May 5, 2013

Finest Hour 151, Summer 2011

Page 8

Theme of the Issue – What Is Left of the Special Relationship?

By Richard M. Langworth, Editor


When the 2011 London Churchill Conference organizers asked for an issue of Finest Hour devoted to their theme, my first reaction was superficial. What is left of the Special Relationship for which Churchill strove, at the expense of British power and independence, believing there were greater things at stake than the Empire? Confined to the area of foreign relations, not a lot.

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Forget the extremists who say America is the only country to have gone from barbarism to decadence without an intervening period of civilization; or that Britain has done nothing for America except to require rescue from two cataclysms. Forget the symbolism of an American president returning a Churchill bust loaned to his predecessor— which in fact was perfectly understandable (Finest Hour 142: 7-8).

Forget all that. Churchill rejected such superficial musings in Virginia in 1946, when he quoted an English nobleman, who had said Britain would have to become the forty-ninth state; and an American editor, who had said the U.S. might be asked to rejoin the British Empire. “It seems to me, and I dare say it seems to you,” Churchill told the Virginia Assembly, “that the path of wisdom lies somewhere between these scarecrow extremes.”

Scarecrow extremes are one thing, facts another. In the main, U.S. policy since the war has been to downplay the British connection, or even the idea that Britain matters: not only to encourage the “Winds of Change” which swept away the Empire, but the devaluation of everything from sterling to British independence of action.

The recent thrust of American foreign policy has been to nudge Britain into a European federation, no form of which Churchill ever endorsed. Oh, the U.S. as been quite willing to ount on its “closest friend” when invading Iraq in 1991, r Afghanistan ten years ater, or in the operations, whatever they are, in Libya at the moment. But reciprocal support of London by Washington has been fairly uncommon.

The only period since the war when the inter-governmental Special Relationship seemed to resume its wartime intimacy was when the respective heads of government were Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher; when America abandoned traditional anti-colonialism and backed Britain in the Falklands war. The British Prime Minister repaid that gesture in August 1990, as Iraq was invading Kuwait, when she sent her famous message to Reagan’s successor: “George, this is no time to go wobbly.”

But the Reagan-Thatcher years fade into the blue distance of the Middle Ages, America reverts to earlier policies, and the State Department now calls the Falklands the “Malvinas.” When Prime Minister Gordon Brown visited the White House in 2009, there was no trip to Camp David, no state dinner, no joint press conference. In London, an aide to the U.S. administration thought it right to explain to the Daily Telegraph: “There’s nothing special about Britain. You’re just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn’t expect special treatment.”

The President and Prime Minister seemed to improve the atmosphere in London this May by giving the relationhip a new name: “Ours is not just a special relationship, it is an essential relationship.” (“An” or “the”? Is it more essential than others, i.e., special? They didn’t elaborate.)

The 2011 Churchill Conference has able critics to document the one-sided Special Relationship between governments. Piers Brendon’s Decline and Fall of the British Empire tracks the end of a domain that once spanned a quarter of the world, a process welcomed by Washington. Our main argument with John Charmley, years ago (FH 79-81-82-83), was over a very brief section of his Churchill: The End of Glory, suggesting that Britain should have backed away from the Hitler war. His sequel, Churchill’s Grand Alliance, on Washington’s postwar effort to dismantle British power, drew few quibbles from us. Confined only to inter-government relations, we would come not to praise the Special Relationship, but to bury it.

Is it dead then?

No.

Times change. Presidents and Prime Ministers come and go. None can change the fundamentals, observed by Churchill at Harvard in 1943: “Law, language, literature—these are considerable factors. Common conceptions of what is right and decent, a marked regard for fair play, especially to the weak and poor, a stern sentiment of impartial justice, and above all the love of personal freedom, or as Kipling put it: ‘Leave to live by no man’s leave underneath the law’—these are common conceptions on both sides of the ocean among the English-speaking peoples.”

Perhaps there is less love of personal freedom, as Mark Steyn argues: “A gargantuan bureaucratized parochialism leavened by litigiousness and political correctness is a scale of decline no developed nation has yet attempted.” But if that is so, the decline is equally precipitous.

By circumstance of history—more than through any specific actions of Churchill or Attlee, Roosevelt or Truman—international leadership after the war passed to the United States. As Raymond Seitz asserts herein, the world (though it doesn’t always accept it) “is incapable of serious action without the American catalyst.” This changes nothing about the congruence of heritage, culture, politics and commerce central to America and Britain.

You see this congruence in all manner of public policy, Ambassador Seitz writes, “from welfare reform to school reform, and from zero-tolerance policing to pension management…in every scholarly pursuit from archaeology to zoology, in every field of science and research, and in every social movement from environmentalism to feminism. You see it in financial regulation and corporate governance… at every point along the cultural spectrum…You see it in the big statistics of trade and investment.” And you see it—if we may digress to our own sphere—in the combination of British and American expertise that is developing the massive Churchill Archives into an unprecedented tool for researching Sir Winston Churchill’s life and times.

The real Special Relationship remains. “The United States and United Kingdom influence each other’s intellectual development like no other two countries,” Seitz adds. “And it is here, I suspect—where the old truth lies—that we will discover answers about our joint future in a changing, global world.”

A thing to be avoided at the coming Conference is concentrating exclusively, or even too deeply, on the relationships between British and American governments. There is much more to the Special Relationship than that. Churchill saw this in the early 1900s. We see it still in the early 2000s. We would be fools to ignore it.

Many of these affinities Churchill limned long ago at Harvard, telling his American audience that it would find in Britain “good comrades to whom you are united by other ties besides those of State policy and public need.” Seven decades on, no Churchillian with experience on both sides of the Atlantic would gainsay him.

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