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“When it comes to the special relationship
with America, Conservatives
feel it, understand it and believe in it.”
Thus David Cameron, who during the
months since he took over the leadership
of the British Conservative Party, has set
in motion one of the most dramatic repositioning
exercises in the party’s history.
After years of appearing marginalized
in British politics and foreign policy,
the Conservatives are reaping useful (if
not spectacular) dividends in the polls,
enabling them to pull ahead of the ruling
Labour party and Britain’s third party,
the Liberal Democrats. Under Cameron,
all areas of party policy are being revisited,
and foreign policy is no exception.
Cameron’s choice of keeping the
word “special” to qualify the UK-U.S. relationship
was carefully made, and all
the more striking for its indifference to
clever punditry which dismisses the notion
as a tenacious self-delusion of the
British. But Cameron put his own spin
on the phrase by calling for a “rebalanced
special relationship.” That grabbed headlines
and inspired commentators to proclaim
that yet another Conservative orthodoxy
had been stood on its head. Cameron’s speech in September to the
British-American Project in London certainly
provided some basis for this, with
its insistence that “we should be solid
and not slavish in our friendship with
America;” its caution that “bombs and
missiles are bad ambassadors;” its chiding
of the U.S. over Guantanamo Bay;
and its call for “a new multilateralism.”
Important as these statements are in
defining Cameron’s approach, his words
need to be read, not as an echo of zealous
anti-Americanism, but as a careful
restating of British positions within a
tradition of Anglo-American alliance.
There was obvious political advantage,
in British electoral terms, in putting
some distance between the Conservative
Party and a Bush administration mired in
difficulties. Cameron’s points were aimed
at refuting the Manichaean geopolitics
and strategic stark choices that have
been posited by the neo-conservatives as
the basis for foreign policy. Cameron’s
own concept has a clear lineage within
the three currents of Conservative thinking
about foreign policy: the Atlanticist
strand, the primacy of British vital interests,
and a “conservative” reflex of caution
about intervening around the globe.
The first of these, the Atlanticist
strand, has enjoyed doctrinal primacy
since World War II amongst the UK’s political
leaders and policy-making elites.
This primacy survived both the Suez debacle
and Harold Wilson’s refusal to send
troops to Vietnam, reached its apogee in
the Reagan-gatcher years and has been
pursued just as determinedly by Tony
Blair.
The second strand is somewhat analogous
to U.S. isolationism and is sometimes
dubbed ‘Powellite’ (after the late
Enoch Powell, a controversial and idiosyncratic
High Tory who championed
the full political integration of Northern
Ireland into Great Britain). This doctrine
eschews foreign interventions except
where territorial sovereignty or the safety
of British nationals is in peril. ge constituency
for this view has been a small
(though not negligible) one, mostly on
the right of the Conservative Party.
The third strand invokes a conservative
tradition of caution in the face of
life’s complexities and the imperfectability
of mankind; corresponding skepticism
about grandiose projects for transforming
the world; and fear of the law of
unintended consequences. This last
school of thought – coupled with reservations
about the U.S.’s judgment, if not
its beneficence – is well represented in
an advisory council that Cameron has
assembled which includes former Foreign
Secretaries, senior officials from the
Foreign Office and Defense Ministry and
historians. Not all members of the council
would describe themselves as Conservatives
in the card-carrying sense. On
security issues, they would range themselves
at different points on the broad
spectrum of Atlanticism that runs from
enthusiasm for U.S.-led “coalitions of the
willing” to pursuit of greater autonomy
for Europeans within the Atlantic alliance.
So the creation of the panel does
not signal a particular direction in security
policy. What it does signal on
Cameron’s part is his willingness to draw
on heavyweight counsel and experience
– perhaps as a corrective to any perception
that his own policy interests tend
more towards domestic rather than
geopolitical affairs.
Whether these adjustments to the
idiom and process in Conservative Party
foreign policy-making presage a recasting
of Transatlantic relations under a Conservative
government is unlikely, however.
There are a number of reasons for this –
some “political” in the narrow sense, others
to do with a convergence of analysis in
the face of threats confronted not only by
the United States and the United Kingdom
but by the West as a whole.
First, the domestic dividends from
opposing the Iraq policy of the Bush administration
are limited for Cameron. Of
course, he was a supporter of the war
and has not recanted – unlike his predecessor as party leader, Michael Howard,
whose post-facto intellectual contortions
over Iraq were not well received in the
White House. But the present unpopularity
of the war is visited not on
Cameron but almost entirely upon Tony
Blair, Bush’s co-initiator of the conflict.
