By Michael Faulkner –
August 01, 2010
Long-lasting serious relationships between individuals,
romantic or otherwise, depend for their success and longevity on a more or less
equal commitment of trust, affection and respect on the part of both partners.
Unequal relationships, where one or more of these elements is missing, may
survive but they will involve illusion and deception. It may suit the dominant
and subordinate partners in such relationships to perpetuate the illusion that
all is well, but this does not alter the reality. For seventy years this has
been the state of affairs characterizing the so-called special relationship
between Britain and the United states.
The new Conservative prime minister, David Cameron, has just
visited Washington where, in his discussions with Barack Obama, he sought to
strike a stance rather less servile than that adopted by his predecessor, Tony
Blair, towards G.W. Bush. Where
Blair cloaked his unconditional support for Bush as the meeting of two
courageous minds facing the threat of global terror together, Cameron conceded
that Britain was the junior partner in the relationship and hinted that the
national interests of the two states might not always converge. Such caveats are
occasioned by the need to present some sort of defense of BP in the face of
widespread and justified rage by those whose livelihoods have been ruined by
the disaster resulting from the company’s irresponsible negligence in the Gulf
of Mexico. The role that BP played in securing the release of the Libyan
Megrahi, convicted of the Lockerbie bombing of 1988, is also a contentious
issue. There are also differences with the Obama administration about the fiscal
policy adopted by the Con-Lib coalition in their attempt to stimulate economic
recovery in Britain. Then there is Afghanistan.
In this unwinnable war British troops are being killed at a
rate more than double that of their U.S. allies. According to the Medical
Research Council (19 July) the number of British military deaths now matches
those of Soviet troops killed in the 1980s.And the rate is accelerating. What
public support there may have been for the war is dwindling fast. The war of
attrition waged by the Taliban can continue indefinitely and the longer it
continues the more it erodes what little public support is left. Cameron knows
this and he needs an exit strategy. Here he also appears to be at odds with
Obama. He has pledged that all British combat troops will be withdrawn by 2015,
but this is a risky strategy. Well before then the rising casualty rates are
likely to lead to intensified opposition to the war and an unstoppable demand
that the troops are withdrawn. Although there are similar pressures on Obama
there is a deep reluctance to commit to a specific date for complete withdrawal
as this would be interpreted by the Taliban as an admission of defeat. The
Afghan imbroglio becomes more intractable by the hour. The attempt to dignify
the corrupt rabble dominated by Karzai and his cronies in Kabul as a
government, is laughable. No-one seriously believes that the Afghan army will
be either willing or able to continue the fight against the Taliban when Nato
forces leave. As claimed in this column in November 2008, the only possible
exit strategy for the U.S. and Britain lies through negotiation with the
Taliban. If the Taliban are not prepared to enter into negotiations - and they
may well not be - the only alternative is complete and unequivocal defeat for
the US, Britain and Nato. The Soviets were in Afghanistan for ten years and
they failed. They left an administration far less corrupt than the Karzai
regime. Within two years that government, led by Najibullah, was overthrown by
the US backed Mujahedeen, forerunners of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Najibullah’s
dismembered body was put on public display in the street. Karzai beware!
The constantly repeated claim that our troops are fighting
in Afghanistan to keep the streets of Britain safe from terrorist attack, fools
hardly anyone. In her evidence to the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war, (21
July) Eliza Manningham-Buller, former head of MI5, expressed the opinion that
the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq were themselves responsible for
converting many young Muslims in Britain to jihad, as they regarded the wars as
an attack on Islam. The U.S. and British governments are unable to extricate
themselves from the Afghan swamp and seem destined to sink even deeper. They
are deeply worried, not least because the reputations of the British and US
armies and of Nato itself are at stake. An ignominious withdrawal, amounting to
defeat, will be the deepest humiliation. Just as in Vietnam forty years ago, a
ragged army of irregulars will be seen to have triumphed over the most modern
and best-equipped military machine in the world. If historical precedent is
anything to go by, that is what is going to happen. In Vietnam the U.S faced an
enemy inspired by a worthy cause – the cause of national liberation. In
Afghanistan, they face the Taliban, a benighted, misogynistic irregular army of
Islamist fanatics supported by aggrieved and downtrodden peasants. But this is
the enemy that the U.S. and its ally Pakistan themselves created in the 1980s
when they armed and trained the Mujahedeen to fight Soviet tanks. The monster has
turned against its former paymaster.
