Oct 5th 2021

The Specious Special Relationship 

by Ian Buruma

 


Ian Buruma is the author, most recently, of The Churchill Complex: The Curse of Being Special, From Winston and FDR to Trump and Brexit. 

 

NEW YORK – Two days before the Normandy landings in June 1944, Charles de Gaulle demanded the right to govern France after it was liberated by the Allies. Franklin D. Roosevelt, who detested de Gaulle, had no intention of agreeing to this. Winston Churchill, who rather admired de Gaulle’s illusions of grandeur, sided with Roosevelt. He told the Free French leader that if he had to choose between de Gaulle and Roosevelt, he would always choose Roosevelt.

Churchill’s attitude was entirely understandable. Europe was occupied by Nazi Germany. The Free French were largely a symbolic force. And Britain was one of the three major Allied powers. Later, however, Britain’s choice to cling to the United States come what may (with one or two exceptions, including the Suez crisis in 1956 and the Balkan war in the 1990s) came with a heavy price.

Flush with wartime victory, Britain turned down every opportunity to shape European institutions in the 1950s, and when Prime Minister Harold Macmillan concluded in the early 1960s that Britain could remain a serious country only within the European Economic Community, de Gaulle stood in his way. British membership of the EEC was vetoed by the general in 1963, and again in 1967.

De Gaulle hadn’t forgotten Churchill’s words in 1944. He saw Britain as a Trojan Horse for American domination of Europe. France, in his view, was Europe’s natural leader. And, because Germany had no desire to assert leadership, and other Europeans had had quite enough of German power, this arrangement was widely accepted.

Britain finally joined the EEC in 1973, but even so, British prime ministers, except for Edward Heath in the 1970s, hung on to their so-called (especially by the British) “special relationship” with the US. This was largely a matter of shared nuclear secrets, intelligence, and military cooperation. Britain hoped that the special relationship would allow it to remain a formidable global player, even long after its empire was lost.

Now, once again, Britain has opted to side with the US, this time in a new defense pact with Australia to counter China. AUKUS is its unlovely name. A long-standing agreement with France to supply diesel-powered submarines to Australia was broken in favor of Anglo-American nuclear-powered boats. France is understandably furious. The three AUKUS countries didn’t even bother to notify the French of their impending deal. France recalled its ambassadors from Canberra and Washington, but not from London; Britain was not deemed to be important enough.

There may be good reasons why Australia decided American submarines would be more suitable as a defense against China. It might also be argued that it makes sense to strengthen US alliances in the Indo-Pacific region, not just with Australia, but also Japan and India. Quite what British interests in the region are, apart from puffing up a self-image of “global Britain” after Brexit, is less clear. France, with 1.5 million people, 8,000 troops, and island territories in the Indian and Pacific Oceans, has more at stake there than Britain does.

But there is more to AUKUS than submarine deals, lucrative though they are. US President Joe Biden has decided to confront China’s expanding power in East Asia with a show of military force. He has often expressed his wish that American allies would join him in this effort, even as Japanese and Europeans worry about damaging trade interests in China and being sucked into a potential war. But by undercutting France, the US, with the connivance of Britain, has widened a historical rift among European allies. It is as though de Gaulle’s suspicion of les Anglo-Saxons in 1944 has been proven right.

There is of course another way of looking at this. Wartime nostalgia plays an important part in Britain’s instinctive fondness for the special relationship. Like former Prime Minister Tony Blair in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, some British politicians might believe that the United Kingdom is the only European country with serious armed forces and the political will to use them. Prime Minister Boris Johnson, like Blair before him, seems to fancy himself a modern-day Churchill.

Unfortunately (or not), Britain’s military power is insignificant compared to what Churchill could command in 1944. Wartime nostalgia has drawn Britain into several foolish American wars, which other European countries were wise to avoid. The question is whether provoking China’s wrath by supporting Biden’s saber-rattling is justified nonetheless, even if it doesn’t involve direct British interests. Is the alternative of backing off and doing business as usual with China a form of cowardly appeasement? Or might there be other options?

Fear of repeating Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement in 1938 is one reason why the US and Britain have gotten themselves entangled in unnecessary wars in the decades after World War II. This is why French leaders have called for greater “strategic autonomy” for the European Union. Europe should beef up its own military force and wean itself from dependence on the US. The EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Josep Borrell announced that Europe, too, would help to limit China’s power. The bloc would seek a trade deal with Taiwan while still engaging with China. Even the pro-European, left-leaning newspaper Le Monde called this “deficient in backbone.”

