invitation to the 53rd prime minister of the United Kingdom (something not accorded to the 52nd) to visit the White House, therefore, could signal a “reset” in Anglo-American relations. In his congratulatory phone call to Cameron just minutes after he entered 10 Downing Street, Obama also “reiterated [his] deep and personal commitment to the special relationship.” Clearly, then, the Leader of the Opposition’s speech on the fifth anniversary of 9/11 highlighting “rational reasons” for the Atlantic alliance as well as policy for the “post-neo-conservative world” made an impression.
President Obama’s view of Britain is filtered through the prism of the past. This is not to say, however, that the experience of his grandfather has provoked some knee-jerk Anglophobia. Yet it must be said, as Times columnist Ben Macintryre does, that “international relationships are based on emotions as well as politics, and the set of preconceptions about Britain that Mr. Obama brings to the White House” are “far removed from those we have become used to over the past half-century.”
“Coolness at the top”, John Bolton writes in this month’s Standpoint magazine, “nonetheless does not and cannot obscure the underlying commonality of interests and values that forms the special relationship’s foundation.” This, then, is Cameron’s job when he visits Washington next month: to emphasize mutual security interests. This will help ensure that the transatlantic flame is kept burning bright. Neo-Churchillian accounts of kinship will simply go down like a lead balloon in Obama’s Oval Office.
Future historians need not see the Bush-Blair relationship as the last hurrah for Anglo-American relations. Indeed, the post-Iraq business-as-usual special relationship could be the house that Barry and Dave built. After all, the UK enjoys an unusually close intelligence relationship with the U.S. The legacy of World War II and the Cold War ensures that even though the Atlantic alliance—once Pax anti-Germanica and Pax anti-Sovietica—will not be reborn as a common front against religious extremism, when it comes to “a complete friend in the intelligence world,” James Woolsey reasons, “with Britain and America, it is as close as it gets.”
If Cameron shows the audacity to hope, there is every chance the PM will return the compliment Franklin D. Roosevelt gave Churchill. After their first meeting in August 1941, FDR said to WSC: “It is fun to be in the same decade with you.”
Democracies the world over have felt snubbed by Obama these past eighteen months. Given that the extended hand has been slapped and autocratic fists remain clenched, though, you would expect the days of self-reflective allies asking “With friends like these, who needs enemies?” to be numbered. After all, Churchill did quip, “You can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they’ve tried everything else.”