Waning “Special Relationship?”

Heirs to a tradition: the U.S.-UK bond is ever more strained. (NZTV image)

That Britain seems to be moving away from the "special relationship" with Washington should come as no surprise given the tendency to pacifism and anti-Americanism in Britain since World War II.   What has been a surprise is that it has lasted over the past 60 years and how even the Labour Party, whenever it came to power, maintained the relationship despite its rather militant socialism and fundamental dislike of American capitalism and culture.

In mid-December Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown signed the latest EU Treaty for Britain, an event which may in retrospect signal the beginning of the end of the "special relationship."

The treaty-signing demonstrates yet again that Britain increasingly looks to the EU and multilateral institutions as its closest partners, not the U.S., which Brown earlier in the year pointedly called Britain’s most important bilateral relationship.

Certainly Britain and the U.S. remain close, and top policy-makers in Britain understand that it is able to punch above its weight in international politics precisely because of its strong links to the U.S.  The largest British Embassy in the world is located in Washington; Britain is privy to certain defense secrets few if any other allies have access to; and there is no nation closer in sharing the technology of nuclear weapons systems.

But the underlying relationship may be changing.  In a way that Americans only rarely understand, a more distant relationship makes sense in the context of contemporary British culture and politics.  While there is collegiality among bureaucrats and cooperation among the top personalities in government, there is declining support among the British people and the political and media classes for Washington’s approach to 21^st century threats and the War against Islamofascism.

Britain is in the process of a withdrawal from Iraq that has all the hallmarks of retreat, and its long-term commitment in Afghanistan may be coming into question.  Indeed, Prime Minister Brown has even disavowed the expression "war on terror" or the mention of Islam in connection with terrorism.

That cringing fearfulness says it all: Britain and the U.S. have largely parted ways in our view of the world, and in many of the shared interests and values which were always the real foundation for the "special relationship."  This belief culture and familiarity nurtured a trust and sense of mutual obligation that, as in a marriage, remained as assumed as it was deep and pervasive.  

All this is easy in a popular cause, but what marked out the relationship was that even in the face of clamorous opposition, both our nations would do the difficult thing; and do it together, and support and consult each other and work intertwined almost as one.

All that has been changing over the past 60 years, even if it is only now clear after Labour’s dozen year march through the culture to the strains of "The Red Flag."  Britain’s thinking in the 21^st century is closer to that of continental Europe than it is to a more muscular America. The stiff upper lip days are long gone, and while Britain still supplies valuable intelligence and a relatively reliable vote in international organizations, it is increasingly unwilling or unable to supply what has become rare from our allies: hard military power.

This failure to even maintain a military that can significantly aid and complement the U.S. reflects a lack of will in a nation that is increasingly pacifist, and unsure of itself and its role in the world.  As in the 1930s, there is an exhausted search for the quiet life and an unwillingness to face the hard truths of the world.

The relationship as it exists now is catching up with this reality, even if differences between the U.S. and Britain are obscured by a gauze of nostalgia and the deceptive fraternity borne of language and a shared cultural heritage.  

In fact, the special relationship has been buoyed up these past 60 years or so by certain quirks in personalities and events beginning after World War II with Clement Atlee’s Labour government.

That government was composed of figures who had worked closely with the U.S. for five years; felt a special obligation to its allies; retained some realism about the world; and were extremely dependent on the U.S. financially as they delicately managed a multi-billion dollar loan.

By Harold Wilson’s time in the 60s, even despite the Vietnam War, friends of the special relationship were fortunate: Wilson’s Foreign Secretaries for most of his tenure were Labour conservatives George Brown and Michael Stewart, whose pro-American sympathies were accepted by an emollient "beer and sandwiches" Premier anxious to maintain peace in a fractious government.

And then there was Tony Blair.  But even if Blair led the Labour Party, he was not truly of it.  An opponent of Labour’s militant socialism and tendency to pacifism, he is a Christian believer who was sympathetic to George Bush and to a view of the world that regards Islamofascism as a mortal threat.

Not so Gordon Brown.  Scottish socialist, son of the manse, beholden to the Parliamentary Labour Party and chary of an anti-American press and a Guardianista bureaucracy, he is less the Atlanticist than Tony Blair; certainly not anti-American, but he is more in tune with traditional Labour skepticism of American capitalism and foreign policy.

And what of the Conservatives in all this?  With the exception of Mrs. Thatcher, most British Conservative leaders after Churchill have shared a certain upper class anti-Americanism to which the current Conservative Leader, old-Etonian David Cameron, is not immune.  Cameron, moreover, has had to revive a nearly-moribund party, and as part of an effort to distance himself from Mrs. Thatcher and appeal to those unhappy with the U.S., has made it clear that Britain will be more independent than it has been in the past.  

Cameron, moreover, has been sensitive to British anger over Iraq and to the resonant charge that Tony Blair was President Bush’s "poodle"; a quivering finger to the wind tells him that greater distance from the Americans will aid in his quest for a Parliamentary majority.

With this era of Labour waning and a tight election in prospect by 2011, the politics of the Labour and Conservative Parties are beginning to converge on what is perceived to be the winning ground.  Not least when they pander to a British public that no longer shares many of the fundamental values of the United States and our approach to the world and so distance themselves from the "special relationship" that has served both nations — and the world — so well.