European Affairs
c/o The European Institute
1001 Connecticut Avenue
NW, Suite 220
Washington, DC
20036-5531
Tel: (202) 895-1670
Fax (202) 362-1088
info@europeanaffairs.org
|
|
|
|
|
|
When the British Foreign Office and
the U.S. State Department provide briefing
papers for the first working summit
between President George Bush and the
new Prime Minister Gordon Brown – a
pretty good bet to occur sometime next
year – the agenda will look very familiar.
And despite the change at the top in
Britain, the most salient issues and policy
choices are likely to be phrased in
terms of “we.”
With sanctions already in place
against Iran, and Western intelligence
experts saying Iran continues moving
closer to mastering the crucial technology
and engineering, is there anything
else that “we” can do to stop Tehran’s
drive for nuclear independence? How do
“we” push the Iraqi government to help
stop the Shiite-Sunni violence that most
describe now as a civil war: indeed,
should “we” be looking for new leadership
there? Can “we” get any of the other
NATO allies to help deliver security, aid
and reconstruction to the people of Afghanistan
so that they don’t turn against
NATO troops? Is there anyway to kick
start the Middle East peace process despite
the chaos in the Palestinian territories?
And is there anything at all to be
done about President Vladimir Putin’s
increasingly anti-Western policies?
As the variety of these agenda items
demonstrate, the commonality of interests
and objectives for London and Washington
covers most of the world. Indeed,
the “special relationship” – much maligned
these days in some quarters but
obviously very much alive – is more a
function of the permanent bureaucracy
than the personalities of the leaders of the
two countries. Whether it is the unparalleled
sharing of information, sources and
analysis between the CIA and the British
secret service, the extensive joint training,
personal ties and comfort level of the U.S.
and UK military establishments, the
shared experiences of British and American diplomats all around the world, or
just the common language and historical
comradeship of the two peoples, there are
no two countries in the world that work
as more of a team.
The personal relationship between a
Prime Minister and a President can affect
the style and pace of this teamwork,
especially its public presentation, but the
fundamentals are deeper than even the
biggest personalities of U.S. and British
leaders.
Indeed, the personalities of Tony
Blair and Gordon Brown couldn’t be
more different. One is, like Bill Clinton,
a great communicator who seems to love
the camera. The other is more cerebral
and shy – qualities that are often underestimated
in superficial characterizations
of him as simply a “taciturn Scot” or
“dour Presbyterian.” And Blair and
Brown have not seen eye to eye on Iraq,
which unfortunately serves as a kind of
barometer of anyone’s foreign policy outlook
these days. Brown supported Blair –
but not with great enthusiasm and apparently
with a heavy dose of skepticism
about a plan for building a democracy
on the back of a brutal dictatorship without
much international support for the
nation-building involved.
As Chancellor of the Exchequer,
Brown has won plaudits for an unparalleled
run of prosperity for the British
economy. While serving as Chancellor
(and maintaining his position as the presumptive
heir to Blair), Brown has
seemed wary of foreign affairs, limiting
his statements and actions to development
in Africa and a key role in eliminating
the debt of less developed countries
around the world. He is a believer
in globalization and has much in common
with America’s push for privatization
and a freer economy. So those issues
should go smoothly with Washington.
Problems could arise, of course, if
Brown’s intensity regarding aid to the developing
world and America’s relative
stinginess on the subject come into conflict in the run up to a G-8 summit or as
the result of a calamity in Africa. You
could imagine Brown stubbornly holding
up agreement in the hopes of pushing
Bush to real commitments in the
area of foreign aid – something Blair
avoided in his dealings with successive
U.S. administrations.
Blair is comfortable and confident in
leading international responses to big
crises and had a good track record doing
it – at least until Iraq. He joined with
President Bill Clinton in demanding capitulation
from Slobodan Milosevic over
Kosovo, sent an elite British military
force to bring stability in place of chaos
in Sierra Leone and made the most powerful
international argument for overthrowing
the Taliban in Afghanistan.
This has brought him a form of confidence that it will take years for Brown to
acquire – if indeed he does manage to
acquire it on the job.
