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abdelbaset al megrahi, abraham lincoln, afghanistan, alex salmond, anglo-american relations, ass kicking, barack obama, bp, british petroleum, civil war, cold war, david cameron, deepwater horizon, falklands, franklin delano roosevelt, gordon brown, helmand, hillary clinton, iraq, iron curtain, kenny macaskill, lockerbie bomber, mau mau rebellion, muammar gaddafi, nato, russia, special relationship, tony hayward, winston churchill, world war i, world war ii
I first considered writing a post about the Anglo-American “Special Relationship” several months ago, but put it off because I thought there wouldn’t be enough interest. There jolly-well is now. On 20 April 2010, an explosion happened on the Deepwater Horizon, an oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico. The wreckage of the Deepwater Horizon and the ensuing catastrophic oil leak brought to the surface an unprecedented environmental disaster, but it also exposed tension lurking beneath the United States’ relationship with Britain, its most important ally.
The sins of BP, formerly (and suddenly anew) called British Petroleum, are just one piece of the puzzle. Britain is deeply interlocked in our global struggle against terrorism. There’s a good reason: the two of us have the most experience fighting global wars over the last two centuries. But our partnership is strained there, too. The last three months have been a litany of public squabbling of a petty but extremely high-stakes nature. History, dollars, and most importantly, lives are at stake.
The Wheelchair and the Cigar
Our alliance with Britain has a long history. After we got over the whole Revolutionary War thing, that is. You might loosely date it from the end of the American Civil War (British responses to the Civil War ranged from mild amusement to profiteering, and the odd British-built Confederate warship). A turning point came in 1901 when we signed the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty, which allowed the United States to begin building the Panama Canal. It was an acknowledgment that Britain’s navy was overcommitted in the Pacific, and that checking the rise of Germany meant that Britain needed allies to maintain its global hegemony.
Wilson on the League of Nations: "FML"
The World Wars are the most famous chapter in the Anglo-American relationship, but at the time it was not so simple. Despite our victorious cooperation in World War I, the League of Nations fiasco soured the mood. The British made big investments, material and ideological, in Woodrow Wilson’s brainchild, hoping it would carry the torch of the imperial Commonwealth model they had pioneered. When Congress voted against joining the League in 1919, bitterness and bewilderment ensued. World War II would fix all that, though.
Winston Churchill, who had an American mom, thought highly of the United States. He also waged a tireless campaign to convince Roosevelt that it was actually in the Americans’ interests as a world power to enter the largest and most highly-staked conflict in history, rather than sit back and sell things to the belligerents. Churchill and Roosevelt were incredibly tight – their visits during the war were quite chummy to say the least. It was Winston who first used the term “special relationship” in 1945, when talking about trusteeship of atomic weapons.
"Nothing could be more important than our continuing alliance to protect impeccable headwear"
As the twentieth century wore on, our specialness would be cemented by the Cold War. Anglo-American cooperation in NATO to check the USSR and our mutual support for the United Nations, within which we peacefully battled the Soviets, were the key strategic pillars of the bipolar Cold War world. It was Churchill’s “Sinews of Peace” address, the same in which he coined the term “Iron Curtain,” that he further expounded on the Special Relationship:
Neither the sure prevention of war, nor the continuous rise of world organization will be gained without what I have called the fraternal association of the English-speaking peoples …a special relationship between the British Commonwealth and Empire and the United States.
"I have a feeling I should just keep buying more weapons." "What's a 'feeling,' LOL?"
The SR continued through the Cold War years and reached another climax during the Reagan-Thatcher axis which (arguably) finally put the Russians to the sword via aggressive cooperative rearmament. Unlike many of their predecessors, Thatcher and Reagan also enjoyed ideological lock-step in domestic matters, engaging heavily in financial deregulation, privatization, and “Something D-O-O Economics.”
The Obama family – we’re not in Kansas anymore
To really get a sense of the feeling between the two countries, though, you have to look beyond speeches and quotes and official statements, which are going to usually say the same, generally positive, stuff. To get an idea of Obama’s attitude toward our monarchist cousins, you might read his 2008 (pre-election) quote “We have a chance to recalibrate the relationship and for the United Kingdom to work with America as a full partner,” and think he has fairly pro-British sentiments. Not so fast. Time for some history.
Between 1952 and 1960, British East Africa, now known as Kenya, staged an uprising against its British colonial masters that resulted in Kenyan independence in a broader movement of African anti-colonialism. But not without significant loss of life and some pretty brutal cases of torture. Though both sides were involved, the British were especially egregious in their “screening” of Mau Mau rebels for information. We’re talking stuff that makes Guantanamo look tame. One of the victims was some guy named Hussein Onyango Obama. The President’s grandfather. The Prime Minister at the time? Some guy named Winston Churchill.
