Lee Ruddin: Cameron and Obama Continuing the Anti-Autocratic Action Tradition

Lee Ruddin is a roundup editor at the History News Network. He lives in the UK. 

‘It is as easy to be distracted by the outward glamour of a prime ministerial visit to Washington as it is to fail to discern its occasional real inner substance,’ Martin Kettle wrote in last week’s Guardian. In a piece about withdrawing from Afghanistan entitled, ‘Cameron and Obama ended the neocon era,’ though, the newspaper’s associate editor is as guilty (by using the word “neoconservative”) as any of putting style before substance. ‘New friends’ may be ‘rac[ing] to end an old war,’ as another associate editor writes (the Financial Times’ Philip Stephens), but to say, as Kettle does, that last week’s two-day meeting ‘marked the end of a chapter in modern history’ misinterprets two centuries of Britain’s past.

As President Obama said on the South Lawn of the White House, ‘through the grand sweep of history, through all its twists and turns, there is one constant – the rock-solid alliance between the United States and the United Kingdom.’ Prime Minister Cameron probably put it better, however, when he said that ‘there are some countries whose alliance is a matter of convenience, but ours is a matter of conviction.’ A joke the pair shared about the burning of the White House during the War of 1812 only obscured for a fleeting moment the leaders’ agenda about standing, working, bleeding and building together a more secure world. In other words, both remain committed to carrying out what I term anti-autocratic actions.

How, then, Mr. Kettle interprets such rhetoric as ushering in the ‘post-George Bush era’, I do not know, since Messrs. Obama and Cameron have done anything but mark the ‘imminent clos[ure] of the phase of U.S.-UK foreign policy that began after 9/11 … for the active promotion of democracy and liberal institutions.’ Do not get me wrong, Kettle could be forgiven for thinking that ‘American imperial power and British support’ would not be on display in the ‘Muslim world’ again. He cannot be so easily forgiven, though, for thinking that such a policy was Bush’s and the 43rd president’s alone. Indeed, as I will illustrate after touching upon the ostensible downgrading of the “special relationship”, an anti-autocratic, interventionist policy is as British as the well-chosen Anglicisms Obama uttered in the Rose Garden.

For Atlanticists who welcomed Iain Murray and James C. Bennett’s proposal for ‘a post-EU Britain to [join] the North American Free Trade Agreement’ and David Aaronovitch’s desire to actually ‘rejoin’ the U.S. as part of an East Atlantic bloc, the time between Obama coming here and Cameron going there has, well, not been easy. Take the former’s visit to a former British colony, for instance. While observers versed in the politics of realism understand the 44th president’s need to look East, Atlanticists could not help but feel a tad jealous by, what one commentator described as, the ‘audacity of grope’ between Barack and Julia [Gillard] Down Under and the possibility that the relationship between two of England’s stroppiest colonies may become more “special” than either of them share with the “more country” itself.

Atlanticist jealousies were fuelled, in no small part, by what Sir John Major said at the Chatham House think tank just days earlier. The former PM evidently believed author Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s question (asked in the pages of the New York Times about whether ‘history [will] see the years of “Atlanticism” as a passing episode, before America turns to a manifest destiny elsewhere?’) had merit, since he stated ‘it [was] time to consign this phrase [“special relationship”] to history.’ That Justin Webb, a former chief Washington correspondent for the BBC, writes in his book, Notes on Them and Us, that the ‘special relationship does not exist,’ only compounded matters. While the less said about The Iron Lady (which does not feature Ronnie and Maggie’s political marriage) or J. Edgar (which overlooks Hoover’s close working relationship with British intelligence officials), the better.

The fact William Hague is the first British Foreign Secretary to visit the National Security Agency at Fort Meade – ‘a spy outfit so sensitive that its very existence was once a secret,’ The Economist reminds its subscribers – and that Cameron accompanied Obama aboard Air Force One more than makes up for matters, though. And despite not being the first Conservative PM to join a Democratic president on the “world’s coolest plane”, Cameron’s relationship with the incumbent has warmed to a degree his Tory predecessor could only dream of. (Indeed, the reason behind Major beating his successor and flying with Bill Clinton in 1994, lay in what journalist Peter Oborne calls ‘presidential guilt’ after the latter awarded Gerry Adams a U.S. visa.)

As Times columnist Oliver Kamm notes in Foreign Policy magazine, ‘Cameron’s Blair-like [interventionist] tendencies have been much greater than the continuities in foreign policy between Cameron and … Major[‘s] … amoral Conservative quietism.’ For me, however, it is how Anglo-American intervention comes about which is of interest for it illustrates how the PM of, what one blogger at Huffington Post calls, an ‘indispensable ally’ forces the hand of a commander-in-chief to “lead from behind”. Cameron once famously referred to himself as the ‘heir to Blair,’ and the latter’s display of statesmanship in Kosovo in 1999 (including the articulation of a doctrine of liberal interventionism in Chicago at the same time Governor Bush opposed the Clinton administration’s nation-building exercise in the Balkans) guided the former in Libya and his attempt to make a dream of democracy in the desert a reality. To gain a better insight as to why Cameron is forcing Obama’s hand, Libya-like, once again in Syria (as reported by Niall Ferguson in his Newsweek feature), it is useful to go back further in history and to the very British roots of anti-autocratic actions, which, as Michael Gove points out in Irwin Stelzer’s edited volume, Neoconservatism, ‘transcend[…] the limitations of cynical realism and multilateral idealism.’

Way back in August 1807, George Canning, the British Foreign Secretary, authorised an audacious anti-autocratic action to combat the threat posed by Napoleon Bonaparte and his plans for dominating the continent. ‘Britain’s strike on Copenhagen was not to be the last occasion on which a democracy launched a pre-emptive assault in a war against a tyranny,’ Gove reminds readers, ‘as a means of both eliminating a threat and of signalling resolve.’ Since, as the current Education Secretary points out, Franklin D. Roosevelt applauded Winston Churchill’s bold action at Mers el-Kebir, Algeria – preventing as it did France’s Mediterranean fleet from going into Hitler’s hands – as ‘a contribution to America’s own defence’ and eventual Allied victory in World War Two.

Despite commentators such as Oborne continuing to believe that Cameron and Obama have veered from the Churchillian-cum-Rooseveltian tradition, I hope our interventionist history reassures commentators such as Kettle that the Anglo-American alliance – ‘one of the greatest … the world has ever known,’ reaffirms Obama – will provide answers to the questions posed in an ‘era’ of Mullah Omars, Ayatollah Khameneis and Bashar al-Assads and “rescue the world” from tyranny.