In the quarter-center I’ve spent studying British relations with Europe, I have never seen, or read, a performance that recapitulated as many cliches as President Obama’s press conference with Prime Minister Cameron on Friday. I suppose I should be grateful: in future, I won’t have to spend months scrounging around British archives for materials to illustrate how poorly American politicians understand the European issue in Britain: Obama’s given me all the sources I need.
I’m not going to waste time decrying the way Obama pretended to like Cameron: we’ve all read his Atlantic interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, in which he makes it perfectly clear that he regards Cameron as yet another free-rider. Nor am I going to complain about how he reduced the Special Relationship to the fawning, and frankly embarrassing, desire of an unnamed staffer to see the Queen. Nor I am going to laugh about his pretense of being inspired by Churchill (“I love the guy!”) or the Queen: since he only refers to Sir Winston and Her Majesty when he’s in Britain, it’s clear that they’re just personages to be deployed rhetorically when convenient, not individuals to be respected, never mind learned from. And can any sane person say that the past seven years of U.S. foreign policy have shown even the slightest Churchillian touch?
