Misreading of history leads to misunderstood U.S.-UK ties

Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Guardian News Service, London

Lord Black of Crossharbour, the owner of London's right-of- center Daily Telegraph, is giving a lecture next month entitled Is it in Britain's national interest to be America's principal ally? That is indeed a very interesting question. The closer one looks at the relations between the two countries in terms of national interest, the more unequal they seem, though distorted by a misreading of history and a misunderstanding of motives.

A hundred years ago, Britain was the only global superpower, whose City of London owned much more of the world than the British empire formally controlled. That included the U.S., which was to a large extent a financial dependency of London until World War I. This was much resented by an American nation which had, after all, emerged from rebellion against British rule, and showed that whatever affection the British felt for the Americans was simply not reciprocated.

After the U.S. civil war there was a fierce dispute about the Alabama, an British-built Confederate warship which had inflicted damage on Union shipping. Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts demanded a sum amounting to six times British annual state spending before London paid a sum equivalent, in relation to state spending, to US$240 billion today.

This set a pattern for American aggression and British conciliation, which was repeated in 1895 when the two countries almost went to war over a border dispute between Venezuela and British Guiana.

In the 20th century, the two countries twice became wartime allies, but this quite wrongly led the British to suppose that they had identical interests. The Americans entered both world wars belatedly, and very much on their own terms. In World War II, one of whose outcomes was the end of Great Britain as a great power, at the behest -- and to the advantage -- of the U.S..

Only in this strange age of historical amnesia could a senior White House official say that the U.S. now faces the same responsibilities as when it was "standing between Nazi Germany and a takeover of all Europe".

And with his own frightening historical ignorance, Tony Blair has spoken of our duty to support the Americans as they supported us during the Blitz. He is apparently unaware that America was neutral at the time. The U.S. didn't enter the war until December 1941, and then only because Japan had bombed Pearl Harbor and Hitler had declared war on the U.S., not the other way round.

Before the U.S. joined the war, there was, of course, the Lend-Lease agreement, which was represented as an act of generosity. On return for some obsolescent warships, Washington ruthlessly stripped British dollar reserves.

The process was completed by the terms of the postwar American loan whose effect -- combined with Lend-Lease -- was gravely to weaken especially Britain's exporting economy, to the very great benefit of American business. Any remaining illusions about a coincidence of British and American interests should never have survived the Suez episode, when London had the financial rug pulled from under its feet by Washington.

One can perfectly well like and admire much about America while discussing its political conduct objectively. And there is anyway no reason why the U.S. shouldn't ruthlessly pursue its national interests as it sees them. But that only emphasizes the sheer one-sidedness of the Anglo-American relationship, going far beyond the inevitable inequality between a former global power, now living in reduced circumstances, and the superpower which succeeded it.

This can be illustrated in the words of two Victorian prime ministers. When the pompous Palmerston said, "I shall always support you when you are in the right", Melbourne less pompously replied, "What I want is men who will support me when I am in the wrong."

Palmerston said that England had no permanent friends and no permanent enemies, only permanent interests. His phrase is sometimes quoted today by those who direct the Bush administration, inside or outside the White House, and it is a perfectly plausible basis for any country's foreign policy.

The trouble is that America follows Palmerston, while expecting the British to follow Melbourne. They have no permanent friends: We must always support them. More surprisingly, this is accepted by some of our own official class, through what Hugo Young has called "the convenient rationale, now much heard in Whitehall, that Britain has a selfless duty to act alongside the U.S. in its military ventures precisely in order to show the world that Washington is not alone".

It is hard to see how that is either convenient or rational. "My country right or wrong" is bad enough, but "your country right or wrong" is barely sane.

Never has the relationship been more one-sided than it is today. Blair loyally acts as the frontman for George Bush, putting the case for war against Iraq with a fluency the president can't match, even if it means telling what would be called, in a person of less exalted station, plain lies about Saddam Hussein's military threat to Britain and his connections with al-Qaeda. As for Blair's claim that, in return for our loyalty, we enjoy unique influence in Washington, there is no more evidence of that than there is for an Iraqi connection with Sept. 11.

Washington conspicuously did not support us in the years when we tried to defeat the IRA. Blair's devoted loyalty the autumn before last was shortly rewarded by a U.S. tariff designed to destroy what's left of the British steel industry. And if the prime minister really enjoyed the influence he claims, then Washington would have backed his pet scheme for an Israeli- Palestinian peace conference, at least to the extent of telling Sharon to let the Palestinians come to London. Nothing of the kind happened.

The sad truth is that Blair is the last victim of an illusion which has long bedeviled British policy, the myth of the "special relationship". Actually, the chief characteristic of this relationship was that only one side knew it existed -- and relationships don't come more special than that.