US presidential transitions, even when they are less fraught than this one, prompt more apprehension among US allies than among its enemies. This is especially true of the UK.
The British government is exerting itself to show US president-elect Joe Biden and his incoming administration that the UK remains a useful ally.
Last month, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson agreed to a remarkably generous supplementary funding deal for the British Armed Forces, of US$22 billion over four years.
Illustration: Mountain People
Clearly, Johnson hopes that the new US commander-in-chief will regard this as a commitment to maintain the UK’s military capability, always a cornerstone of transatlantic relations.
British officials burn midnight oil to divine the likely course of the Biden administration. A former British ambassador to the US told me: “The question is always: ‘Do we know the people who will be around the president? And will they like us?’”
Johnson and his advisers know that Biden has no predisposition to like the prime minister — as US President Donald Trump did, seeing a minor clone of himself, a fellow china-breaker.
In the wake of Brexit, the UK might urgently need a new trade deal with Washington to replace the US-EU arrangements.
Yet the Biden administration will likely be in no hurry to negotiate, especially until it becomes plain whether the precarious 1998 Irish Good Friday peace agreement is threatened by cavalier UK conduct over border trade, as some of us fear that it will be.
When spring blossoms, Johnson will almost certainly visit the new US president.
Tired old phrases about a “special relationship” will likely be dusted off and written into British headlines.
In Washington, such fantasies evoke mild amusement. Few Americans would notice that Johnson is in town.
This British government, like its predecessors, has to learn the hard lesson that US presidents spend much less time thinking about them than they do thinking about the occupant of the White House.
Former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger has wittily described the follies of British prime ministers in meeting US chief executives.
About former British prime minister Harold Wilson, Kissinger wrote that he “greeted president Nixon with the avuncular goodwill of the head of an ancient family that has seen better times.”
Kissinger wrote pityingly of the UK yearning to claim a special relationship with the US.
This should be indulged, because “we do not suffer in the world from such an excess of friends that we should discourage those who feel that they have a special friendship for us,” Kissinger wrote.
The US should never wantonly trample on Britons’ sensitivities and merely pursue “special relationships” with all its allies, he added.
The US and the UK have many values and interests in common.
However, successive British leaders diminish themselves when they parade delusions about their kingdom’s importance.
Although I am not an intimate in the corridors of power, I have trafficked with six British prime ministers, and urged all save Margaret Thatcher — I would not have dared — in vain to adopt realistic attitudes toward UK-US relations.
A few days before Theresa May became British prime minister in July 2016, by chance I was her neighbor at a dinner party. We chatted mostly about nothings, but toward the end of the evening, I said that, as a historian, I would venture to offer one fragment of advice.
When she took office, she would visit Washington and receive all the courtesies in which Americans excel, I said.
However, she should never delude herself that relations between our countries involve sentiment, I said, adding that the relations are instead governed by the same criteria that dictate every nation’s foreign policy: perceptions of self-interest.
The UK must never fall out with the US, but our leaders should forsake expectations of favors, I said.
May said nothing in response, and I did not expect her to.
However, soon after Trump became president, she visited Washington and offered him a state visit to the UK — an almost unheard-of invitation at the outset of an administration.
For various reasons, the visit was put off until July last year. When Trump eventually arrived, the UK pulled out the stops to entertain him, organizing a spectacular demonstration of the British Special Air Service’s anti-terrorist prowess, together with the royal family’s inimitable road show.
It all proved wasted effort. Trump has treated the UK no worse than any other nation, but also no better.
Just before James Mattis in February last year resigned as US secretary of defense, he spoke privately to a senior British officer whom he warned: “However many state visits you fix, this president does not do allies.”
None of the above — nor, indeed, what follows — is a complaint about the US’ behavior.
Again and again in the post-World War II era, the UK and the US have worked together in ways that have benefited world peace. But British governments would enjoy happier lives, and expose themselves to fewer humiliations, if they acknowledged the UK’s relatively modest place in today’s world, together with the fact that many other folks are competing for the ears and smiles of Washington.
The US and British militaries have always cooperated closely, with mutual respect. So much has been written about the quarrels between generals during the war that it is sometimes forgotten how amazingly well relationships worked at the operational level.
Intelligence is the field where the UK has the most to offer the US, a tradition unbroken since the Bletchley Park’s legendary codebreakers.
The British Government Communications Headquarters, the UK’s cyberwar center, is a world-class operation, which the US National Security Agency values immensely.
Trump threatened to break the intelligence partnership unless the UK withdrew contracts from China’s Huawei Technologies Co, and the Johnson administration complied.
Its own security experts be, lieve that the US was correct on this issue.
The same was true in November 1956, when then-US president Dwight Eisenhower’s rage about the Anglo-French invasion of Egypt, following then-Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal, forced a humiliating retreat.
“Suez,” as the British still refer to the crisis, was a ghastly mistake, which exasperated the US by deflecting world attention away from the savage, almost simultaneous Soviet suppression of the Budapest uprising.
Nonetheless, UK-US solidarity through the decades of the Cold War was a critical factor in holding together NATO and checking Soviet adventurism.