But what of the “special relationship”? It is surprising how
obsessed much of the news media is with this. The idea that there really is
some special relationship, equally respected and cherished on both sides of the
Atlantic, has a long history in Britain. Yet, as soon as one begins to look at
it critically it is seen to be largely illusory. It is much talked about but doesn’t amount to much. It is taken more
seriously in this country than in the United States, though even there it has
some serious adherents, mainly conservative nostalgists who still worship at
the shrine of Winston Churchill. It was indeed Churchill who, during Britain’s
darkest days of the Second World War in 1940, concluded the Atlantic Pact with
FDR. He was clear that the price that would have to be paid would put Britain
forever in debt to the US. He wanted two things that were mutually
contradictory – to preserve the British Empire – then facing
destruction along with Britain itself at the hands of Nazi Germany –
while surrendering a large part of British sovereignty to the United States. It
was a short-term strategy for survival, and as such it worked for the duration
of the war at least. After the war
Churchill perpetuated the notion of a special relationship in his “History of
the English-Speaking Peoples”. But within a very few years the British Empire
had ceased to exist and Britain itself, like most of Western Europe bankrupted
by the war, was forced to go, begging bowl in hand to the U.S. for Marshall
aid.
It is interesting to note that the only two countries of
Western Europe to develop nuclear weapons after the war were Britain and
France. They were the only two former European “Great Powers” surviving from
the pre-war era. The earlier constellation of Great Powers had disappeared, to
be replaced by the bi-polar world of the Cold War, dominated by the United
States and the USSR. Under Charles De Gaulle, France, in the 1950s broke free from US tutelage and proclaimed its
nuclear prowess in the “Force de Frappe”. Successive U.S administrations,
confident of their dominant military position in Europe through Nato, tended to
deal even-handedly with their western European allies, if anything favouring
West Germany whose rearmament they secured in 1954. Britain was regarded as
their unsinkable aircraft carrier. The US bases established during the war,
remained, were expanded, and still remain.
The Attlee government (1945 – 1951) subscribed to the
“special relationship”. The most plausible explanation for the persistence of
the idea is that successive British governments have been extremely reluctant
to face the reality of Britain’s severely diminished status in the world.
British insularity has bred a deep suspicion of “Europe”, probably conditioned
to some extent by the centuries of wars with both France, and later Germany.
The loss of the American colonies was bearable as long as Britain remained
– as was the case throughout the nineteenth century and up to 1939
– the metropolis of the largest empire the world had ever known. But it
was, during the first half of the twentieth century, an empire in terminal
decline. After 1945 the collapse could no longer be denied. The new English
speaking empire on the other side of the Atlantic could easily be accepted as
the noble successor to imperial Britain. We were united by the same language
and had, so it was claimed, common roots and ideals. It was Attlee’s Labour
government that developed the atomic bomb and every government since has
insisted on maintaining at inordinate expense an “independent nuclear
deterrent” that is neither independent nor a deterrent, but the retention of
which is considered beyond rational debate.
So every prime minister since Churchill has subscribed to
the “special relationship”, though some have done so more enthusiastically than
others. The least enthusiastic was the Conservative, Edward Heath (1970 -1974).
The most enthusiastic was the (nominally) Labour, Tony Blair, whose popularity
in the USA never ceases to bewilder but is probably explained by the abysmal
performance of G.W. Bush. Sadly, many public figures here seem to believe that
there really is a special relationship and that it must be nurtured and
cherished. Most other countries are untroubled by such notions. The whole idea
corrodes serious discussion of Britain’s role in Europe and of its actual
relationship with the United States. One suspects that in the United States itself the idea is
treated as rather quaint and probably at best as a way of keeping the Brits in
good humour.