Excerpts from an editorial in The Times of London yesterday:
George Bush’s bust of Winston Churchill is already four days into its new life outside the Oval Office. In its place there are new memorabilia, new art and a new world view from which positive British influences are conspicuously absent.
The younger Bush loved Scotland as well as Churchill. Bill Clinton discovered Britain as a Rhodes scholar. Ronald Reagan never lived here but still felt “a moment of kinship and homecoming” on an early visit to Westminster. The Obama family’s only direct experience of British government has been the torture of the new president’s grandfather by police in Kenya.
Now more than at any point since the Cold War, there is a strong argument for regarding improved trans-Atlantic relations as a central goal of British foreign policy. But if that relationship is to have special status in Washington as well as London, it will have to be earned.
So far President Obama has appeared virtually immune to personal prejudice. If he were not, Britain’s old alliance with the free world’s superpower might be in trouble. He is aware of the colonial mistreatment of his grandfather. He has described with quiet scorn the barely hidden racism of whites whom he met in Kenya.
The trans-Atlantic partnership that Obama seeks will be with Europe as a whole. He is a natural multilateralist and every European leader’s new best friend. He may choose not to pick favorites. But if he seeks a hotline to the heart of the continent rather than the “bridge” that Britain has traditionally offered, Gordon Brown’s phone is unlikely to be the one that rings.
The front-runner is President Sarkozy of France, who has advertised his fondness of America from his first day in office (and is close to Philip Gordon, the new, fluent French-speaking US assistant secretary of state for Europe).
