Elegy on "The Special Relationship"

The British PM, Gordon Brown, has just concluded a visit to the United States, the first European leader to be received by the new Obama administration. Few would regard this honour as anything but proper recognition of Britain's place as America's most stalwart ally; more proof of the enduring strength of the special bond between the United States and the United Kingdom. From it's inauspicious beginnings in the vortex of war and revolution, the relationship between the two countries went from strength to strength culminating in the partnership which, since WWII has secured the triumph of democracy and constructed and guaranteed the security and financial arrangements of the world since 1945. In keeping with this deep bond between nations, Brown delivered an address to a joint session of Congress, a rare honour, in which he received 19 standing ovations. This was quite a coup for a man not known for the felicity of his oratory. All in all, this appeared to have been a successful visit, providing Gordon Brown with a welcome respite from the the turbulent British political scene, where he is beset by a perfect storm of crises and low poll ratings.
Obama had already ruffled British feathers by returning a bust of Churchill, lent to President Bush in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. This was not seen merely as further proof of the new President's attachment to Lincoln, whose image replaced Sir Winston's, but as evidence of Mr. Obama's indifference to the 'special relationship'. It was through a prism tinged by concerns of this kind that the British press viewed Gordon Brown's visit. So we learned of the care which Mrs. Brown took in choosing presents for the Obama girls, in contrast the presents the Obama's got for the Brown children seemed to have come from the White House gift shop. Mr. Brown chose his present for the new president with an eye place squarely on history. It was an ink-stand fashioned from a Royal Navy ship that had played an important role in suppressing the slave trade. In return the prime minister was given a collection of dvds, admittedly of classic films, leading one Fleet Street wag to wonder whether the president was unaware of the fact that there were dvd shops in the UK. The president also declined to hold a fancy dinner in honour of the Browns and there is a suggestion that he had the minimal level of contact with the PM during the visit. It was further surmised that a final call placed by the president was prompted by Brown's triumph at Congress, and was only made as the PM's plane was on the tarmac about to leave. Now the floodgates opened and the dirges for the 'special relationship' began in earnest.
The fact is this relationship has long since ceased to be special and it is a mystery that the misapprehension that it is has survived so long. A brief historical survey will illustrate this point. By 1812, Britain and the newly-independent United States were at war, a conflict which saw American sailors being impressed by the Royal Navy and the burning of Washington and the White House. In the 1860s, during the Civil War, the British Government came exceedingly close to recognising the Confederacy which would in all likelihood have precipitated the end of the Union. The 1890s saw the two powers nearly going to war over the issue of the proper placement of the border of British Guiana with Venezuala. WWI saw the US becoming the world's creditor, displacing Britain in the process. The British government became severely indebted to the US during the war and had to make territorial concessions as well in lieu of other forms of payment. The settlement that followed the war showed the world the extent to which America had become at a minimum primus inter pares, in reality the dominant global player. Our image of WWII is of Roosevelt doing all he could to aid Britain in its darkest hours and then, following Pearl Harbour, forming a partnership with Churchill which doomed the Axis. Leaving aside one problem, the criminal diminution of the decisive Soviet role in defeating the Wehrmacht, there is the fact that in no sense could the Churchill-Roosevelt relationship be called a partnership.
There may have been personal warmth between the two men but the fact was that Roosevelt left no doubt as to who was in charge. Churchill recounts in his memoirs the painful realisation that he was being shunted aside as Roosevelt, through a combination of realpolitik and a growing liking for Stalin, converted the so-called 'Big Three' into a dyad. No considerations of a special relationship gave Roosevelt the slightest pause as he pushed for measures that would hasten the demise of the British Empire. The post-war settlement, from the point of view of the west, was fashioned by the Americans and with the Suez crisis of 1956 all doubts as to Britain's true position in America's view was removed. Eisenhower forced Britain to reverse its effort, in concert with France and Israel, to maintain control of the Suez canal. There is much in this step to commend vis-a-vis the support it gave to the sovereignty of a nascent nation and the general slap-down it delivered to colonialism. What cannot be gainsaid is that it was now way for one country to treat another, one which was ostensibly its 'special friend'.
Fast forward to the 1990s: following the love-fest between Reagan, then Bush 41, with Mrs. Thatcher, we have the assumption of power by a young Rhodes scholar, Bill Clinton. Notwithstanding his personal history, Clinton's administration was clear that it placed more interest in Asia, the coming locus of power, and even in other countries in Europe, than it did in the UK. Most humiliating of all was the courtship of Sinn Fein and its leader Gerry Adamns which included Mr. Adams being a guest of the president's in the White House. Remarkable stuff, that a man who had a terrorist past, with activities directed against the UK, was feted by Washington's elite.
The years under Bush 43 offered a sort of false dawn in the relationship between Britain and America, particularly after 9/11. Blair locked himself in a fulsome embrace of G.W. Bush and was rewarded with warm receptions in Washington and pointed praise as America's truest friend. Mr. Blair effectively destroyed his premiership by joining America in its misadventure in Iraq. Far from representing an apogee in the US-UK relationship, I would argue that Blair's strategy revealed the parlous state of the 'special relationship'. It was a desperate roll of the dice to bring back the imagined halcyon days of Churchill and Roosevelt. Like any effort to bring back the past, this gambit was always going to be forlorn and it has reaped a whirlwind for the once all-conquering Labour party.
So, whether Obama's coolness to Brown resulted from his Kenyan-Irish roots (lots of reasons for Britophobia in those histories!) or from the conventional wisdom that Asia is the place that merits the unbridled attention of the US, or simply that like all winning politicians, Obama abhors losing ones (Brown has all the markers of this type) it is of a piece with a larger reality: America is just not that into you Britain! The cultural commonalities will occasionally provide areas of comity, and there will be cooperation on a variety of issues in the future. What is well and truly dead is the illusion of something more; of Britain being Greece to America's Rome. The UK is, for the Americans, a small island off the western coast of Europe.