Obama in England

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

President Obama and Elizabeth II were barely done with their banquet when the Financial Times was out with an editorial about Britain’s place in the world. It said that the Obama administration has “distanced itself from the hubristic, go-it-alone attitude that characterized George W. Bush’s first term.” That was the term in which America went to the United Nations and won backing for the enforcement of the United Nations resolutions on Iraq and built the coalition of the willing in which Prime Minister Blair was such as staunch leader. The FT editorial then welcomed what it called a “new emphasis on alliances rather than coalitions.” Britain itself “must also consider carefully its relations with Europe,” the FT burbled before offering this sentence: “Britain’s weight in Washington rises and falls with its influence in Brussels, even if the EU is still not a coherent international actor.”

Where that last idea is coming from is beyond us. The way the sentence is formulated suggests the FT labors under the misapprehension that if Britain’s influence in Brussels rises, its weight in Washington also rises. Brendan Bracken call your office. Our impression would be the contrary. The more Britain’s influence in Brussels waxes, the more it engages with Europeans, the more its weight in Washington wanes. The ratio is inverse. This is why people speak of a special relationship to begin with, Lafayette notwithstanding. George III may have been crazy, but John Adams was as sane as they come. He grew so disgusted by the French that, by the time he presented his ministerial credentials to George III, it seemed to be almost a relief to meet, in a tyrant he’d just helped overthrow, someone with whom his nation shared a special bond.

There’s a dramatization of that meeting in the HBO series “John Adams,” in which the man who was about to become America’s first vice president is played by Paul Giamatti. He speaks to the king of the relationship being marked by the same language, similar religion, and kindred blood. The king then observes that there is an opinion among some that Adams is “not the most attached of all your countrymen to the manners of France.” Adams chuckles and allows, “I have no attachment to any country but my own.” For the first year or so of Mr. Obama’s presidency, it seemed as though he were bound and determined to end the special relationship altogether. So much so that the members of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee actually issued a call for an end of the use of the phrase “special relationship.”

This week the welcome given to Mr. Obama was colorful and warm. And no wonder. Mr. Obama has escalated the war in Afghanistan, and we are now also together with the British in respect of Libya. Mr. Obama has also embraced, at least rhetorically in his speech at Westminster Hall, the centerpiece of President Bush’s doctrine, which was focused on the fact that the yearning for freedom is universal. But Britain, as the FT editorial reminds us, has yet to make up its mind as to whether it wants to go fully into the arms of Europe or find its soul-mate in the America to which it gave so much in law and culture. Our guess is that, for all the pomp of the British welcome, restoring that special relationship is going to have to await a pair of leaders who believe more ardently than Messrs. Obama and Cameron do in the combination of classical political and economic liberalism that is so entwined in our history and so un-European.


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