Smoke them out of their holes...with cigars
Now, Obama is a pretty smart, level-headed guy. I don’t want to create an image of a privately seething Anglophobe here. But is the above irrelevant? Realistically, it can’t be. Perhaps that is why, almost immediately after taking office, Obama removed an incredibly valuable bust of Churchill, loaned by the British to Bush II, from the Oval Office and sent it to the UK ambassador’s residence. The spot is now occupied by Honest Abe Lincoln (of Lincoln Log fame). This caused outrage among the British, and not without cause. For all his drawbacks, we’re talking about possibly the most important politician of the twentieth century; the guy who may have saved Western liberalism by continuously being right about zee Germans and building the coalitions necessary to keep them from taking over the world. The British Empire was no angel, but let’s just say you’d choose it over the Imperial or Third Reichs. It’s pretty clear that Obama’s bust-shuffling wasn’t business, it was personal.
In the Galactic Empire...everyone sounds English
Obama’s relationship with former Prime Minister Gordon Brown was fairly cool. Recognizing that Obama’s taste in symbolic gifts was slightly different than that of his predecessor, Brown brought on a visit a pen holder made from the wood of the 19th-century vessel HMS Gannet, which patrolled the Mediterranean busting up the slave-trade, which Britain criminalized in 1807 (followed by slavery in general in 1833). Obama’s reciprocal gift? 25 DVDs. Not joking. I hope Brown was a Star Wars fan. Upon closer examination, it seems that in addition to further gifts for Sasha and Malia, Brown also brought a signed first edition of a seven-volume biography of Churchill. Maybe that was a bad idea.
Redcoats. With black trim.
Things haven’t exactly gotten rosier since. There have been numerous foreign policy gaffes, such as conflicting stances over whether to talk to Hamas and Hezbollah (I might add that we’re both reaping what we’ve sown with the stupid “no-talking” act), and Hillary Clinton supporting Argentina in its quarrel with the British over the Falklands (I might add again that we’re reaping what we’ve sown here as well by letting Hillary be Secretary of State, I blogged about the Falklands incident here).
The British public has been cooling toward the United States for some time now. Tony Blair, a popular Prime Minister whose ten-year reign is, apart from Thatcher, the longest since the Marquess of Salisbury, gradually morphed into a demon by the time he left office because of his support for Bush II and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Increasingly, the British have soured to the idea of doing the Americans’ bidding all over the world, never mind that we did the same for them for most of the twentieth century. Groups ranging from the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee to my own Church of England have suggested that the Special Relationship may be both illusory and unhelpful in present times.
He looks very ill, and sorry.
Then, the Scots decided to release Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset al-Megrahi from prison and let him return to his native Libya because he was believed to have terminal cancer. In 1988, a Pan-Am flight from Heathrow to JFK was destroyed by a bomb, killing all 259, mostly American, passengers and 11 at the site of the crash in Lockerbie, Scotland. Al-Megrahi, an alleged Libyan intelligence officer, was convicted of the bombing and sentenced to life in prison. In August 2009, with al-Megrahi supposedly on the brink of death from prostate cancer, Scottish Justice Minister Kenny MacAskill approved his release from prison on compassionate grounds. He returned to Libya and was greeted by a celebratory crowd and the son of Libyan dictator Muammar al-Gaddafi, who has an extensive and public record of funding terrorism. Al-Megrahi remains very much alive. We’ll return to this later.
And then that oil thing happened. After the spill, Obama was reportedly looking for “an ass to kick,” and it was inevitably going to be a British ass. Despite the fact that it renamed itself “BP” in 2001 after some mergers with American companies, administration officials have made a point to call it “British Petroleum” just to explicitly specify their ass-kicking target. Good thing no-one remembers its original name, Anglo-Persian Oil Company. The anti-British rhetoric got so high in the wake of the BP spill that John Napier, CEO of British insurance giant RSA, wrote this open letter to Obama chastising him for being vindictively Anglophobic. Ouch.
In the land of Florida where the shadows lie...
Recently, the two problems merged into a single giant Anglo-American shitstorm. Speculation has been rife for a year now that something more sinister was behind the Scots’ seemingly ridiculous decision to release al-Megrahi. Theories ranged from a simple desire to cause trouble for London on the part of Scotland’s ruling SNP nationalists, to an under-the-table deal trading the prisoner for Libyan oil. Since the spill, a popular accusation is that beleaguered BP CEO Tony Hayward presided over an extraordinary Faustian bargain with terror for oil, with the results appearing on Louisianan shores. Something like that.