British governments suffered moments of private alarm that the US might unleash nuclear weapons, first in Korea and then during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, but the public front of the alliance remained unbroken.
John F. Kennedy was the last US president to have close friendships with leading British figures, notably David Ormsby-Gore, British ambassador to the US during the Kennedy administration, and journalist Henry Brandon.
There was also mutual affection between Kennedy and then-British prime minister Harold Macmillan.
It fell to the latter to smooth Britons’ ruffled feathers after then-US secretary of state Dean Acheson in 1962 asserted that the UK had lost an empire, but “not yet found a role,” a remark that stung to the quick, because so true.
The transatlantic relationship survived turbulence in the mid-1960s, when then-US president Lyndon Johnson put Wilson on the barbecue, figuratively speaking, to persuade him to send even a token troop contingent to Vietnam.
Wilson’s refusal was perhaps the wisest act of his time in office, but prompted then-US secretary of state Dean Rusk to poke a British journalist in the chest at a cocktail party and growl: “When the Russians invade Sussex, don’t expect us to come and help you.”
The Thatcher decade, of course, was the sole period of the last half-century when a British leader has commanded the highest respect and attention in the US. Then-US president Ronald Reagan admired her prodigiously.
Yet their relationship is often misunderstood. The Reagan administration repeatedly acted in ways that dismayed and even affronted her, as in 1983 when it occupied Grenada, a former British colony, without consulting London.
Even during the UK’s war against Argentina in the Falkland Islands a year earlier, the most serious early crisis of Thatcher’s tenure, Then-US secretary of state Alexander Haig and then-US ambassador to the UN Jeane Kirkpatrick strongly opposed endangering US interests in South America to save the moth-eaten imperial lion, as they saw Thatcher’s UK.
Then-US secretary of defense Caspar Weinberger alone, and importantly, supported the UK, and ensured critical military and intelligence aid.
In the last weeks of the war, Reagan enraged the prime minister by telephoning to urge her not to impose absolute defeat, and thus humiliation, on the Argentine military junta.
Thatcher exploded, and the transcript of their conversation delights posterity.
“This is democracy and our islands,” she told him.
Having lost valuable British ships and invaluable lives to return to the Falklands, she utterly rejected a diplomatic settlement. At one point in her harangue, Reagan held up the phone in the Oval Office so that others might hear the prime minister, saying: “Isn’t she marvelous?”
Several wars later, during and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq, then-UK prime minister Tony Blair expended immense political capital to support then-US president George W. Bush all the way to Baghdad, which has cost his historic reputation dearly.
Blair’s backing reflected yet another British prime minister fantasizing that he could buy favors in Washington. Although the UK committed a division to the Iraq operation, US histories scarcely mention that participation.
Moreover, Blair deluded himself that backing the invasion would enable him to secure a tougher US stance toward Israel, in pursuit of Middle East peace.
A year after the war, a very senior official of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office said to me ruefully: “You know, we stuck out our necks a long way for the US over Iraq. Yet now we have a dozen outstanding bilateral issues with Washington on aircraft landing rights, F-35 technology access codes and suchlike, and we are getting absolutely no payback.”
The reality, of course, as all nations are obliged to recognize, is that the many elements of US administrations operate almost independent of each other, often little influenced by the White House.
Following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, then-UK prime minister David Cameron sought to persuade then-US president Barack Obama to give BP a helping hand amid the colossal cash penalties inflicted by US courts (which were far in excess of those imposed on similarly negligent US oil companies). He got nowhere.
Kissinger wrote, in terms relevant to this day, that the British way of retaining great-power status “was to be so integral a part of American decisionmaking that the idea of not consulting them seemed a violation of the natural order of things.”
It remains the ambition of every British prime minister to make the UK sufficiently useful to merit consultative status in Washington during international crises, although this becomes more difficult as the focus of US foreign policy shifts toward Asia.
Britons are unwilling to acknowledge that their armed forces’ lack of mass makes them ever-less-credible fighting partners.
The Royal Air Force has fewer front-line planes than a US Marine Corps air wing; the British Army and Royal Navy are likewise shrunken. The principal value of UK support of US foreign warmaking is to provide political cover.
The UK’s brilliant ambassador in Washington in the early 1990s, Robin Renwick, has written: “The U.K. needs to understand the perspective in which it is viewed in Washington. There is … a clear recognition that, from every perspective except military, Germany is a far more important force in Europe, and will be still more so post-Brexit.”
After Biden’s inauguration, Johnson’s government will likely face a familiar problem: As Britons display ever less confidence in their prime minister, there is no reason for the US president to feel any more enthusiasm for him.
Nonetheless, a working relationship between the two sides, rooted in common security concerns and ancestry, should remain serviceable to both.
Our soldiers are unlikely again to land together on the beaches of Normandy, as they did in 1944. However, it will be a sadness, indeed, should we not remain on the same side of history’s barricades through tough decades ahead.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners. Max Hastings is a Bloomberg columnist. He was previously a correspondent for the BBC and newspapers, editor-in-chief of the Daily Telegraph, and editor of the London Evening Standard.
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