As long as the EU has no common foreign policy and sufficient armed forces of its own, talk of strategic autonomy is just that. Only the full cooperation of Britain, and far greater military participation by Germany, might one day give Europe some chance of autonomy. But the combination of Germany’s historical baggage and Britain’s fixation on its special relationship stands in the way.

As a result, the fate of the Indo-Pacific region, and perhaps many places beyond, will remain in the hands of the increasingly aggressive authoritarians in Beijing and whoever happens to be sitting in the White House. Either way, neither Britain nor Australia, much less France and the EU, will have much to say in the matter.


Ian Buruma is the author, most recently, of The Churchill Complex: The Curse of Being Special, From Winston and FDR to Trump and Brexit

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2021.

 


This article is brought to you by Project Syndicate that is a not for profit organization.

Project Syndicate brings original, engaging, and thought-provoking commentaries by esteemed leaders and thinkers from around the world to readers everywhere. By offering incisive perspectives on our changing world from those who are shaping its economics, politics, science, and culture, Project Syndicate has created an unrivalled venue for informed public debate. Please see: www.project-syndicate.org.

Should you want to support Project Syndicate you can do it by using the PayPal icon below. Your donation is paid to Project Syndicate in full after PayPal has deducted its transaction fee. Facts & Arts neither receives information about your donation nor a commission.

 

 