When Cameron was in Egypt-Land
While the BP-Lockerbie connection is sensationalist, it hasn’t stopped American politicians from calling for blood during new Prime Minister David Cameron’s visit to Washington a week ago. The most troubling aspect of these outcries is that they demonstrate that American politicians apparently don’t understand the difference between Scotland and the United Kingdom. While Cameron and his predecessors in Brown’s cabinet represent the United Kingdom of which Scotland is a member, and BP lobbied Brown for prisoner transfer to ease pressure on their business, the decision to release al-Megrahi was the Scottish government’s alone. Scotland has had its own, independent legal system for awhile now. And by awhile, I mean since the 1707 Act of Union. Not to mention that Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond is a nationalist and his people are rarely on the same page politically with the UK government in London. But hey, these are just details! It’s not like we should expect our elected officials to understand the political system of our most important ally or anything, right?
"I have about this much patience with you"
As a case in point, David Cameron, a Conservative who is more inclined to talk tough on matters of terrorism and national security, isn’t particularly happy with the release of al-Megrahi either, as he noted during his visit with Obama, “he should have died in jail.” Still, members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee were hoping to compel members of the UK and Scottish governments to testify about Lockerbie and BP in the US. They were unsurprisingly declined, because of a little thing called “state sovereignty” that makes members of one government being summoned to the proceedings of another for questioning and chastisement ridiculous.
Meanwhile Tony Hayward, who was responsible for the fault in the subtitles, has been sacked. It’s rumored that he could reappear in Russia. Cameron’s visit with Obama was, on the whole, positive. The two seemed to be on the same page about Afghanistan, and the timetable of troop withdrawal. No matter his feelings about the Special Relationship, Obama must realize that he needs it to get reelected in 2012. Whether it’s fair or not, Afghanistan became “his war” when he rightly committed to finishing what we started there, and Britain still has over 9,000 troops holding the crucial Helmand province. Mounting troop casualties have led to extreme pressure on the UK government to withdraw from Afghanistan, which would be a disaster for NATO military operations there. As the recent Wikileaks scandal shows, the war in Afghanistan is not going well and could end up defining Obama’s presidency, for better or worse.
Bennifer, Brangelina...Brindia.
David Cameron left Washington for India, and in addition to a new $1.1bn deal with the Indians expressed the desire to begin a new “special relationship” with them. Uh-oh. India’s huge economic growth and historically close relationship with its former colonial master makes the notion of a new Anglo-Indian Special Relationship viable. Nevertheless, Churchill bust or no Churchill bust, the Anglo-American Special Relationship is still vital to world order as we know it, and neither of us can afford to let it lapse.
I should start by saying that I like Britain; this may come across as unduly critical, but ideally it should be read as a “realist”ic (in the political science sense of the term) critique.
It’s worth thinking about Britain’s place in the world absent the special relationship with the United States. Their power-projection capabilities are severely curtailed; they have a sluggish economy, even worse than some of the other northern European countries, and are in an even less-favorable debt position than the United States; there, as here, the financial sector takes up an unhealthy portion of the economy, and is the driver of most of what productivity gains exist. Without the special relationship, they do not occupy the privileged position they do now.
Now think about it from the United States’ point of view, integrating the most plausible counterfactual scenario: would the United States rather have a Britain acting as a transatlantic intermediary, or a Britain more fully integrated into the European Union? There are clear reasons to think the latter to be the case, just as there are reasons to think the SR is the main reason this has not taken hold. It’s not as if British integration into the EU would preclude them sending troops for adventures like Iraq and, from a statecraft point of view, it would help the United States to have a (relatively) more hawkish friend closer on the inside in Brussels.
Much of what you’ve cited here as attacking the SR is politics — poorly played, for sure. (Although I would say no, we shouldn’t expect our representatives to know the intricacies of our ally. They are, after all, pulled from our population.) Frankly, given the information you have up here about Obama’s grandfather, the removal of the bust seems unsurprising and quite possibly justified. The only shocking thing here is that Obama didn’t give an inappropriately erudite speech about how good people can sometimes sanction horrible things. And on the Falklands, I take a different view. This can be seen as a manifestation of an even older pillar of American diplomacy: the Monroe Doctrine. I think it is difficult sometimes to overlook how much this line of thinking still influences American policymakers. So here, I’m inclined to see the siding with Argentina as a return to normalcy after the coziness of the Reagan-Thatcher years.
I suppose my main beef with the post here is that you neglect to really give a compelling reason why the special relationship is still strategically crucial, particularly if we allow that the alternative is closer British engagement with the European project. The pound-euro dynamic is perhaps most telling here: discussions of alternative reserve currencies still revolve around the euro, yen, and eventually the RMB; this even after the (hopefully averted) sovereign debt crisis. Sterling is nowhere to be found.
