American-British relations are out of joint. One has to go back to the Suez crisis — when Britain was very much at fault — to find them reaching the present low level. Poll after poll (as in the rest of Europe) have shown, and for some years, that the United States is highly unpopular.
In a way this is most surprising. Still to a large extent many Americans share the same roots. The outstanding Founding Fathers of the United States, much as they rowed with the English king, admired the English tradition.
We speak the same language. The Magna Carta, which King John was forced to sign in 1215, is of great importance in both countries.
In 2006 the British media is absurdly US-centric, and the British cinema and TV awash with American films and offerings. To a degree that I dislike, our culture is distorted by what is new and exciting in the United States, where many from the British Isles fly for their holidays. British politicians look at America’s last election to see how to fight Britain’s next election.
There can be no doubt as to why the United States is so unpopular: Bush and Iraq. After the successful military campaign to overthrow the hated regime of Saddam Hussein, the United States made a series of massive blunders in Iraq, for which the United Kingdom must take its share of responsibility.
President George Bush, one suspects following advice from Vice President Dick Cheney, gave the responsibility for Iraq to Donald Rumsfeld, the defense secretary, and not to Colin Powell, the secretary of state. It was the Pentagon which was ultimately responsible for the failure to control the looting in the early days of the occupation; the manifest incompetence of Gen. Jay Garner, the first and now forgotten administrator; the decision to disband the Iraqi Army; the refusal to provide the manpower which US generals needed; the lack of trained Americans to take over the administration in Iraq; the efforts to minimize the UN’s role and the packing of the first Iraqi Governing Council with exiles who lacked local support.
Many people in Britain were horrified by the opening of the camp at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and the secret “Extraordinary Renditions” program which involved abducting terrorist suspects. People could not understand the failure of the Americans to push the Middle East peace process and stop the construction of that shocking Israeli Wall.
The list of complaints against the Bush administration is a long one and it includes American’s steel tariffs and its failure to support the International Criminal Court which, correctly, was strongly backed by the British Foreign Office.
Writing in his column in The Times, on Oct. 16, William Rees-Mogg, a former editor, who has been a strong supporter of the Anglo-American Alliance, commented: “The Bush administration has treated the US-UK alliance with supercilious negligence, if not with outright arrogance.”
There are those at Westminster who claim that Prime Minister Tony Blair has only been doing what every British prime minister since the 1940s has done — with the possible exception of Edward Heath who saw Britain’s future as being more linked with Europe than America — by giving support to whoever is currently sitting in the White House.
The traditional argument is that it is in Britain’s interest, and more grandly in the world’s interest, for Britain to be a serious player in the making of policy in Washington. A modern argument, which is now attacked, is that Britain can help America remain engaged with the rest of the world over such vital matters as climate control and support for Africa.
Dear to the heart of Whitehall is the belief that the United Kingdom relies on the United States for its nuclear weapons, and its intelligence capability, which is in no way matched by that from either Europe or the Commonwealth.
The great problem for Tony Blair, and his successor next year, is that George Bush is not like Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower or Jack Kennedy.
George Bush has surrounded himself with neoconservatives whose politics and international priorities are all too obviously not those of the British Labour Party, which remains a pro-European social democrat political party — even if its leader tends to behave like a Christian Democrat! Very few at Westminster are impressed with George Bush’s record in office; it is a shockingly bad one at home and abroad — much influenced by the oil industry.
In practice the Bush/Blair partnership has failed for it has been grossly unequal. Either Tony Blair has not pushed George Bush sufficiently firmly and effectively on big issues for the United Kingdom, or else George Bush has seen no reason to help him out. The poor state of the alliance is of no credit to either country.
