[Mb-civic] The BreakUp LATimes

[Michael Butler]

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-ferguson10oct10.story

The Breakup

The Iraq war is isolating the U.S. and killing the American-British 'special
relationship'
 By Niall Ferguson
 Niall Ferguson is professor of history at Harvard University and a senior
fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford. His latest book is "Colossus:
The Price of America's Empire."

 October 10, 2004

 CAMBRIDGE, Mass. ‹ On numerous occasions, Sen. John F. Kerry has claimed
that, if elected, he could persuade unspecified allies to assist the United
States in Iraq. These allies play a crucial role in Kerry's plan for the
country. They allow him to say he can reduce U.S. commitments without
leaving Iraq to self-destruct.

 But who are these white knights waiting to ride to the rescue of a more
internationally minded president?

 The answer is: er, pass.

 If Kerry seriously thinks he could induce any of the world's major military
powers (or indeed any of its minor ones) to bail the U.S. out in Iraq, he is
deluding himself. There is absolutely zero chance of (to name the obvious
candidates) either France or Germany changing its stance of unqualified
opposition to last year's invasion and thinly veiled indifference to this
year's insurgency. 

 The leaders of the countries that stood aside when Saddam Hussein was
overthrown have one obvious reason for staying on the sidelines. They have
no desire to pay the domestic political price currently being paid by the
leaders of the countries that gave President Bush their support.

 French President Jacques Chirac and German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder are
not popular politicians. But they are still in power. If they had backed the
invasion of Iraq, they would surely not be. A backlash against Spanish
support for the war contributed to the downfall of Jose Maria Aznar in
March. Leszek Miller, who took Poland into the war, resigned in May. And
John Howard is in a tight contest in Australia.

 If Italy were a properly functioning democracy, rather than a docile
subsidiary of its prime minister's media empire, Silvio Berlusconi too would
be under pressure. Most striking of all, Iraq has permanently tarnished the
reputation of Prime Minister Tony Blair in the eyes of British voters. The
erstwhile golden boy of European politics came close to quitting this
summer. With every passing day, it becomes harder to imagine him serving
another full term as prime minister.

 The irony is that if Kerry were to be elected, he might quickly find
himself even more isolated than Bush has been because the most important of
Washington's traditional alliances ‹ the "special relationship" with Britain
‹ has been brought to the point of collapse by Blair's backing of Bush's
policy toward Iraq.

 As dramatized by the British playwright David Hare in "Stuff Happens," Bush
and Blair are players in a Shakespearean tragedy. Somewhat unexpectedly,
Bush turns out to be the devious Iago to Blair's naive Othello. The victim
is not a woman, however. The victim is Britain ‹ lured into a war that a
large majority of British voters now regard as unjust and unnecessary.

 The question is worth pondering: What exactly has Britain gained ‹ besides
applause in Washington and opprobrium everywhere else ‹ from Blair's
uncritical support of the Bush administration's Middle Eastern policy?

 Whenever I pose this question in Britain, the positive answers have one
thing in common: They come from members of professional elites. Military men
believe in the special relationship, especially those who have some
experience in intelligence operations. Bankers believe in it, especially
those who work for bulge-bracket Wall Street firms. And some academics still
believe in it, especially those (here I have firsthand experience) recently
lured away from Oxford or Cambridge by their more generously endowed Ivy
League competitors.

 These institutional links across the Atlantic are not wholly asymmetrical;
the brighter sort of Brit generally finds himself treated with a measure of
respect, rather than as a member of a helot race. In short: Show me the
people flying first-class across the Atlantic and I will show you the
special relationship.

 Yet the national interests of the United States and the United Kingdom have
been divergent for many decades. After 1945, the U.S. was slow to appreciate
the hazards of premature decolonization ‹ in particular, that the Soviets
might have more to offer Third World nationalists than it did. The British,
for their part, were almost equally slow to grasp that reliance on the U.S.
for military technology would swiftly lead to dependence.

 It was precisely the unreliability of the U.S. ‹ not only as an ally but
also as an export market ‹ that gradually convinced Britain's political
elite that it must abandon the Churchillian dream of a bilateral Atlantic
partnership in favor of a new special relationship (in the first instance,
economic) with the signatories of the Treaty of Rome. From 1973, Britain
ceased to have an independent trade policy, removing the entire field of
commerce from the realm of bilateral Anglo-American relations.

 Finally, as the slow grind of detente gave way to the breakneck disarmament
of the Mikhail Gorbachev years, the last compelling incentive for
Anglo-American solidarity ‹ the Soviet menace ‹ fell away. With the benefit
of hindsight, the political romance between Ronald Reagan and Margaret
Thatcher was nothing more than a flicker of a dying flame.

 By 1990, nothing geopolitically meaningful remained of the special
relationship. As a result, there was a compelling logic to the European
orientation of British foreign policy under John Major's government. With
light hearts, he and his ministers accepted Britain's post-imperial destiny
to be "at the heart of Europe."

 In this context, Blair's fervid Atlanticism marks a discontinuity. It makes
sense partly as a backlash against the dismal failures of Major's European
strategy, especially its hopelessly miscalculated responses to the breakup
of Yugoslavia. It was Blair's conversion to the U.S. view of the Balkan
problem ‹ Slobodan Milosevic ‹ that led him to support war against Serbia in
1999. And it was the success of that war, opposed as it was by so many of
Blair's critics on both the left and the right, that led him to favor wars
in both Afghanistan and Iraq. The road to Baghdad led from Pristina via
Kabul.

 Religion is the other bond between Bush and Blair. The born-again Christian
and the High Church Anglican share a strong belief that war is not just an
instrument of policy but also of morality ‹ a weapon to be used by the
forces of righteousness against wicked dictators like Hussein. The trouble
is, although a majority of Americans are receptive to what might be called a
faith-based foreign policy, few Britons are. Americans are still a deeply
Christian people. The British ceased to be some time ago.

 This is just one aspect of a fundamental divergence in popular culture that
increasingly makes the special relationship. Perhaps nothing illustrates
more clearly how European the British are becoming than their attitudes to
U.S. politics. Asked in a recent poll to choose between the two candidates
for the presidency, 47% favored Kerry, compared with 16% for Bush ‹ at a
time when the president was between 5 and 10 percentage points ahead in U.S.
polls. On the legitimacy of the Iraq war, too, the British public is now
closer to Continental opinion than to American.

 All this suggests that Blair's Atlanticism may represent the special
relationship's last gasp. For a strategic partnership needs more to sustain
itself than an affinity between the principals and the self-interest of a
few professional elites. It requires a congruence of national interests. It
also needs some convergence of popular attitudes.

 If the special relationship were a transatlantic flight, the Americans
would be in the cockpit. The British would be the sleeping passengers.
Sooner or later ‹ even if Kerry makes it to the White House ‹ British
foreign policy is going to wake up.


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