Blair will depart from the British political
scene next year, and for that portion
of the population for whom opposition
to the Iraq war has almost totemic status
– the liberal/left middle class – the obvious
political home is not the Conservatives
but the left-of-center Liberal Democrats:
they have consistently opposed
the war and are the only party committed
to an early timetable for withdrawal.
The second political reason for continuity
in Conservative support for the
U.S. is the British party’s “sister-party” relationship
with the Republican Party – in
particular, with presidential hopeful John
McCain. For Cameron’s centrist-oriented
Tories, McCain is a conservative of a
more congenial stripe than the current
U.S. administration. McCain’s support for
Cameron was expressed in person at the
Conservatives’ party conference this fall
(and warmly reciprocated by Cameron ),
and that personal chemistry makes it
even less likely that Cameron would
move to a position of more outright opposition
instead of his current critical but
supportive stance in Iraq.
But there are deeper factors driving
UK-U.S. convergence on security issues.
They go beyond a common analysis of
the challenges posed by international
terrorism, failing states and the proliferation
of weapons of mass destruction –
and the consequent need to devise tough
and effective responses. For Cameron as
for the U.S. administration, such responses
extend to the use of pre-emptive
force and also humanitarian intervention,
sometimes in cases that challenge
classic doctrines of national sovereignty.
It is a paradox (but not, perhaps, a
surprising one) that since the 2003 invasion
of Iraq, such concepts are no longer
problematic for many of the world’s
main actors, as not only the last two versions
of the U.S. National Security Strategy,
but also the European Union’s Security
Strategy and the United Nation’s new
“responsibility to protect” all testify. It is
true that centre-right leaders like
Cameron and McCain are moving to
distance themselves from the more
hubristic elements of neo-conservatism
(without, it should be said, repudiating
its central tenet of extending freedom, at
least in principle). But even so, they have
already crossed an intellectual Rubicon
in the sense that, in future they could be
ready again – political will and physical
means permitting – to pursue new “ad
hoc” coalitions of the willing. Assuming
the case is well made about the threat
and the scope and purpose of the mission
are clearly defined, a future British
prime minister, Conservative or Labour,
would not necessarily have to expect to
run into insuperable opposition from
public opinion. For all the public disquiet
about the deteriorating situation in
Iraq, the British are still, by history and
by instinct, inclined to the deployment
of force where this can make a useful difference.
Crucially, they have recent experience of campaigns and interventions
(Falklands, Sierra Leone, Kosovo) that
were persuasively presented as either national
or moral imperatives and then
prosecuted successfully. So whilst “effective
multilateralism” will be Cameron’s
preference, this does not mean that he
would, as prime minister, put all his eggs
in the UN basket; and whilst Cameron is
undoubtedly sincere (and “European”)
in preaching the virtues of “sof” power,
greater cultural sensitivity and the need
to win hearts and minds, he is not about
to turn Britain’s traditional military activism
on its head – any more than the
next U.S. President is likely to repudiate
an activist tradition of foreign policy
which can be traced as readily to
Wilsonian liberal universalism as to the
interventionism of Reagan and the more
contemporary neo-conservatives.
At a profound level, Cameron’s
world-view remains resolutely Atlanticist
and “pro-Western” – in contrast to a
trend in which many Europeans have
persuaded themselves that the U.S. has
become part of the world’s problem
rather than its solution. He has not
minced words about the dangerous and
misguided nature of this trend, which
extends beyond such established America-
baiters as playwright Harold Pinter
and journalists John Pilger and Robert
Fisk and now reaches into much well educated
white-collar opinion. In his lecture
to the British-American project,
Cameron matched Blair in condemning
such anti-Americanism as “intellectual
and moral surrender.” One of the
Cameron’s closest aides says: “pro-Americanism
is written into his DNA.” Domestically,
this stance is neither brave nor reckless: Cameron knows that the
idea of the West, even in the post-communist
era, still has sufficient purchase
in the UK (and many continental European
countries for that matter) to make
notions such as Jacques Chirac’s call for a
“multi-polar” world look both unattractive
and unrealistic. Nor will Cameron, a
pragmatic Euro-skeptic, give currency to
the development of any European security
and defense policy (ESDP, in the jargon)
which could challenge the primacy
of the Atlantic alliance and NATO.
But some caveats have to be entered.
For one thing, the commonalities between
Britain and the U.S. play both ways in the
sense that both countries now face the reality
of pressures to scale back military
ambitions in light of budgetary pressures,
physical over-stretch and growing public
skepticism about foreign entanglements.
