David Cameron made few references to the US in parliament – an oversight or a tactical calculation following the Iraq war?
When David Cameron made his pitch to MPs for British participation in yet another US-led intervention in the Middle East yesterday, he made strikingly few references to "our good friends and allies" the Americans, let alone to the "special relationship" that British prime ministers have usually cherished during the decades of imperial decline.
An oversight or a tactical calculation designed to deflect attention from uneasy parallels with Tony Blair's Commons speech on the eve of the 2003 Iraq war? Perhaps, but though the bonds of sentiment and shared interests remain powerful, there have also been mutual distancing and disenchantment since the US embraced a virtual state of emergency after 9/11.
Barack Obama's heroic status is not what it was in Britain. Europe, and Britain's role in it, have disappointed the US, as has our military performance in Iraq and elsewhere, our dwindling military budgets too. Guantánamo Bay remains open and civil liberties curtailed; the mighty US banking system has let us all down. And then there is the rise of China. The first Pacific-born president, grandson of a victim of British torture during the Mau Mau rebellion, has no emotional ties to offset his growing preoccupation with Asia.
Tactless it may be to point out, but exactly 200 years ago Britain and the US were engaged in their second and (as it turned out) last war. Silly and pointless, it ended in mutual embarrassment and the status quo, but not before the Brits had burned the White House in retaliation for Toronto. Lingering ill-feeling, stoked by Irish immigration from the potato famine and oppression, lasted into the 1890s when the Brits – but not Europe – supported America's imperial grab for Spanish Cuba and the Philippines in 1898, a war immortalised by Orson Welles' Citizen Kane.
Though the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 warning Europe to stay out of the Americas was upheld by the mighty Royal Navy, the century was marked by US/UK border skirmishes from Oregon to Venezuela and high tension – the near risk of war – over Abraham Lincoln's naval blockade of the Confederacy's cotton exports to Lancashire and warship purchases. Anglophobia was rampant.
The High Victorian John Bright had said the rise of America would be as inevitable as the rising sun (as China's is today?), but it took the first world war to make most Britons realise what the novels of Henry James had not managed. Motor cars, aircraft and the soft power of Hollywood were one thing, but British condescension remained strong and, even when the talkies came, many movie heroes still had British accents – in contrast to 2013, when they are often villains.
It was far from clear after 1914 that Washington would be angrier over German submarine warfare or the latest British blockade. Facing defeat if it could not starve Britain, Berlin risked unrestricted submarine war, banking on victory before enough US troops arrived in 1917-18 to tip the balance. The gamble failed, but the war revived powerful isolationist feelings and kept the US out of the new League of Nations. Britain's naval hegemony was formally trimmed by the Washington naval treaty of 1921.
With hindsight the Anglo-American partnership that emerged from Winston Churchill's strategic decision in 1940-41 to throw Britain's lot in with the US (his mother was American, but he didn't have much choice) looks inevitable. It did not look so then. Many Americans – including FDR's London ambassador, Joe Kennedy (father of the future president) – thought Britain would lose. The 1940 lend-lease deal – rackety US destroyers in return for a string of bases – was as hard-nosed as US financial policy before, during and after the war, from which it emerged the undisputed global power. The US disapproved of empire, but picked Britain's clean.
It did not like Attlee's socialism either, a recurring source of mutual dismay embodied in distaste for each other's healthcare systems. Harold Wilson's Labour MPs ensured he did not succumb to LBJ's blandishments to send troops ("just the Black Watch would do") to Vietnam and his peacemaking efforts in Hanoi were rightly mocked.
Britain's secret collusion with France and Israel to invade Suez in 1956 – aborted when prime minister Eden's wartime colleague, now President Eisenhower, authorised a run on sterling – had ensured that it would never again defy Washington (France drew the opposite conclusion, at least in theory) with independent military adventures. But the Tory right, heirs both to imperial nostalgia and Ukip-style Little England-ism, shared the left's dislike of American muscle abroad: unsubtle Romans to our sophisticated Greeks, as Harold Macmillan once remarked.
Edward Heath, the least pro-American postwar PM despite his wartime military service, tried in 1970-74 to rebalance the relationship: less US (where President Richard Nixon was opening up to Mao's China) or old Commonwealth, more Europe. It created a tension between globalists and Europeans that has never been resolved, not even by Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair; both were ardent pro-American globalists, admired there as only Churchill had been before, but both were stuffed when necessity dictated an unsentimental US attitude towards steel imports (Bush Jr) or the invasion of the Commonwealth's "communist" Grenada (Reagan).
It remains a cliche that Anglo-American relations are like a family's, feuding but strong, the ties of language, the common law and great American writers like Shakespeare and Dickens impossible to replicate or destroy. But more successful members of families sometimes couple kindness with cheerful self-interest. So it is with countries. Reported by guardian.co.uk 1 day ago.