Of course you are right to point out the extent to which Britain’s military prowess has declined since World War II. While the reduction in global military operations and the dismantling of the Empire are firm realities, I think pointing to their reduced military capacity is misleading. For one thing, Britain has seldom maintained a large standing army at any point in its history, with the exception of the two World Wars. You might go so far to say that this is a matter of principle for the British. Granted, their naval power used to be of far greater magnitude, but the size of its navy matters much less now than the fact that they have Trident-armed nuclear subs that accomplish much the same thing in the post-Cold War strategic world.
While this is a poor time to quibble with you that Britain’s financial sector doesn’t make up an “unhealthy portion of the economy,” that accusation too requires more context. Britain’s financial sector has “driven most of what productivity gains that exist” since the late 19th century, when the continental powers vastly outstripped Britain’s manufacturing sector and the Dominions began industrializing. Again, you might say a financial economic vanguard is a matter of principle for the British. It has been, and probably remains, their only option.
As to what Britain would look like without the SR, well, it’s a Paul Kennedy-esque question. Undoubtedly less military spending, which sounds great at first but I’m inclined to believe that several decades of Labour leadership without the necessity of defense spending would have produced an even more bloated welfare burden, if such a thing is even imaginable. Counterfactually speaking, that’s a whole book.
As for the United States, it’s not clear to me how we would benefit from a more Europhilic Britain. Our lack of military synergy with the major EU states has more to do with idiosyncratic factors than pan-EU ones. Seeing as how the EU lacks a coherent and effective common foreign policy, I don’t see how having a hypothetically beneficial British influence in Brussels would have helped us win over France and Germany. Maybe if the EU had a common foreign policy and an army I’d be more receptive to your point.
Furthermore, I’m not sure that a cooling of Anglo-American relations would necessarily result in a more EU-friendly Britain. Most of the reasons for British Euroscepticism are financial, as well as historical reasons like the Anglo-French beef and de Gaulle. Admittedly a non-SR Britain would need to look to another power bloc for support, but the two most important stumbling blocks remain.
I didn’t really take a side on Obama and the bust. My main point is that he has personal reasons to look beyond the normal historical warmth that exists between the two countries. If I made it out like the bust incident was surprising or somehow wrongheaded, I certainly didn’t mean to do so. Regarding the Falklands, of course you’re right again to point to the Monroe Doctrine. That is an historical context that was lacking in my analysis. However, I don’t really think there was a “normalcy” that’s being returned to after this incident. Unless “normalcy” was Argentina’s military junta, or ignoring the sovereignty of more liberal states in favor of less-liberal ones. I guess part of my point is that the SR ought to entail some discussion and attempted consistency on matters of sovereignty where Britain’s current and former interests and our hegemony overlap. And part of my narrative of the increasing tension of the SR is lapses in consistency like this.
Finally, my thesis about the SR’s crucialness is right at the end. Afghanistan is on thin ice, and if we lost 10k soldiers because of a beef with the Brits, we would almost certainly fail there, crushing Obama in the process. I obviously don’t know as much as you about the reserve currency issue, so it isn’t part of my thesis here. But again with the EU, I would argue that a semi-detached Anglo-Saxon/Deutschmark-flavored financial program has worked well enough so far. Though that is, I think, part of an entirely different conversation than the one concerning the SR.
I should also point out that my friend Daniel, an International Relations PhD student at the University of Texas, runs an IR blog you should check out called Skenningly into the Void. Bring your dictionary and savor the IR-y goodness at http://blogs.utexas.edu/dmm2698/ .
The Brits certainly have their faults and their own agenda. However, I take exception to your reference that Obama is a “pretty smart and level-headed guy.” No doubt that is the veneer Obama wishes to polish, but it is superficial at best. The UK and US do indeed have a special relationship that transcends isolated moments in history and political fads. At the moment, our greatest problem is that Obama by definition IS a fad. To see him as otherwise is to commit a grave historical error.
While I suspect we may not be on the same page here, my description of Obama is not incompatible with your opinion of him. That he is smart goes without saying given his vocational and education background, while his level-headedness in fact often hurts him. As was mentioned above he is prone to giving sober and erudite responses to issues where the American people would prefer more passion, sincerity, and conviction. The attribute is a double-edged sword.
Your suggestion that Obama himself is a “fad” implies that our political system, which gave him his power, is itself a slave to fads. I would like to be more optimistic about that system, which has made our country great. Nonetheless, part of what I’m arguing here is that failure in Afghanistan (helped by ignoring the Special Relationship) could make Obama’s tenure in office fleeting, and I suspect that such transience is part of what you mean when you say “fad.”
britain has a lot to answer for biggest disaster on american soil and the world