A relationship that is now - your country right or wrong - Why do we pretend that we have the same interests as the US?
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Geoffrey Wheatcroft Monday January 27, 2003 The Guardian
Next month, Lord Black of Crossharbour - Conrad Black, the owner of the Daily Telegraph - is giving a lecture in London entitled "Is it in Britain's national interest to be America's principal ally?" There may be no prizes for guessing his answer, but that is indeed a very interesting question, and has been for many years. The closer one looks at the relations between the two countries in terms of national interest, the more unequal they seem, though distorted by a misreading of history and a misunderstanding of motives.
A hundred years ago, England was the only global superpower, whose territories covered much of the Earth's surface, and whose City of London owned much more of the world than the British empire formally controlled. That included the US, which was to a large extent a financial (as well as a cultural) dependency of London until the first world war. This was much resented by an American nation which had, after all, emerged from rebellion against British rule, and one episode after another showed that whatever affection the English felt for the Americans was simply not reciprocated.
After the US civil war there was a fierce dispute about the Alabama, an English-built Confederate warship which had inflicted damage on Union shipping. Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts demanded a sum amounting to six times British annual state spending (he was prepared to consider the cession of Canada as an alternative) before London paid a sum equivalent, in relation to state spending, to £150bn today. This set a pattern for American aggression and British conciliation which was repeated in 1895 when the two countries almost went to war over a border dispute between Venezuela and British Guiana. President Cleveland played on a deep vein of American Anglophobia, showing that, as one historian put it: "An Anglo-American war would still be the most popular of all wars in America".
In the 20th century, the two countries twice became wartime allies, but this quite wrongly led the British to suppose that they had identical interests. For one thing, the Americans entered both world wars belatedly, at very little cost in casualties, and very much on their own terms. That was especially true in the second world war, one of whose outcomes was the end of Great Britain as a great power, at the behest - and to the considerable advantage - of the US.
Only in this strange age of historical amnesia could a senior White House official tell the Washington Post that the US now faces the same responsibilities as when it was "standing between Nazi Germany and a takeover of all Europe". And with his own frightening historical ignorance, Tony Blair has spoken of our duty to support the Americans as they supported us during the Blitz. He is apparently unaware that, far from supporting or standing between anyone, America was neutral at the time. The US didn't enter the war until December 1941, and then only because Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor and Hitler had declared war on the US, not the other way round.
Before the US joined the war, there was, of course, the Lend-Lease agreement, which was represented as an act of generosity. The reality was that, in return for some obsolescent warships, Washington ruthlessly stripped British dollar reserves. The process was completed by the terms of the postwar American loan whose effect - combined with Lend-Lease - was gravely to weaken the British economy, especially the exporting economy, to the very great benefit of American business. Any remaining illusions about a coincidence of British and American interests should never have survived the Suez episode, when London had the financial rug pulled from under its feet by Washington.
To say all of which may sound "anti-American", that quaint catch-all term. In fact, one can perfectly well like and admire much about America while discussing its political conduct objectively. And there is anyway no reason why the US shouldn't ruthlessly pursue its national interests as it sees them. But that only emphasises the sheer one-sidedness of the Anglo-American relationship, going far beyond the inevitable inequality between a former global power, now living in reduced circumstances, and the superpower which succeeded it.
This can be illustrated in the words of two Victorian prime ministers. When a pompous colleague said, "I shall always support you when you are in the right," Melbourne less pompously replied, "What I want is men who will support me when I am in the wrong."
Palmerston said that England had no permanent friends and no permanent enemies, only permanent interests. His phrase is sometimes quoted today by those who direct the Bush administration, inside or outside the White House, and it is a perfectly plausible basis for any country's foreign policy.
The trouble is that America follows Palmerston, while expecting the British to follow Melbourne. They have no permanent friends: we must always support them. More surprisingly, this is accepted by some of our own official class, through what Hugo Young has called "the convenient rationale, now much heard in Whitehall, that Britain has a selfless duty to act alongside the US in its military ventures precisely in order to show the world that Washington is not alone". It is hard to see how that is either convenient or rational. "My country right or wrong" is bad enough, but "your country right or wrong" is barely sane.
Never has the relationship been more one-sided than it is today. Blair loyally acts as the frontman for George Bush, putting the case for war against Iraq with a fluency the president can't match, even if it means telling what would be called, in a person of less exalted station, plain lies about Saddam Hussein's military threat to this country and his connections with al-Qaida. As for Blair's claim that, in return for our loyalty, we enjoy unique influence in Washington, there is no more evidence of that than there is for an Iraqi connection with September 11.
Washington conspicuously did not support us in the years when we tried to defeat the IRA. Blair's devoted loyalty the autumn before last was shortly rewarded by a US tariff designed to destroy what's left of the British steel industry. And if the prime minister really enjoyed the influence he claims, then Washington would have backed his pet scheme for an Israeli-Palestinian peace conference, at least to the extent of telling Sharon to let the Palestinians come to London. Nothing of the kind happened.
The sad truth is that Tony Blair is the last victim of an illusion which has long bedevilled British policy, the myth of the "special relationship". Actually, the chief characteristic of this relationship was that only one side knew it existed - and relationships don't come more special than that.