Recently in Britain,we watched as Tony Blair gave us his final virtuoso performance as leader at a Labour Party conference. It reminded even the most jaded political hacks why they chose him in the first place, and made us all contemplate the future once again. For us in the U.K., beyond losing a great orator, very little will change. The real loss will be felt in the United States.
The U.K. has long known that the time would come when Tony Blair would step down, we have equally known who to expect after him: current Chancellor of the Exchequer (Economics Minister) Gordon Brown. We have known this because Messrs. Blair and Brown were two halves of the same party. They conjured the New Labour experiment together that turned the previously unelectable party of the British left into a winning centrist party.
They did this together by fostering an economic plan that both allowed the forces of market capitalism to advance, while at the same time maintaining social spending and investment into communities at a high enough level to keep some sort of safety net in place. Not everything succeeded, but the fundamentals were sound. Britain has experienced unprecedented growth over the last decade and Brown is one of the men responsible for that. So we have a great future ahead.
For the U.S., and foreign policy, on the other hand, Brown will be a very different proposition. Rather than lose an ally per se — the United Kingdom’s foreign policy is one that is structured in such a way that it will always be intertwined with America’s — the U.S. will lose its greatest public speaker, and one of the few supporters left with any credibility or power.
Time after time, it is Prime Minister Blair who comes forwards to sell whatever bill of goods the U.S. is trying to peddle to the world. We all got to see exactly how this relationship works on the “Yo Blair” tapes — one of the causes of the recent round of political infighting that led to
Blair’sdecision to put a timeline on his departure.
This is not to say that Brown will not be a vocal supporter of America. Washingtonian fears about his old Labour proto-socialist anti-American tendencies are completely incorrect. Chancellor Brown holidays regularly in Cape Cod, and most of his liberal economics policies are born of a deep admiration of the American market.
He will, however, not be as impressive a public speaker. Brown’s dour Scottish overtones and long complex speeches on economic policy are not as eloquent as Blair’s soaring foreign policy rhetoric. He will not make America’s case on the international stage in nearly such fluent terms.
Nor will he necessarily want to. While British foreign policy will remain largely the same, the emphasis is going to be gently shifted away from Iraq.
Brown has stated that he would have gone into the country in the same way as Blair, but this is about all he has said on the matter.
He has, however, wholeheartedly embraced the cause of Africa and alleviating global poverty. While this will have gone largely unnoticed in the United States, this is the one foreign policy issue that both Blair and Brown have championed around the world. Under Blair’s tutelage, in the period of 2001-2005, the U.K. doubled its foreign aid to £1.1 billion ($2.1 billion), and Brown is eager to continue this and move beyond Iraq to make Africa and poverty alleviation his legacy.
Brown’s silence on Iraq means that he will probably be able to pass on the blame for inheriting a war that was not of his doing. While he is certainly not going to pull British troops out and will continue to support the broader war on terror, he is not going to run around the world justifying it loudly. Rather, he will try to turn the page and shift the focus of British foreign policy elsewhere. There will not be a cleavage in the special relationship, but rather a gentle adjustment.
The United States has yet to really realize the repercussions of this shift.
Washington has reassured itself (and been reassured by Brown) that nothing will change. Yet no longer will the president find an ally on the international stage who is willing to publicly and unilaterally share his ideological outlook, and, given the treatment of this one, let us not expect there to be many more.
Raffaello Pantucci is a research associate at the International Institute for Strategic Studies.