Moreover, in his re-orientation of
the Conservative party towards the political
centre, Cameron has taken up
some positions which could yet be problematic
for the United States if he is returned to power in 2008 or 2009. In his
bid to seize for the Conservatives the
moral high ground on climate change
and curbing emissions (as audaciously as
Arnold Schwarzenegger has done in California),
Cameron has shown himself
quite prepared to rube business opinion,
traditionally the Conservatives’ most
solid constituency. (Indeed, he has not
been beyond resorting to anti-big business
rhetoric to dispel the public perception
that the party is a captive of corporate
interests.) It seems likely that the
next U.S. administration, Republican or
Democrat, will lay itself as open to
tirades against the military-industrial
complex as the present one has done. But
Cameron has already sounded a warning
that the interests of the planet and future
generations must take priority over economic
short-termism. Similarly, the
signs are that his position on other “soft”
global issues such as the plight of the
poorest countries will propel him towards
a free-trade position which will
not spare protectionism whether coming
from the U.S. or the EU.
The most immediate challenge facing
the Conservatives’ new leader will appear
in the coming months as strategy towards
Iraq and Afghanistan is reviewed
on both sides of the Atlantic. The domestic
terms of debate for Blair, for his immediate
Labour successor (almost certainly
Chancellor Gordon Brown), and
for David Cameron have changed fundamentally
as a result of Iraq. Henceforth,
any British leader or aspirant leader will
expect to be fully consulted by its principal
ally and substantively involved in the
shaping of military strategy. It will be
Britain’s price for support whose political
value is at least as great as its military
one, and which British politicians will in
future under-value at their peril.
Secondly, British politicians will
henceforth listen more closely to the advice
of the military. It is one thing for a
Labour leader to be second-guessed by
the professional military as happened to
the Blair government this fall with the
views proffered publicly and critically by
the outspoken new Chief of the General
Staff, Sir Richard Dannatt. Such a conflict could look too high a price to pay
for a Conservative party leader. Cameron
is politically astute enough to recognize
the impact on the public mood of
the recurrent campaign by the British
tabloid press against alleged government
indifference to the well-being and safety
of “our boys.” The context of an apparently
un-winnable war in Iraq is not the
whole story, but it colors the future.
Going forward, the sine qua non of British
participation in foreign missions will be
clarity about strategy as well as tactics
(or, more accurately, public perception of
clarity among decision-makers about the
operation in question).
That is for the future. Currently, issues
center on Iraq and Afghanistan and
the policy to be worked out there in the
short term between Washington and
London (with the UK this time a more
assertive interlocutor). In these situations,
where British military personnel
are already committed, Cameron is unlikely to be prepared to overturn the
convention of political bipartisanship
between the government and “the loyal
opposition.” (The Conservatives’ support
for an independent inquiry into the
“lessons” of the Iraq war is careful political
maneuvering that does not cut across
this convention of bipartisanship since
any inquiry would only begin after the
start of a process of troop withdrawal: in
any case, the government has been able
to use its Commons majority to shelve
the idea for now.) It is even more unlikely
that Cameron would break ranks
with the British position and call unilaterally
for early withdrawal from Iraq:
most British Conservative politicians
would view that step as a blow to Western
credibility, liable to inject momentum
into radical Islam.
The bigger challenge in the next few
years for the Conservative leader will be
the test faced not only by Brown or
Cameron and their U.S. counterpart but
by the entire international community:
restraining the nuclear ambitions of Iran
and North Korea within a UN framework
– or outside it if the Security
Council is rendered intellectual by Russia
and China. The task of framing an effective
Western response that goes beyond
the usual “coalition of the willing” – i.e.
one including, this time, France and
Germany – will fall as much to London
as to a newly multilateralist or realist
Washington that emerges in the wake of
the Iraq policy study led by former Secretary
of State James Baker’s group. It
will be a test not only of Cameron’s or
Brown’s loyalties to the United States but
also of their influence within the European
Union. Either man will need to
raise his game in Europe if he is to succeed.
But the outcome could be the definitive verdict on Britain’s long-held
self-defined mission to be a ‘”bridge” between
the U.S. and the EU. With Chancellor
Angela Merkel in Berlin and the
strong possibility of “President Sarkozy”
in Paris after May 2007, that kind of ambition
looks less fanciful. For a British
prime minister – New Conservative or
New Labour – there can be no greater
prize in troubled times than helping to
ensure that the West holds together.
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