At the end of World War II, a gifted young British expert on Russia named Thomas Brimelow—later ambassador to Poland, but at the time reporting from Moscow—ventured that what the Soviet Union respected most about Great Britain was “our ability to collect friends.” Indeed, having allies in this world matters if you want to advance your agenda. Of the many things a new American president will need to do in 2017, one is to begin repairing America’s relations with our key allies. Start with the United Kingdom.
There’s no shortage of concerned chatter about the state of affairs. Foreign Policy speaks of the “decline” in U.S.-U.K. ties; the Telegraph says the “special relationship hangs by a thread.” National Review contends that should the post of prime minister land in the hands of Labour’s new leader, Jeremy Corbyn—the 66-year-old socialist who describes Hamas as “friends” and advocates renationalization of key industries—we’d have a final nail in the coffin. Even the staid Financial Times opines that the special relationship has ceased being very special.
In point of fact, the historical record of our strategic love affair with the British has hardly been without its bumps. Yes, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher got along famously. “Your problems will be ours,” proclaimed the Iron Lady in her first meeting with Reagan as president in 1981. Before that, John F. Kennedy and Harold Macmillan became friends. Jimmy Carter and James Callaghan worked well together. Bill Clinton and George W. Bush both enjoyed closed ties to Tony Blair. It was Winston Churchill (whose mother was American) who coined the term “special relationship,” first in 1944, but then pushing the expression into the mainstream two years later in his famous 1946 Iron Curtain speech in Fulton, Missouri. As wartime prime minister, Churchill once informed Charles de Gaulle, “[E]ach time I must choose between you and Roosevelt, I shall choose Roosevelt.”
These were the lovely moments. Between the two world wars, though, there had been naval rivalry and British accusations that the United States had ruined the League of Nations (the Senate refused to ratify the league’s covenant after the Paris Peace Conference in 1919). After World War II, there was Dwight D. Eisenhower’s opposition to British military operations in Suez, which resulted in British humiliation and the resignation of Prime Minister Anthony Eden in January 1957. There was Lyndon Johnson’s intense dislike of Harold Wilson, whose government declined to commit troops to Vietnam (according to the American ambassador to the Court of St. James, Wilson feared being seen at home as “a mere satellite” of the United States).
Then, too, add to the list of sore spots Ted Heath, the conservative prime minister who followed Wilson (1970-74). An ardent advocate of British integration into Europe, he was at best lukewarm about the special relationship. Heath had once declined the post of ambassador to the United States.
So it hasn’t been all roses. But what’s different now?
For one thing, context. As the United States has signaled retreat during two terms of Barack Obama, our adversaries have advanced: China in East Asia, Russia in Eastern Europe (and now Syria), and ISIS and Iran in the Middle East. And as world order unravels—arguably more so than at any other time in the last 60 years—it’s crucial that we make sure the West becomes strong again at its core. That’s NATO and the transatlantic partnership. And it’s hard to imagine getting any of this back into shape without Britain strong and solidly committed to the alliance, especially at this moment. True, Germany is important. It’s Europe’s largest economy, and Angela Merkel has been formidable in standing up to Vladimir Putin over Ukraine. But Merkel’s chancellorship may soon be in serious trouble, in the wake of a very unpopular Greek bailout and as the country’s (and the European Union’s) migration crisis deepens. The EU as a whole is likely to be looking inward for the foreseeable future, with Germany reverting to trade and cautious diplomacy as the mainstays of Berlin’s foreign policy.
Which brings us back to Britain, the current problem, and solutions. The principal problem of recent years in U.S.-U.K. ties has not been any particular antipathy by our president toward the British. Of the widely discussed controversy over Obama and the return of a Churchill bust, incidentally, I say give the president a break. Upon taking office in 2009, the Obama administration returned to the British government a bust of the British statesman that had been on loan—given by Blair to Bush—to the White House since July 2001. The White House residence has another Churchill bust, given to President Johnson in 1965. The decision to return the loaned sculpture, according to the White House curator, had been made before Obama arrived. Cries about Obama dissing the Brits over the Churchill bust were much ado about nothing.
