HENS MAY BELIEVE the rooster who tells them his cock-a-doodle-doo brings the sunrise, and there may be a few gullible Labour MPs who think Tony Blair’s dash to “persuade” George W. Bush to pressure Israel has not been carefully choreographed by the Americans and the Israelis — but the rest of Britain will be harder to persuade.
More has been written on the relationship between Britain and America in the past couple of years than in two decades that went before. This newspaper has taken a strong and consistent editorial line: that anti-Americanism in Britain has grown, is dangerous and ought to stop. Meanwhile, many, including me, have found our opinion slipping unnoticed into the chasm between those who rail against Washington and those who rail against the railers.
Our opinion is simply expressed. It is that George W. Bush is not America. We see danger in conflating one rogue US President with the personality and the ideals of a whole great nation.
Muscle can remake friends as fast as it loses them. If after the present interlude the United States were to resume her ancient, humane, rule-based internationalism, it would not be long before she became leader of the gang in the Free World again. But Britain’s delicate network of friendships abroad — more reliant on respect than muscle — will be harder to repair. The United Kingdom has minimal real power in the world; but we have attracted (though we should not exaggerate this) a little useful influence, based more on respect than awe. Respect will be more difficult to rebuild because, while America has made herself feared, we are have been making ourselves contemptible.
Which of us has not known the social embarrassment of sticking our necks out to back an old friend with a tricky corner to defend, only to find he later abandons the stand we had tied ourselves into knots to support? We see him out on the town, eating and drinking merrily with friends we lost, friends who now condemn us for encouraging him in his old ways before he saw the light. Does anybody think a new US Secretary of State in a post-Bush administration will whisper into the cupped ear of a new White House incumbent: “Mr President, we really cannot backtrack on your predecessor’s foreign policy: it would be too awful for the British to leave them high and dry. They went out on a limb for us and sacrificed half their alliances in the world.”
This is the risk Britain now runs: of being beached by a receding tide of US neoconservative enthusiasm, and left waving our Stars and Stripes in territory that the native bearers of that flag no longer wish to occupy — sneered at by the rest of the world even as it welcomes America back into the fold.
I won’t join the left-liberal new imperialists who think Britain should be big-mouthing hostility to the United States or Israel, and wading in with offers of peacekeepers and money to keep the various sides apart in the Middle East. We don’t have the troops, the money or the leverage, and we should accept our modest place in the 21st-century international order. But there is such a thing as dignity; as the expression of humanitarian dismay: such a thing as keeping a cool and sceptical distance from incendiary diplomacy and warmongering.
Within five years an America entering the second decade of the new century may be looking back on George W. Bush’s presidency as a kind of nightmare, an aberration, a dreadful memory tinged with the acrid smoke of Baghdad and a policy of political arson in the Middle East. Words like “Iraq” and “Lebanon” will be pronounced in the tones we British still reserve for “Suez”. People who today describe themselves as neocons will be denying that they were ever attracted by these delusional enthusiasms. It will be hard to find anyone who claims to have had anything to do with early 21st-century US foreign policy. Men we now call Washington hawks will be muttering that they harboured secret doubts from the start.
I utterly despair of Mr Blair recovering the sanity to quit this ship of fools before it sinks; he is handcuffed by history to the doomed hulk. But there is one politician, still unchained, who really must ask himself whether now — the summer of 2006, as Lebanon burns — is the time to let misguided friends turn the key and lock him (like all his predecessors) into support he may later regret but which it will be hard honourably to withdraw.
David Cameron should ask himself why the neocons among his advisers are so keen that he should declare himself now, when he is not in government, not likely to be for some years, under no serious pressure to position his party on foreign affairs, and when few in Britain and nobody abroad yet give a fig what he thinks. What’s the hurry? When or if Mr Cameron becomes prime minister, the US president may not be a Republican and will certainly not be Mr Bush. Who knows what may have happened in the intervening years?
Yet a sensible and rather brave Commons speech last week by William Hague, the Tories’ spokesman on foreign affairs — pointing out that British foreign policy is linked to that of the US but need not be identical to it — has put the Tory neocons into a lather. Matthew d’Ancona, the Editor of The Spectator, took much of his column in The Sunday Telegraph last weekend to deplore what he described as an alarming lapse in the judgment of the Shadow Foreign Secretary.
The reason for Mr d’Ancona’s agitation is clear: Mr Cameron has been away in Afghanistan. He has yet to say much about foreign policy. His returning thoughts (if he has any) on Britain’s position in the world may get attention. He must be armed, they think, against any thought that opposition foreign policy might be rebalanced, however slightly, in the direction of a greater detachment.
There’s a war on in the Conservative Party at present: the War for Cameron’s Ear. It matters, and so my own agitation matches Mr d’Ancona’s. Most readers may care little what the Leader of the Opposition thinks or says on foreign policy. We hardly noticed when Mr Blair invited Iain Duncan Smith into Downing Street to “confide” in him what he knew about Saddam Hussein and his weapons, and secure Tory support for the invasion and occupation of Iraq. But the result was to neuter the principal Opposition during the prolonged fiasco that has followed.
Mr Cameron should be alive to a comparable danger this weekend. There are some dangerous voices in the Parliamentary Conservative Party, and outside it among the set to whom senior Tories listen. One of these voices is Michael Gove, my fellow-columnist and the capable frontbencher who speaks on housing and has just had a notable success on housing information packs. Michael is a moral man, a subtle and persuasive writer, a spellbinding speaker and a powerful mind. He is also — on questions of foreign policy — stark, staring bonkers. He thinks the West is blithely unaware of a huge and pressing danger in the form of worldwide Islamist plotting, and that an urgent imperative to foil this should be at the centre of Western foreign policy. He has just written a book, Celsius 7/7 about it.
I have enough faith in Michael’s intellect and honesty to be confident that, in 20 years time, he will look back on this phase in his ideological journey as a passing embarrassment. But Michael is free to alter his opinions. Mr Cameron, if he gets stuck on the record with any variant of them, will not be.
This Conservative leader has no need yet to nail his colours to any mast. Let him give the good ship Neo-con a wide berth. In five years time her hulk will be with the fishes. And it will not be “anti-American” to say so.
