Roger Cohen: As U.S. Mumbles, Britain Speaks Out
[Roger Cohen writes a column in the NYT.]
LONDON — Back in the 1940s a young Foreign Office recruit was asked what he thought were the most important things in the world. “Love and Anglo-American relations,” he responded.
That was the decade in which Churchill and Roosevelt defended the free world, combined British and American talent to develop the nuclear bomb, and arranged the burden-passing that Macmillan later described as Britain becoming Greece to America’s Rome (“We can at most aspire to civilize and occasionally to influence them”)....
That was awfully convenient. But those days are long gone. With America suffering from quasi-imperial overreach, the Atlantic world overshadowed by emergent Asian powers, and post-9/11 renditions still clouding Anglo-American dealings, the question has arisen: What, if anything, is left of the “special relationship?”...
The Obama-Cameron body language [has been] better. I detect interesting movement in the Anglo-American relationship. William Hague, the foreign secretary, has suggested that it should be “solid but not slavish” — more hound than poodle. Britain is shifting.
Cameron was in Turkey a week after his July Obama meeting and declared that “the Israeli attack on the Gaza flotilla was completely unacceptable” and Gaza was a “prison camp.” Obama, whatever he feels, could never say this, given U.S.-Israel politics. But Cameron’s frankness helped bring some movement: The Gaza blockade has eased....
Read entire article at I.H.T.
LONDON — Back in the 1940s a young Foreign Office recruit was asked what he thought were the most important things in the world. “Love and Anglo-American relations,” he responded.
That was the decade in which Churchill and Roosevelt defended the free world, combined British and American talent to develop the nuclear bomb, and arranged the burden-passing that Macmillan later described as Britain becoming Greece to America’s Rome (“We can at most aspire to civilize and occasionally to influence them”)....
That was awfully convenient. But those days are long gone. With America suffering from quasi-imperial overreach, the Atlantic world overshadowed by emergent Asian powers, and post-9/11 renditions still clouding Anglo-American dealings, the question has arisen: What, if anything, is left of the “special relationship?”...
The Obama-Cameron body language [has been] better. I detect interesting movement in the Anglo-American relationship. William Hague, the foreign secretary, has suggested that it should be “solid but not slavish” — more hound than poodle. Britain is shifting.
Cameron was in Turkey a week after his July Obama meeting and declared that “the Israeli attack on the Gaza flotilla was completely unacceptable” and Gaza was a “prison camp.” Obama, whatever he feels, could never say this, given U.S.-Israel politics. But Cameron’s frankness helped bring some movement: The Gaza blockade has eased....