Browse articles by author

More Current Affairs

Dec 29th 2022
EXTRACTS: "On August 1, 1991, a little more than three weeks before Ukraine declared independence from the Soviet Union, US President George H.W. Bush arrived in Kyiv to discourage Ukrainians from doing it. In his notorious 'Chicken Kiev' speech in the Ukrainian parliament, Bush lectured the stunned MPs that independence was a recipe for 'suicidal nationalism', 'ethnic hatred', and 'Local despotism.' ----- ....the West’s reluctance to respect Ukraine’s desire for sovereignty was a bad omen, revealing a mindset among US and European leaders that paved the way to Russia’s full-scale invasion in February. ----- .... Western observers, ranging from Noam Chomsky to Henry Kissinger, blame the West for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade, or have urged Western leaders to provide Putin a diplomatic off-ramp by compelling Ukraine to give up territory. Policymakers, too, seem to view Ukraine’s self-defense as a bigger problem than Russia’s genocidal aggression. ----- ..... despite the massive material and military support the West has provided to Ukraine, the fateful logic of appeasement lingers, because many Western leaders fear the consequences of Russia’s defeat more than the prospect of a defeated Ukraine. ----- This war is about the survival of Ukraine and the Ukrainian people. In the words of the Israeli leader Golda Meir, born in Kyiv, 'They say we must be dead. And we say we want to be alive. Between life and death, I don’t know of a compromise.' "
Dec 29th 2022
EXTRACT: "China’s flexible, blended, increasingly dynamic private sector could do all that and more. ----- Then came Xi Jinping. "
Dec 29th 2022
EXTRACTS: "For a few years in the late 2010s, it seemed to be only a matter of time before China would replace the US as the world’s largest economy and overwhelmingly dominant technological superpower. Then came the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan in late 2019. " ---- "How could China’s seemingly all-powerful autocrat understand so little about the social contract on which his power rests? For all its difficulties, liberal democracy – with its transparency and self-imposed limits – has once again proved more efficient and resilient than autocracy. Accountability to the people and the rule of law is not a weakness; it is a decisive source of strength. Where Xi sees a cacophony of clashing opinions and subversive free expression, the West sees a flexible and self-correcting form of collective intelligence. The results speak for themselves."
Dec 12th 2022
EXTRACTS: "Next time you’re in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, don’t bother looking for Dostoevsky Street. It’s been renamed: it’s now Andy Warhol Street. ..... because many Ukrainians regard Andy as Ukrainian. Was he? The evidence is mixed." ---- "Warhol remained a committed Greek Catholic all his life. He regularly prayed, both at home and in church, and frequently attended Sunday Mass. His bedside table contained a crucifix, a Christ statuette, and a prayer book. After he died on February 22, 1987, he was buried in St. John the Divine Byzantine Catholic Cemetery, some twenty miles south of Pittsburgh, in a simple grave next to his parents." ---- "When it comes to objective cultural affiliation or subjective ethnic identification, the United States—with its diverse Slavic heritages—has the greatest claim on Warhol and his art."
Dec 12th 2022
EXTRACT: "Cellular agriculture provides an alternative, and could be one of this century’s most promising technological advancements. Sometimes called “lab-grown food”, the process involves growing animal products from real animal cells, rather than growing actual animals. If growing meat or milk from animal cells sounds strange or icky to you, let’s put this into perspective. Imagine a brewery or cheese factory: a sterile facility filled with metal vats, producing large volumes of beer or cheese, and using a variety of technologies to mix, ferment, clean and monitor the process. Swap the barley or milk for animal cells and this same facility becomes a sustainable and efficient producer of dairy or meat products."
Dec 5th 2022
EXTRACT: "After a decade of unconstrained growth – when it seemed that a new billionaire was minted every day – the tech industry has finally hit a rough patch. Elon Musk’s erratic behavior following his takeover of Twitter has left the financially leveraged platform in a precarious state. The crypto exchange FTX’s sudden implosion has vaporized a business that was recently valued at $32 billion, taking many other crypto firms with it. Meta (Facebook) is laying off 11,000 people, 13% of its workforce, and Amazon is shedding 10,000. What are we supposed to make of these setbacks? Are they isolated incidents, or signs of structural change?"
Dec 3rd 2022
EXTRACT: "Just looking at explicit debts, the figures are staggering. Globally, total private- and public-sector debt as a share of GDP rose from 200% in 1999 to 350% in 2021. The ratio is now 420% across advanced economies, and 330% in China. In the United States, it is 420%, which is higher than during the Great Depression and after World War II."
Dec 3rd 2022
EXTRACT: "The Conservative leadership must stand up to the party’s extremists, and it must do so sooner rather than later. If moderates cannot defeat the hardliners by the next election, and the outcome turns out to be as bad for the Tories as recent polls suggest, they will find they have the same fight on their hands in opposition. --- Conservatives must never underestimate the importance of their moderate supporters. If the Party continues to disregard centrists whenever the Brexiteer right stamps its feet, it may find itself out of power for a long time to come."
Nov 24th 2022
EXTRACT: "....young voters did reach the polls they voted overwhelmingly for Democrat candidates across the country. According to reports, 63% of 18- to 29- year olds voted Democrat and 35% voted Republican in the House of Representatives elections. Voters between 30 and 44 split their vote between the two parties, while older voters tended to vote Republican."
Nov 24th 2022
Nouriel Roubini: "Central banks are in both a stagflation trap and a debt trap. Amid negative aggregate supply shocks that reduce growth and increase inflation, they are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. If they increase interest rates enough to bring inflation down to 2%, they will cause a severe economic hard landing. And if they don’t – attempting instead to protect growth and jobs – they will be left increasingly far behind the curve, leading to a de-anchoring of inflation expectations and a wage-price spiral. Very high debt ratios (both private and public) complicate the dilemma further. Raising interest rates enough to crush inflation causes not only an economic crash, but also a financial crash, with highly leveraged private and public debtors facing severe distress. The resulting financial turmoil that intensifies the recession, creating a vicious cycle of deepening recession and escalating financial pain and debt distress. In these circumstances, central banks will blink. They will wimp out in the fight against inflation, in an effort to avoid an economic and financial crash. But that will lead to a higher permanent inflation rate, while only postponing the arrival of stagflation and debt crises. In other words, central banks in the United States, Europe, and other advanced economies have only bad options."
