Conrad Black - US tradition of respecting European leaders in danger of being squandered
Some readers
will recall that last week I posed the question of what sort of an alliance the
British government might think it had with United States after denying that
country the use of the shared airbase at Diego Garcia in what was then the
possible offensive against Iran to force the end of that country’s nuclear
military programme and its subsidisation of the most odious terrorist groups in
the Middle East. Obviously, the circumstances changed decisively, and the
British have reversed their view on allowing US Air Force and Naval Air Force
warplanes to use British airbases, including in Cyprus.
Reporting in
Britain and Europe on American political news and especially anything to do
with the Trump administration is so generally biased and unreliable that it may
be useful to describe the current state of American public opinion about its
British and European allies, as much as it can be deduced from apparently
representative comment in the US political media. Prime Minister Starmer’s
statement of qualified support for the American and Israeli action in Iran was
almost universally seen as mealy-mouthed, late, quite inadequate, and not
really an expression of support at all. That is a reasonable interpretation.
Although the
BBC is reporting widespread anti-administration demonstrations in many American
cities, American opinion is, as is usually the case when their armed forces are
exchanging fire with the foreign enemy, supportive of the actions in Iran,
tentative about the wisdom of going to war at this time. Americans are almost
unanimously convinced of the wickedness of the Islamic Republic government.
American opinion is also uninterested in what foreigners think of the US, and
although the administration does wish for greater solidarity and a clearer and
more reliable consensus in the Western Alliance, not five per cent of Americans
would know who Keir Starmer is or care what he thinks about anything.
The blur of
the seven failed prime ministers from both parties since Tony Blair just 19
years ago has substantively changed collective American opinion of the
stability and relevance of the UK government. Americans were accustomed to the
durability of Mr. Churchill, Harold Macmillan, Harold Wilson, Margaret
Thatcher, and Tony Blair. The legacy of the Churchill Gloriana in the war years
and the grand alliance with Roosevelt, and the significant revival of that
spirit and efficient cooperation under President Reagan and Prime Minister
Thatcher, and most Americans appreciated and valued the special relationship
with the UK.
Whatever
British and European opinion of the current American administration, and Trump
certainly does not lack domestic critics, the British and Europeans should be
aware of how close they are coming to being regarded in US strategic policy
circles and broadly informed public opinion, as relevant only as a strategic
territory that, as in 1940 and even 1917 and throughout the Cold War, the
United States did not wish to have dominated by hostile powers.
The long
tradition through World War II, all of the Cold War and somewhat beyond, of
taking the British government seriously on its merits and on the continuing
strength and influence of the UK, and of respecting the governments of
successive German chancellors and French leaders including Adenauer, Schmidt,
and Kohl, and de Gaulle, Giscard d’Estaing, and Mitterrand, is in danger of
being irretrievably squandered.
As Secretary
of State Rubio explained at Munich two weeks ago, the United States is
historically and sentimentally close to Europe and views the deterioration in
relations between the two with unease and even distress. All of this can be put
back together but not exclusively by the passage of the Trump Era at the end of
his present term. There are signs from the present German Chancellor and
certainly Prime Minister Meloni of Italy and some other European leaders, of a
genuine desire to strengthen the European participation in the Western Alliance
and restore better and closer relations with Washington.
For most of
the Cold War and some of the subsequent years, the correlation of strength in
the Western Alliance, while unequal, certainly included a healthy respect for
the major Western European allies. They are now widely regarded as incapable of
controlling their own borders, so over-socialised that they are economically
inert and increasingly uncompetitive, of very marginal utility as allies, and
that they allow militant minorities to undermine their democracy and respect
for human rights, and that they are largely governed by irresolute nonentities.
The small number of Americans who have an opinion of Starmer think he is
completely intimidated by local Muslim radicals and he is taken less seriously
than any British prime minister since Ramsay MacDonald, who was a decent man in
terrible times propped up from 1931 to 1935 by the king (George V).
The US and
Israel are obviously about to win a decisive victory over Iran and will do the
world a great favour in dispensing with that ghastly regime. This is no time
for British relativism about the competing merits of Iran and the United
States.
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