Edward M Spiers: Body blow for Britain’s reputation as trusted ally of US

Several commentators, including Lord Ashdown, the former Lib Dem leader, have expressed fears that the vote has diminished the international standing of Great Britain; that it has damaged the so-called special relationship with the United States and that it has left the UK unable to act in response to chemical warfare.

Undoubtedly David Cameron and William Hague under-estimated the legacy of scepticism left by the Iraq war and suffered a humiliating defeat on a policy that they had promoted with passion and conviction both at home and internationally.

This will diminish the impact of British diplomacy whether in bilateral meetings or in the UN Security Council and the forthcoming G20 summit at St Petersburg this Thursday and Friday. Britain’s reliability as an ally has been damaged; it may prove difficult to repair.

Of particular importance may be relations with the US. Britain, France and recently Turkey have urged the Obama administration to act upon his “red line” speech in August 2012, implying a possible military response should the regime of Bashar al-Assad use chemical weapons.

With outrage over the recent attack in Damascus now expressed by President Obama and his Secretary of State, John Kerry, the US may decide to act alone. If it does, it will act militarily, as Obama has indicated, in support of its “own interests” in the hope of deterring further recourse to chemical warfare.

Will this mean the end of the special relationship that has been the cornerstone of our foreign and security policies since the Second World War?

That relationship was crucial during the Cold War, when the US nuclear deterrent (part of which was based in Britain) underpinned the security of the UK and our Nato allies.

It was also a relationship that flourished under particular leaders – Macmillan and Kennedy, Reagan and Thatcher, and latterly Blair and Clinton before Blair and Bush. Underpinned by a sharing of intelligence, it often flourished in times of crisis: the Falklands War, Bosnia and Kosovo, and the military operations after 9/11.

While the Commons vote has damaged the special relationship, as reflected in Kerry’s jibe about France being America’s “oldest ally”, the relationship has survived even worse problems: US opposition during the Suez crisis; Harold Wilson’s refusal to support the US during the Vietnam war and America’s invasion of Grenada in 1983.

So the relationship could recover, especially as Obama, who understands the political legacy of the Iraq war, is now following Cameron in seeking Congressional authorisation for military action. But the UK government’s maladroit response to the Syrian crisis may have longer-term consequences; it could encourage the Obama administration (and possibly its successor) to give US interests in Asia far higher priority than those of its European allies.

Meanwhile the Syrian civil war will continue, with its 100,000 death toll, principally from conventional ordnance, growing and dwarfing the casualties inflicted by poison gas. Whether a US “shot across the bow” of the Assad regime proves successful or not, it underscores that both the Geneva Protocol (1925) and the Chemical Weapons Convention (1997) lack procedures for enforcing their terms.

Just as Mussolini’s forces and the Imperial Japanese Army exposed the hollowness of the protocol in the 1930s, so the Syrian crisis is revealing the shortcomings of the convention. If the UN Security Council is either deadlocked by political disputes and a Russian veto, or is bypassed by pre-emptive US military action, or cannot act at all because Congress has blocked Obama, then talk about upholding international “norms” in a legitimate manner will remain just talk.

*Edward M Spiers is Professor of Strategic Studies at the University of Leeds.