LONDON, 10 March 2003 — The notion that Britain enjoys a “special relationship” with the United States has long been a preoccupation of the British political class. One of the relationship’s greatest champions was Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s prime minister from 1979 until 1990. Besotted by the American way of life, this pugnaciously anti-European British leader did her utmost to turn Britain into a mini-United States, a country with a dynamic American-style “enterprise culture.” And in the name of the special relationship, she was proud to offer the then American President Ronald Reagan whatever British assistance he required. When, in the mid-1980s, Reagan resolved to bomb Libya, she had no hesitation in allowing US bombers to fly from Britain. In Mrs. Thatcher’s eyes, Britain and America were the twin pillars of Western civilization, nations with identical interests and ideals.
It seemed barely conceivable that Britain would ever again have a leader quite so fixated on the special relationship as Mrs. Thatcher. But Tony Blair has achieved the apparently impossible: Endlessly advertising his allegiance to Washington, forever insisting on how much the Anglo-American relationship has benefited mankind, Blair makes his predecessor’s pro-Americanism seem comparatively sober stuff. Ever since Sept. 11, 2001, he has wasted no opportunity to proclaim himself America’s firmest friend. Not long ago (and to general amazement), he declared that Britain must be prepared to pay a “blood sacrifice” as a token of its loyalty to the US. And since George W. Bush threatened to attack Iraq, Blair has promoted the American case for war with at least as much zeal as Bush himself.
Evidently thinking of herself as Winston Churchill and of Ronald Reagan as US President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Margaret Thatcher often seemed to be re-enacting World War II: Just as they had joined forces to overcome Adolf Hitler, so (in her own mind at least) she and Reagan were bent on vanquishing what the latter dubbed the “empire of evil,” the Soviet Union — not to mention such demonic new enemies of freedom as Col. Qaddafi. More than twenty years younger than Mrs. Thatcher, Tony Blair is likewise obsessed with World War II. He is given to reminding his fellow Britons how the United States came to Britain’s aid when Hitler’s Lutwaffe bombed British cities during the Blitz of 1940 — though in point of historical fact the United States had still to abandon its neutrality at that point.
In an extraordinary gesture of Anglo-American solidarity, this most obliging of prime ministers has even lent George Bush a bust of Churchill to place on his presidential desk. Pondering his endless eagerness to please the present American administration, the British writer Geoffrey Wheatcroft waspishly suggested that Tony Blair’s watchword is not “my country right or wrong” but “your country right or wrong.”
It seems increasingly clear that the British political class never really came to terms with Britain’s diminished role on the world stage. Arguably, the British cult of the special relationship (a relationship which means little, if anything at all, to the majority of Americans) has been rooted in national self-delusion, in the wishful sense that by identifying its destiny with that of the United States, Britain could sustain its former posture as a major force in world affairs. If Britain has not infrequently appeared a reluctant member of the European Union, it is surely because integration with the rest of Europe is felt by many Britons to amount to the shaming admission that their country no longer has a grand imperial role to play.
Forty years ago, the American statesman Dean Acheson remarked that Britain had lost an empire without finding a compensatory new role. Loath to acknowledge the truth of this, many among the British political elite were incensed by Acheson’s comment. In reality, however, Britain was already in the throes of embracing a fresh raison d’être — as the closest, least critical, most trustworthy of all the United States’ allies. Now, in Tony Blair, this long-standing British subservience to the US has found its definitive personification. During the present crisis, the official line has been that Blair regards himself as a bridge between Europe and America, a restraining cisatlantic influence on Washington’s impetuosity. Yet this is hardly how the rest of the world views him. Indeed, the more he has maintained that he is acting out of profound personal conviction, the more Blair has consolidated his worldwide reputation as Washington’s favorite yes-man. At home, Blair’s problem is that his fervor in the US cause is straining the allegiance of many Labour MPs to breaking point. Nor is this just Blair’s problem, though. For — bereft of major allies as they are — Washington’s impatient hawks desperately need British endorsement for PR purposes, namely as diplomatic cover for declaring a war that would otherwise look like nothing but an act of blatant unilateralist aggression.
Tony Blair has arguably been in a position not enjoyed by a British prime minister for several generations. He might have significantly influenced the course of international events: Deprived of his dependably voluble cheerleading, George Bush might have had to reconsider his strategy. What has stopped Blair from using this power? And why does he cleave to the American rather than the European view of things — even when this means dividing Europe against itself and helping to entrench a damaging rift between the United States and his own country on the one hand and France and Germany on the other? Ultimately, this may be a matter for the psychologists. When Blair was 11, his father was reduced to mute invalidism by a devastating stroke. Has he been in pursuit of a surrogate father figure all these years? Has this pious Christian found one at last in the swaggering, Bible-thumping Texan George W. Bush? It is a disquieting thought that Blair may be attempting to work out his private psychological problems in public at the expense of world stability.
The irony is that Bush’s obedient British servant is causing his people to question the special relationship as they have seldom questioned it before. Devotees though they may be of American popular culture, today’s skeptical Britons plainly feel no great admiration for a prime minister whose politics revolve around displays of self-abasing fealty to Washington. Many on the Left resented the essentially conservative Blair for hijacking the British Labour Party. Now, there is a much more widespread sense that this fanatically philo-American prime minister is robbing the British of their self-respect.
Last week the long-serving US diplomat John Kiesling wrote an anguished resignation letter to Colin Powell explaining that he could not bring himself to be associated any longer with the thuggish image that the United States is displaying to the world. And he posed the plangent question: Has “let them hate, so long as they fear” really become America’s motto? It is this tortured American liberal, not Tony Blair, who sums up how millions of British people feel about the US in its current menacing guise.
Whatever the outcome of the present crisis, and however long Tony Blair survives as prime minister, British attitudes toward America may never be quite the same again. Many are beginning to suspect that the special relationship is not so much a blessing as a curse.
