US, UK and the unbalance of power

Book review of THE CHURCHILL COMPLEX: The Curse of Being Special, From Winston and FDR to Trump and Brexit

Two vignettes present seemingly antithetical views of Anglo-American relations since the World War II. The first is a 1952 satirical primer by the British humourist Stephen Potter on the so-called special relationship between the United States and Britain: “First lessons concentrate on the necessity of always using the same phrases, and using them again and again. … ‘We have a lot in common.’ ‘After all, we come from the same stock.’ ‘We have a lot to learn from each other.’”

The second is the denouement of the 1979 BBC adaptation of John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, in which the well-born, patriotic, British intelligence officer, bewailing what he sees as his count­ry’s sycophantic dependence on the United States, explains that he had resolved to become a Soviet agent when he realised the British had turned into nothing more than “America’s street walkers.”

Although Ian Buruma, the former editor of The New York Review of Books, cites neither artefact in The Churchill Complex, he aims to show how the cultivation of the relationship Potter lampooned — and that Mr Buruma calls a “curse” — led to one similar to what Mr le Carré’s mole laments.

The Churchill Complex examines the invented tradition that is the special relationship. The stock phrases used to define that liaison — “common heritage,” “common values” and “kinship of ideals,” as well as the self-flattering conviction that “when the United States and the United Kingdom stand together … people around the world are more secure and they are more prosperous” — have been the rhetorical expression of Britain’s ongoing effort to bind itself to American power, and of Washington’s ongoing desire to keep Britain, a diminished but still useful ally, on side. The quotations happen to be from Barack Obama, but they are all but identical to the intonations of every president and prime minister since 1941.

The special relationship was born of Britain’s desperation and of America’s realisation that its security would be imperilled by a British defeat or surrender. The contours of the Grand Alliance fully and perhaps inevitably reflected the gross imbalance of military and economic power between its members. Holding virtually all the cards, Washington pursued its interests by relentlessly extracting maximum concessions from a forlorn and increasingly impotent Britain. Yielding naval-basing rights to an America bent on achieving post-war global dominance, forfeiting the nuclear programme it had carefully built to exclusive American control and submitting to the all but extortionate terms Washington demanded for the financial assistance needed to prosecute the war, London had to abide by the terms of a forced and unequal marriage.

Outwardly far more hostile to British colonialism than to Soviet totalitarianism, Roosevelt made clear his expectation that Britain’s empire would be liquidated. More generally, Washington intended to lead an economically liberal global order, a vision inimical to Britain’s imperial preference system. Churchill was unwilling, indeed unable, to countenance its end. But he was also acutely aware of Britain’s diminished political and economic position. When out of office in 1946, Churchill saw that the emerging Soviet threat gave Britain the opportunity to harness itself to the United States’ international preponderance. In warning of an “iron curtain,” Churchill essentially resubmitted his plan for a Pax Anglo-Americana.

Mr Buruma maintains that London’s ongoing attachment to the special relationship has thwarted Britain from pursuing what he sees as its “proper” international role. His principal objection to the special relationship is that it distracted Britain from playing a key part in Europe’s ever closer union. But in fact many devotees of the alliance, such as Harold Macmillan, Tony Blair and David Cameron, have also been among the strongest advocates of closer integration with Europe. The special relationship in fact prescribed it: Washington pressed Britain to involve itself in Europe to enhance America’s goal of bolstering Western Europe as a self-sustaining “pillar” in the Cold War. Indeed, the desire to please Washington was among Macmillan’s main reasons for applying for membership in the European Economic Community.

To its British adherents, the special relationship is a means toward that end, not an end in itself, and that the two recent prime ministers most ardent in pursuing that role — Messrs Blair and Cameron — were devoted to both the American connection and to the EU. In pursuit of what Mr Blair has celebrated as the ambitious policy of “regime change,” they each committed Britain to accompany the United States in military interventions — in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya (and pressed for intervention in Syria, though that was stymied by Parliamentary opposition).

But neither leader undertook those interventions to sustain the special relationship. Rather, that relationship allowed them to assume the global role they coveted. Clearly, many Britons in both parties share Mr Buruma’s scepticism toward the international role the two prime ministers have pursued, but Mr Buruma, who also conspicuously wears the mantle of anti-Brexit cosmopolitan, probably wouldn’t plump for a Little Englander revival to counter the interventionism that the special relationship has enabled.

©2020 The New York Times News Service