Not so special any more

However cosy they may appear, neither Obama nor Cameron care much for the ‘special relationship’. But, says John C. Hulsman, that may be no bad thing

Good student that he is, Barack Obama has been careful to dot his ‘i’s and cross his ‘t’s after the British election. Well aware that he is viewed as uninterested in transatlantic relations, Obama made sure he was quick off the mark; he was the first foreign leader to phone David Cameron when he became PM. It’s well known in Washington that the President considered Brown uninspiring, but Obama made it clear that this time it was different; that between them, Barack and Dave, they were truly the new guardians of the special relationship.

So — did he mean it? Are Obama and Cameron the new Reagan and Thatcher? For far too long, too many foreign policy thinkers have used the ‘special relationship’ as a Rorschach test for their general feelings about the world. Over the last week the usual perennial assessments about the state of affairs between the UK and the US have made their usual appearances. But we need far more analysis here, and far less wishful thinking.

The truth is that whatever Cameron and Obama promised each other last Wednesday, the old special relationship is in tatters.

David Cameron certainly does not seem preoccupied with what is going on in Washington in the manner that Margaret Thatcher (or for that matter Tony Blair) was. Rumour has it that the new Prime Minister has never even been to DC. Instead, in terms of rhetoric, he can be regarded as the least Atlanticist Prime Minister since Harold Wilson. This, coupled with his innate euro-scepticism, makes Cameron seem to be a throwback, a sort of pre-Suez Tory, both hostile to Europe and slightly agnostic about America. This has given the relationship’s cheerleaders many sleepless nights.

Likewise, the American right has been alarmed by Nick Clegg’s faintly anti-American noises, though the Obama people are more sanguine, content that Cameron will head off any difficulty there. What is indisputable is that the Deputy Prime Minister reflexively looks to Europe, and not Washington, as the first port of call to solve policy problems.

Personalities aside, there is a deeper problem that at least partly explains the lack of enthusiasm for the special relationship exhibited by British politicians from across the political spectrum. This basic change in British attitude is part of the price the United States is still paying for the Bush administration’s follies in Iraq. This is almost a truism in the UK, but it is brushed aside by American commentators, especially those right-wingers who supported the disastrous war, and have caused much of the damage.

In addition, things are fundamentally changing in America. It is not too much to say that Obama is personally the least pro-Atlantic president since 1945. Unlike the vast majority of chief executives since the second world war, Obama does not have a personal history that makes seeing Britain as the Sundance Kid to America’s Butch Cassidy the default emotional and policy point of view. And frankly, this would be so whoever happens to be Prime Minister and whatever their disposition toward Washington.

This is the uncomfortable truth the relationship’s backers can neither stomach nor explain. Instead, they simply wish it away.

As with the post-Blair British hesitations about the US, this change in American view also makes a lot of sense. Almost everyone in Washington (aside from some neocons burying their heads in the sand) now accepts that the world is genuinely multipolar; as such, the all-encompassing American focus on both Europe and our primary British allies that characterised the bipolar Cold War has abruptly come to an end. The future lies in working with/managing China and those other powers in the Indian Ocean Rim. Britain simply doesn’t matter as much.

Privately, senior foreign policy aides to the President tend to scoff gently at Britain’s propensity to worry about what America thinks of it. ‘How much more love do they want?’ Obama asked a friend of mine who works for his administration. ‘Must we hold their hand and tell them it’s a super-duper-special relationship?’ Another recently confided in me, ‘Look, Europe is no longer a problem, we don’t have to go to war over there, and it’s no longer all that helpful. As such, let’s just leave things as they are but not spend a lot of time worrying about it, or Britain.’ There’s an old American saying about Hollywood: everyone there talks like a hippy but acts like a gangster. The same is even truer for Chicago politicians.

So the sceptics of the special relationship are right to point out that worshipping the glory days of the US–UK tie — a bond forged in a very different world from the multipolar era now dawning — is not very helpful. But to conclude lazily from this that a fundamental turning away from America makes sense is to throw the intellectual baby out with the bathwater.

Yet it is not enough simply to say that the world is multipolar and leave it at that. The poles are not the same size. For a long time to come, the US will remain chairman of the board, the single most important power on the earth, even if others are gaining relatively on it.

In such a world, to neglect the chairman is not just infantile, it’s potentially disastrous. Betting the farm on Brussels, given present realities, would be the height of lunacy for the UK. Also, in the wake of Greece, beset by endemic political bad feeling and division, and with (other than France) no serious military force on the Continent, it is an open question whether Europe in any form will emerge as a real power in the new era.

Further, the UK and the US start from the same general point in the new system — older powers, still formidable in their way, that are losing clout as the years pass. For this reason alone, London and Washington will continue, on very many occasions, to see eye-to-eye with one another on the great issues of the day. Like the ageing Rolling Stones, we’ve at last realised our solo work doesn’t cut it, and that, like it or not, we are stuck with one another.

Nor are the great power poles equidistant. And here the special relationship’s cheerleaders have a point. Based on a shared language, belief in a free market system and democracy, and the ingrained historical habit of working together, the two countries tend to agree more than they do with others with very different historical and philosophical touchstones. Talking to a Brit about liberty or free markets is simply easier for an American than having the same conversation with the Chinese and the Russians. Our two poles, for all our hang-ups with one another, simply have more mutual gravitational attraction than they do with other important global players.

But the test of the special relationship will lie in its ability to solve common problems. The standard special relationship circular argument looks at things intellectually backwards: it’s not the calibre of the ties that determines the success of the policies, but the success of common polices that will (and must) determine the calibre of the ties.

Here Barack Obama and David Cameron may be on to something. Let’s worry more about getting common policies right when we happen to agree, and mitigating differences in a grown-up way when we do not, rather than whether Obama can channel FDR and Cameron can do a good Churchill impersonation. A less romantic (it’s terrible/it’s wonderful) view of the special relationship might just lead to the saving of it.

Dr John C. Hulsman is the Senior Research Fellow at the Hague Centre for Strategic Studies and a life member of the American Council on Foreign Relations.