Ted Bromund: US relations must be rooted in reality rather than rhetoric

But over time, the relations of nations are shaped by their domestic political cultures, their values, and their interests. The US and Britain have been allies for the better part of a century because they need each other, not because their leaders have always liked each other. If personalities governed, the Anglo-American alliance would not have survived Eisenhower and Eden, never mind Edward Heath.

Thus, it is not particularly depressing that there is little personal sympathy evident between David Cameron and Barack Obama. Undoubtedly, the pomp and circumstance for which official Britain is famous will be deployed to effect, but the very fact that Obama is making a state visit testifies to the fact that, for Cameron, its significance rests mostly in its visible symbolism.

Cameron is not the first prime minister to try to wear a US president as an electoral charm: Harold Macmillan made great play with the success of Eisenhower’s visit to Britain in 1959. When he was in opposition, Cameron’s approach was to try his hardest to pair himself with Obama as a young, vigorous leader, free from the tired loyalties of dogmatic ideology and eager to occupy the vital, pragmatic center.

Of course, that is the kind of thing that parties out of power always say. But the approach made electoral sense because Obama was almost as wildly popular in Britain as he was across continental Europe. Three years on, Obama’s popularity has suffered from his evident lack of interest in Europe and his inability to live up to the fantastic hopes entertained for him. But Cameron’s approach, like a half-squeezed orange, still has some juice left in it, and the Prime Minister has not been shy about trying to extract it.

The irony is that Cameron and Obama actually have a good deal in common. Most importantly, they are both domestic politicians first and foremost. With the possible exception of Jimmy Carter, no post-war US president has displayed less interest in international affairs before his election than Obama. The same is true of Cameron, whose statements on foreign policy before 2010 were marked mostly by his desire to prove that he was neither Tony Blair, nor George W Bush, nor above all a neo-conservative.

Now that Cameron has emerged as a champion of the so-called Arab Spring and launched Britain enthusiastically into a war in Libya, those claims look rather quaint. But then, Obama has embraced drone strikes, kept Guantanamo Bay open for longer than he wanted, and killed Osama Bin Laden. On yesterday’s Andrew Marr programme, he vowed to mount a similar operation in Pakistan if another militant leader was discovered. So he can join Cameron in having said one thing and done the other abroad.

The problem with the Obama-Cameron relationship is not that it is personally thin. Nor, even, is it that Cameron appears to be primarily interested in the public relations benefits he can extract from appearing to have a friend, or at least a kindred spirit, in the White House. It is that they have made so little effort to build a solid foundation for an enduring Anglo-American alliance. They are less important for themselves than for what they represent: domestic political cultures that are increasingly less interested in taking the business of international affairs seriously.

On the American side, the more assertive elements of Obama’s foreign policy have been either forced on him against his will or undertaken because the alternatives are, from his point of view, even more undesirable: for example if the US does not use drones, it will have to put more boots on the ground. On the British side, Cameron entered Libya with an astonishing insouciance: Britain’s cause is just, but it can now put so little force behind its word that its strategy is to hope to get lucky with a Gaddafi collapse.

Neither leader is particularly interested in sustaining military strength. Both are eager to waste more money on foreign aid. Neither has a long-stated, consistent commitment that goes beyond rhetoric to leadership in the world. Above all, both are interested in international affairs primarily because they recognise that it was the unpopularity of the Iraq War that brought their opponents back down to earth.

There is much that Obama and Cameron could do to improve Anglo-American relations, if they are so minded. On the US side, Obama could remember that a cardinal rule of US foreign policy should be to treat its allies as allies. That means no more attacks on “British Petroleum,” no more equivocating about who owns the Falkland Islands, and no more demanding that all US concerns in Europe be settled in Brussels.

On the British side, it means taking an occasional political risk. Politicians in Britain have become too comfortable with winning easy points by bashing the US, as senior Labour figures have done by knocking the extradition treaty between the two countries that they negotiated. This portrayal of Britain as victim is factually wrong and breeds nothing but a resentful little Englandism. The US. has made mistakes in its relations with Britain, but there is nothing fortifying about self-pity.

It is time for both sides to stop relying on rhetoric about the special relationship and to actually do something about it. The worst part of the President’s visit is that it will give everyone a perfect excuse to do nothing but proclaim generalities about the Anglo-American alliance. The more the event focuses on public relations instead of international relations, the more it will express the lack of substance in the Obama-Cameron relationship.