When David Cameron made his pitch to MPs for British participation in yet another US-led intervention in the Middle East yesterday, he made strikingly few references to "our good friends and allies" the Americans, let alone to the "special relationship" that British prime ministers have usually cherished during the decades of imperial decline.
An oversight or a tactical calculation designed to deflect attention from uneasy parallels with Tony Blair's Commons speech on the eve of the 2003 Iraq war? Perhaps, but though the bonds of sentiment and shared interests remain powerful, there have also been mutual distancing and disenchantment since the US embraced a virtual state of emergency after 9/11.
Barack Obama's heroic status is not what it was in Britain. Europe, and Britain's role in it, have disappointed the US, as has our military performance in Iraq and elsewhere, our dwindling military budgets too. Guantánamo Bay remains open and civil liberties curtailed; the mighty US banking system has let us all down. And then there is the rise of China. The first Pacific-born president, grandson of a victim of British torture during the Mau Mau rebellion, has no emotional ties to offset his growing preoccupation with Asia.
Tactless it may be to point out, but exactly 200 years ago Britain and the US were engaged in their second and (as it turned out) last war. Silly and pointless, it ended in mutual embarrassment and the status quo, but not before the Brits had burned the White House in retaliation for Toronto. Lingering ill-feeling, stoked by Irish immigration from the potato famine and oppression, lasted into the 1890s when the Brits – but not Europe – supported America's imperial grab for Spanish Cuba and the Philippines in 1898, a war immortalised by Orson Welles' Citizen Kane.
Though the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 warning Europe to stay out of the Americas was upheld by the mighty Royal Navy, the century was marked by US/UK border skirmishes from Oregon to Venezuela and high tension – the near risk of war – over Abraham Lincoln's naval blockade of the Confederacy's cotton exports to Lancashire and warship purchases. Anglophobia was rampant.
The High Victorian John Bright had said the rise of America would be as inevitable as the rising sun (as China's is today?), but it took the first world war to make most Britons realise what the novels of Henry James had not managed. Motor cars, aircraft and the soft power of Hollywood were one thing, but British condescension remained strong and, even when the talkies came, many movie heroes still had British accents – in contrast to 2013, when they are often villains.
It was far from clear after 1914 that Washington would be angrier over German submarine warfare or the latest British blockade. Facing defeat if it could not starve Britain, Berlin risked unrestricted submarine war, banking on victory before enough US troops arrived in 1917-18 to tip the balance. The gamble failed, but the war revived powerful isolationist feelings and kept the US out of the new League of Nations. Britain's naval hegemony was formally trimmed by the Washington naval treaty of 1921.
With hindsight the Anglo-American partnership that emerged from Winston Churchill's strategic decision in 1940-41 to throw Britain's lot in with the US (his mother was American, but he didn't have much choice) looks inevitable. It did not look so then. Many Americans – including FDR's London ambassador, Joe Kennedy (father of the future president) – thought Britain would lose. The 1940 lend-lease deal – rackety US destroyers in return for a string of bases – was as hard-nosed as US financial policy before, during and after the war, from which it emerged the undisputed global power. The US disapproved of empire, but picked Britain's clean.
It did not like Attlee's socialism either, a recurring source of mutual dismay embodied in distaste for each other's healthcare systems. Harold Wilson's Labour MPs ensured he did not succumb to LBJ's blandishments to send troops ("just the Black Watch would do") to Vietnam and his peacemaking efforts in Hanoi were rightly mocked.
Britain's secret collusion with France and Israel to invade Suez in 1956 – aborted when prime minister Eden's wartime colleague, now President Eisenhower, authorised a run on sterling – had ensured that it would never again defy Washington (France drew the opposite conclusion, at least in theory) with independent military adventures. But the Tory right, heirs both to imperial nostalgia and Ukip-style Little England-ism, shared the left's dislike of American muscle abroad: unsubtle Romans to our sophisticated Greeks, as Harold Macmillan once remarked.
Edward Heath, the least pro-American postwar PM despite his wartime military service, tried in 1970-74 to rebalance the relationship: less US (where President Richard Nixon was opening up to Mao's China) or old Commonwealth, more Europe. It created a tension between globalists and Europeans that has never been resolved, not even by Margaret Thatcher or Tony Blair; both were ardent pro-American globalists, admired there as only Churchill had been before, but both were stuffed when necessity dictated an unsentimental US attitude towards steel imports (Bush Jr) or the invasion of the Commonwealth's "communist" Grenada (Reagan).
It remains a cliche that Anglo-American relations are like a family's, feuding but strong, the ties of language, the common law and great American writers like Shakespeare and Dickens impossible to replicate or destroy. But more successful members of families sometimes couple kindness with cheerful self-interest. So it is with countries. Reported by guardian.co.uk 1 day ago.