It is also hard to imagine Brown having
the same seemingly messianic commitment
that Blair has to democracy in
the Middle East. In their famous private
exchange at the St. Petersburg G-8 summit
in July, when Bush was caught on
camera calling out “Yo, Blair,” the British
Labour Party leader seemed to match
Bush – neocon argument for neocon argument
– in explaining why Israel had to
have full support in its assault on
Lebanon. They agreed that anti-democrats
(Syria, Tehran, Hezbollah and
Hamas) were trying to undermine a new,
more democratic Middle East stirring in
the tumult of Lebanon, the Palestinian
territories and Iraq. Notwithstanding the
absurdity of this over-simplification,
Blair seemed to believe it. Brown surely
wouldn’t. For one thing, he will have witnessed
how little Blair managed to get
back from Bush in return for his readiness
to spend political capital swinging
Britain behind U.S. initiatives. In addition,
Brown does not seem to have the
same zealous commitments that Blair
often appeared to share with the Bush
administration. On the contrary, when it
comes to the major strategic and foreign
policy issues, Brown appears to have an
open mind. Will he develop strong views
on the Iranian nuclear dilemma, the
Middle East peace process, or the rollback
of civil liberties and democratic
values in Russia? Nobody knows.
What is knowable about Brown is
that his public compass has been mainly
economic and that he is decidedly pro-
American. In his formal duties, Brown
has consistently worked closely and well
with his counterparts in the Bush Treasury
Department. More privately, he regularly
summers in Cape Cod and consults
regularly with Clinton-era Treasury
Secretaries Robert Rubin and Larry
Summers, and he has close political ties
to many other key figures in the Democratic
Party. Certainly, former Vice President
Al Gore can be expected to play a
prominent role working with Brown on
global warming issues that the latter says
require urgent moves toward instituting
a global emissions-trading system.
On the broad subject of Europe’s development
and role in the world, Brown
apparently does not share Blair’s hopes
(now dashed in the wake of Iraq) of seeing
Britain lead the EU to new international
authority. True, Brown has always
regarded himself as a ‘pro-European’ in
the sense of seeking to lower national
barriers among member states, and he
has never seemed to have the same emotional
attachment to the sovereignty of
the British Parliament that characterizes
many Euro-skeptics in Britain, particularly
the English (as distinct notably
from the Scots and the Welsh.) While famously
wary of the attractions of the
euro in place of the British pound, he accepts
that Britain gains economically
through its membership in the EU. But
he seems quite hostile to the European
Commission as an institution. For example, he has never made much effort to
befriend commissioners in Brussels. He
has never championed the Commission
as an agent for liberalization in the EU
nations. He is open about finding himself
bored by Council of Ministers meetings:
he sometimes skips them and, if he
does turn up, he often leaves early.
On even broader geopolitical issues,
now that Bush has diluted U.S. unilateralism
after his re-election, Brown should
be largely comfortable with Washington’s
new-found appreciation of diplomacy
and coalition-building with respect to issues
like North Korea and Iran.
What won’t continue under Gordon
Brown is the kind of tag-team public
diplomacy that Bush and Blair have delivered
around the world. Bush sets the
policy, and then Blair presents the best
possible public case for it. Especially in
the context of Iraq and the Middle East,
Brown is likely to be more cautious.
While British diplomats will still work
side by side with Americans, the two
leaders will have less shared experiences
to rely on and probably some subtle differences
in world view.
The open question is whether Brown
will adopt Blair’s basic approach to dealing
with George Bush. Blair has suffered
mightily for his commitment to rarely
breaking with Bush in public and to giving
Washington unqualified support up
front and then trying to modify the policy
from a position of insider.
That is
something that even Margaret Thatcher
didn’t always do. She publicly demanded
and obtained a dramatic scaling-back of
the Reagan Administration’s Star Wars
program, lest it generate a backlash in
U.S.-Soviet relations and upset the Cold
War balance that Europeans had come to
appreciate.
If there is another controversial
world crisis in Bush’s last two years – and
there may not be – events may push
Brown to adopt a different style. My
guess is that he will choose to acknowledge
in a respectful and realistic way,
that as close as Britain and the U.S. are,
there are still some areas of significant
disagreement.
|
|
|
|