Nov 13th 2022
EXTRACTS: "Today’s autocrats wear staid business suits and pretend to be democrats, and that has been sufficient to grant them access to high-level meetings in Davos or at the G20, where they actively recruit former Western politicians, lawyers, public-relations consultants, and think tanks to make their case in the West." ---- "....whatever the weaknesses of Western democracies, they still command a degree of soft power that their autocratic competitors could only dream of. Democracy remains popular around the world – among citizens of both democratic and nondemocratic countries. That is why modern dictators pretend to be democrats." ---- "....there is no shortage of criticism about how the US and Europe function. But that itself is a product of the press freedom and political opposition that one can find only in democracies. But actions speak louder than words: Immigrants from around the world are eager to come to Europe or America, whereas few are trying to get into Russia or China."
Nov 9th 2022
EXTRACT: "In conventional macroeconomics, an economy’s longer-term growth potential is determined by the sum of labor-force and productivity growth. If one of those factors slows, the other must accelerate. Otherwise, long-term growth suffers.  China is in serious trouble on both fronts. An unsustainable one-child family-planning policy –subsequently changed to a two- and now three-child policy – means that the working-age population is declining, and Xi’s speech at the 20th Party Congress suggested that already-strong productivity headwinds are likely to intensify. "
Nov 1st 2022
EXTRACTS: "First and most obvious – it has happened before. And in an historical sense, it has happened relatively recently, with the collapse of the USSR in 1991 rightly considered a seismic event in world politics. The rub is that nobody predicted the end of the USSR either. In fact, it was confidently assumed in the West that Mikhail Gorbachev would go on ruling the Soviet Union, until the hard-line coup that failed to topple him (but left him mortally wounded in a political sense) made that view obviously redundant." ---- "So is it speculative to talk about a future Russian collapse? Yes. Is there evidence it is imminent? No. But in many ways that’s the problem: when authoritarian regimes implode, they tend to do so very quickly, and with little warning."
Oct 25th 2022
EXTRACT: " But in celebrating the CPC centennial, he [XI left little doubt of what those challenges might portend: “Having the courage to fight and the fortitude to win is what has made our party invincible.” A modernized and expanded military puts teeth into that threat and underscores the risks posed by Xi’s conflict-prone China."
Oct 8th 2022
EXTRACTS: "Recent inflation news from the eurozone’s largest member, Germany, is particularly alarming. In August, producer prices – which measure what is happening at the preliminary stages of industrial production – were a whopping 46% higher than in the same month last year. Given the long-term correlation between the growth rate of producer and consumer prices, this suggests that the latter could soar to 14% in November. Price stability – which is supposed to be the ECB’s uncompromising goal, per the Maastricht Treaty – is no longer perceptible" ----- "Since the 2008 global economic crisis, the ECB has allowed the central-bank money supply to increase twice as fast, relative to economic output, as the US Federal Reserve has. Of that growth, 83% was the result of the ECB’s purchases of government bonds from eurozone countries. With those purchases – which totaled an estimated €4.4 trillion – the ECB pushed interest rates on government bonds to around zero. This spurred countries to disregard European debt rules and accumulate debt at a breakneck pace."
Oct 7th 2022
EXTRACTS: "While some Russians have opposed the attack on Ukraine from the outset and publicly protested against the mobilisation that has just been declared, others, on the far right, feel that Russia is holding back too much and are increasingly calling for total mobilisation, the carpet-bombing of Ukrainian cities, and even the use of nuclear weapons." ----- "Will the Kremlin be able to channel the growing warmongering zeal? In view of the intensity of the rhetoric of the various wings of the Russian far right, backed recently by several Putin allies including the Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, it is doubtful: whatever the outcome of the war in Ukraine, nationalist pressure is likely to become a serious and lasting threat to Russia’s internal stability."
Oct 3rd 2022
EXTRACT: "But US and global equities have not yet fully priced in even a mild and short hard landing. Equities will fall by about 30% in a mild recession, and by 40% or more in the severe stagflationary debt crisis that I have predicted for the global economy. Signs of strain in debt markets are mounting: sovereign spreads and long-term bond rates are rising, and high-yield spreads are increasing sharply; leveraged-loan and collateralized-loan-obligation markets are shutting down; highly indebted firms, shadow banks, households, governments, and countries are entering debt distress. The crisis is here."
Sep 29th 2022
EXTRACTS "Ever since she became a prominent political figure 12 years ago, Truss has been a shapeshifter. She started as a Liberal Democrat before becoming a Conservative, and she voted to remain in the European Union before championing Brexit. As a minister, it is hard to think of anything she accomplished. She signed a few EU trade deals as Secretary of State for International Trade, but most of those were rollovers." --- "But if until recently it seemed that Truss was driven solely by political ambition, her government’s 'mini-budget' proposal sheds light on her deeper ideological affinities."
Sep 20th 2022
EXTRACT: "Russia’s focus on Ukraine and Putin’s choice to frame this as a civilisational struggle with the west has created opportunities for China to enhance its influence elsewhere – at Russia’s expense."
Sep 20th 2022
EXTRACTS: ”The Ukrainian army is making spectacular advances,” --- “…the European Union has fully mobilized to confront the energy crisis.” ---- “we are helping our partners in the Global South to handle the fallout from Russia’s brutal aggression and cynical weaponization of energy and food.” ---- “In short: the overall strategy is working. We must continue to support Ukraine, pressure Russia with sanctions, and help our global partners in a spirit of solidarity.”