[A-List] Britain/US split: Blair's strategic dilemma

["Keaney Michael" <Michael.Keaney@xxxxxx>]

Gambling on America

Without Europe, Tony Churchill won't swing Washington behind Tony
Gladstone

Timothy Garton Ash
Thursday October 3, 2002
The Guardian

Step forward Tony Gladstone. Meet Tony Churchill. Both were on stage in
Blackpool this Tuesday, as the prime minister spoke about foreign
policy. The question is: who leads whom? And what earthly chance do they
have of realising their vast ambitions for Britain in the world?

Tony Gladstone preaches - never has the word been more apt - a moral
imperative of global liberal engagement. Against Saddam. For Palestine
as well as Israel. Against Aids, African poverty, disease and climate
change. For rebuilding Afghanistan, and not just conquering it.
"Remember," he says, "that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of
Afghanistan, among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eyes of
Almighty God as can be your own". Well, actually that was William Ewart
Gladstone. But, recast in the language of modern political
televangelism, it's still the Blair message.

In some ways, he's more admirable than the original role model. When old
William Ewart thundered against "the Bulgarian horrors", there was
always the strong suspicion of political self-interest lurking behind
those purple curtains of righteousness. The will of God and the career
calculations of his earthly servant wonderfully coincided. By contrast,
when Tony Blair talks war against the "Iraqi horrors", he is risking his
own domestic political position. Moreover, Blair's arguments for
humanitarian intervention and international community are more coherent
and more sustained (if not more eloquent) than Gladstone's. To listen to
him in a smaller group is to be convinced that he really is a passionate
liberal interventionist.

I like and admire Tony Gladstone. I have not forgotten the touching
graffiti I saw in downtown Pristina shortly after the liberation of
Kosovo: "Thank you Tony Bler." But there is a huge problem here: the
ambitions of Blair's moral global liberalism are far larger than old
Gladstone's, but his means of realising them are so much smaller. When
Gladstone inveighed against the Ottoman Bimbashis and Kaimakams, in
1878, Britain was what the United States is today - the hyperpower.
Today, we're just Britain. "At times, in Britain we lack self-belief,"
Blair chided in Blackpool. We should remember that Britain has the
fourth largest economy in the world, and so on. But if low self-esteem
is something for national psychologists to watch out for, so is hubris.

In less visionary moments the prime minister knows very well that
Britain is now a medium-sized European power. So we need to get larger
forces to do our neo-Gladstonian work. This is where Tony Churchill
comes in.

Of course all British prime ministers want to be Churchill. And someone
who was a schoolboy in the 1960s grew up entirely in Churchill's shadow.
But Churchill was not just the great war leader. Gnawed by the knowledge
of Britain's sharply declining power, he made a strategic choice. This
was to forge a special relationship with the United States, to help us
do what we could no longer do on our own. And sure enough, in defending
his close relationship with Washington, Blair recalled "where this
alliance was forged: here in Europe, in world war II when Britain and
America and every decent citizen in Europe joined forces to liberate
Europe from the Nazi evil." (The only difference between this and what
Margaret Thatcher would have said is the nice passing reference to
decent citizens in Europe.)

So here we go again, in the old game of historical charades: Saddam =
Hitler, Blair = Churchill, Bush = Roosevelt. But hang on, Roosevelt
? To make the comparison is to see the yawning differences. Actually,
even Churchill found the game he invented difficult and sometimes
humiliating to play. At one point in his dealings with Roosevelt, over
financial support for the British war effort, Churchill exploded: "What
do you want me to do - stand up and beg like Fala?" Fala was Roosevelt's
dog.

Churchill fretted, with good reason, about Roosevelt cosying up to
Stalin's Russia. "A small lion," he is recorded as saying, "was walking
between a huge Russian bear and a great American elephant." Now the huge
Russian bear has shrunk and grown mangy. But the British lion is even
smaller than it was (although perhaps with better muscle-tone) and the
American elephant is even larger. While Bill Clinton brilliantly played
the part of Franklin Roosevelt at the Labour party conference yesterday,
President George Bush has very different views of the new world order.
It's not true that there's no Gladstonism in there. Actually, if you
read the new American security doctrine, there's quite a lot. But there
are also some very different voices: unilateralist, neo-imperialist,
and, so to speak, Disraeli with F-16s.

Is there anything more a British prime minister can do to shift the
balance inside the Bush administration? Probably not a lot. But how
about paying a little more attention to the European voice? After all,
both Gladstone and Churchill summoned the vision of "United Europe" to
support their larger schemes. Europe has been remarkably absent from
Blair's pronouncements on Iraq. There have been many references to
conversations with Bush, but few or none to those with Chirac or
Schröder, let alone Prodi and Solana.

He told parliament "we're working with the Americans and others" on a
Middle East peace conference. Europe is reduced to "and others". In the
conference speech, mentions were high-flown but perfunctory. "Europe is
to become 25 nations, one Europe for the first time since Charlemagne,"
(two questionable claims in one sentence, incidentally). A brief plug
for the euro. And then: "We believe in Europe but we're not yet at the
centre of it." Dead right we're not. Nor, at this rate, shall we ever
be.

It's true that Europe is in a mess over Iraq: Blair playing Churchill in
Washington, Schröder playing Bismarck against Washington, Chirac
playing hard-to-get and Brussels playing the mouth-organ. Europe has
many positions on Iraq, and therefore none. One can understand the
frustration. But it's rudimentary common sense that the small British
lion would stand a slightly better chance of turning the American
elephant if it had Europe - whatever animal or animals that is - pulling
in something like the same direction. If I had been watching Tony
Blair's performance from Paris or Berlin over the last two months, I
would be wondering what on earth had happened to the professedly most
pro-European of all British prime ministers. The man whose ambition it
was (still is?) to resolve our historic uncertainty about our place in
Europe, once and for all.

Blair rightly argues that there is no realistic alternative to
engagement with America, whoever's running it. We can't just stand
aside. Europe is not strong or united enough to act on its own. But his
hair-raising wager seems to be that, with Britain's much diminished
relative power, and not having the huge personal prestige of Churchill,
he can still somehow "do a Churchill" and swing Bush's Washington behind
a Gladstonian world agenda. It's some gamble. The danger is that
Gladstone will get lost and Blair will end up as Churchill - without the
clout.