Leave aside also our cold fish president’s apparently stiff relationship with Prime Minister David Cameron. According to Sir Anthony Seldon and Peter Snowdon’s recent biography of Cameron, the prime minister has found Obama detached and inaccessible, while 10 Downing Street staffers and the Foreign Office refer to our commander in chief as Spock, after the stoic Vulcan in Star Trek. Regrettably, one would be hardpressed to name a world leader—let alone an ally—with whom the president has forged close personal ties. There was Turkey’s Islamist, authoritarian president Recep Tayyip Erdogan—for a while, anyway.
But the special relationship was never merely about close personal links between leaders. Nor was it simply about shared language and history (even if these things are of considerable importance). For decades, the special relationship rested on exceptionally close and practical cooperation between the United States and Britain in areas of nuclear weapons technology, intelligence sharing, military planning, and foreign and defense strategy. This fine-tuned collaboration was born of our alliance during World War II and continued through most of the Cold War.
Much has atrophied in recent years, and Britain itself hasn’t helped. Cameron has cut defense and turned the United Kingdom inward. The referendum on Scottish independence and the upcoming 2016/2017 vote on whether the United Kingdom should stay in the EU absorb enormous amounts of political energy (as do the never-ending railings of Conservative backbenchers against Brussels). On Ukraine, Germany and France have led the so-called Minsk process. On Syria, the British prime minister decries Russian backing for the “butcher” Bashar al-Assad, without explaining what Britain, the United States, and NATO ought to do about it.
All this, while our president stumbles in and out of alliance matters like a barely interested bystander. In this sense, the president is less like Spock and more like Mr. Magoo. Well-pedigreed, to be sure—the old cartoon character was an alumnus of Rutgers—the shortsighted, oblivious Magoo walked through life missing nearly everything, while stubbornly refusing to admit the problems he had gotten himself into.
To the point, on mismanaging the special relationship, Obama’s failings have been chiefly threefold.
First, “leadership from behind”—much like leadership by consensus—is an oxymoron if ever there was one. In the administration’s view, an integrated, stable, and prosperous EU was to become a strong strategic partner of the United States. That was the theory. But the EU is not there yet. President Obama has steadfastly refused to accept that this is the real-world state of affairs—and that therefore the United States itself will have to lead—in large part because he seems ideologically wedded to the idea that American power and influence generally do more harm than good.
Second, the president’s dim view of America’s role in the world seems to blur his thinking about power and purpose generally. When asked early in his first term whether he believed in American exceptionalism, the president couldn’t resist adding that Greeks think their country is exceptional, too. During a March 2012 trip by Cameron to Washington, Obama fawned over our ties to Britain: “Through the grand sweep of history, through all its twists and turns . . . we stand together and we work together and we bleed together.” But the year before, in Paris, the president had announced, “We don’t have a stronger friend and stronger ally than Nicolas Sarkozy and the French people.” In the Obama worldview, everybody’s exceptional, all partnerships are strategic and special. Put another way: The president’s words seem often not to add up to very much.
Third, the president gets an F for “the vision thing.” Whittling down America’s role says nothing about the kind of world we want to live in. This summer, Obama scolded Cameron, insisting the prime minister find a way to ensure Britain’s spending on defense does not fall below the NATO goal of at least 2 percent of GDP. But for what? For this or that ad hoc task? Upping the bombing of ISIS targets in Syria does not a strategy make. Why should the British—or anyone else in the alliance, for that matter—spend more on defense if these resources are not backing a larger concept we believe in and which we’ve properly explained and sold to our publics? In 2017, a new American president must establish a renewed vision for the alliance, from which strategies can be developed, serious conversations about resource allocations can evolve, and an appreciation can once again be established for what America and Britain can do together.
The Foreign Office Kremlinologist Thomas Brimelow—who thought a good deal about Soviet threats of the time, the importance of allies, and British power and purpose—went on to become one of the United Kingdom’s most respected diplomats. In the context of working specifically with Brimelow, Henry Kissinger once noted that “there was no other government which we would have dealt with so openly, exchanged ideas so freely, or in effect permitted to participate in our own deliberations.”
There’s no need to idealize. There’s plenty that sets us apart. But what a serious strategic blunder it would be if we didn’t work to rekindle and keep a friendship like this.
Jeffrey Gedmin is codirector of the Transatlantic Renewal Project, a senior director at Blue Star Strategies, and a senior fellow at Georgetown University.
