Tony Blair and the Death of the Special Relationship

Robin Harris

The British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, survived a nerve-racking test on the controversial issue of university finance, by a mere five votes in the House of Commons. There are signs, albeit not definitive ones, that he may be at least partially exculpated by the imminent report by Lord Justice Hutton into the circumstances of  the suicide of weapons expert Dr. James Kelly, which has itself thrown a sombre light upon the attempts by Downing Street  to suppress official doubts about the justification for the war in Iraq. But the fact remains that the Prime Minister is gravely damaged. All the talk is of a deal with Chancellor Gordon Brown to see Mr. Blair through to the next election, after which, no doubt, a lucrative spell on the lecture circuit beckons.

But who will be found to explain to the Americans the extraordinarily rapid and seemingly inexorable political destruction of Tony Blair? And will they recover from the shock? These are questions of enduring strategic not mere passing, significance to the relations between the two nations, as I argue in a forthcoming article in the London Spectator.

The British Prime Minister is, it seems, everyone’s special friend in America, not just the personal friend of the US President. There has been no such adulation of a foreign leader since Churchill. Margaret Thatcher was never so indiscriminately popular, though she was probably more respected. Mr. Blair has managed to surmount all political divides. His artfully crafted, soft-focus simplicities exploit that mighty, but vulnerable, nation’s desire to be loved.

Yet a powerful case can be made that this Prime Minister has done great harm to the Anglo-American relationship. He has undermined his country’s trust in America’s motives. He has made the British public reluctant to contemplate any further action to bring rogue states to heel. He has planted the bacillus of Euro-pacifism in the only major European state hitherto immune from it. These are facts which should gravely worry all those in the United States who value and hope to count upon the Anglo-US axis.

The Prime Minister retains no credibility from any quarter now in Britain as a war leader. Saddam Hussein may have been found, but weapons of mass destruction have not, and (in any quantities at least) clearly will not. That may not matter much in the United States, but it is politically fatal in the United Kingdom. It is not just the usual suspects on the Left who are outraged. So are huge numbers of centrist or non-political people who, through motives of patriotism, are always ultimately prepared to support a conflict that the preservation of national security requires, but who now feel bewildered and deceived.

Mr. Blair may find this difference of perceptions between one side of the Atlantic and the other puzzling and frustrating, but the reason is not far to seek. It is simply that the United States, not Britain, was the victim of the 9/11 terrorist outrage. America alone had been wounded and humiliated. No matter how many alternative arguments were offered, America was going to show its enemies in both the secular and the theocratic Islamic world that it meant business. Ousting the Taleban was not enough. Saddam had to go too.

From the first, Mr. Blair was out of his depth. He proffered a stream of bad advice to President Bush, some of which was unfortunately taken.

Thus, he confidently persuaded the President to resort to the UN Security Council to authorize war. Despite protracted diplomatic wrangling, these initiatives totally failed. Mr. Blair urged the Americans to build a wide coalition, including Muslim powers: high hopes were entertained by the British Foreign Office of the mullahs of Iran and even of the preposterous ruler of Syria. That diversion failed, too. Mr. Blair finally pressed the President, against the latter’s better judgment, to embark upon a new Middle East initiative in the form of a “road map”. The suicide bombers and Ariel Sharon together, quite predictably, tore it up.

None of this would have mattered very much, however, if Mr. Blair had been able to deliver the one thing that America actually needed – something far more important than the modest military contribution Britain could make – that is, the consistent support of British public opinion. This has been his greatest, and potentially disastrous, failure.

Because the Prime Minister dared not, perhaps could not, explain in traditional patriotic terms why his strategy was right, he had to engage in shiftiness and subterfuge. His justifications for war have varied from minute to minute. Sometimes it was all about preventing an imminent use of Weapons of Mass Destruction against us or our allies. Since these weapons either did not exist or were insignificant, that argument now appears in the form of our having had every reason to believe that the threat was real – even if it wasn’t. This argument has the drawback that it makes Mr. Blair a dupe: as such, it is not flattering. Sometimes, though, the preferred justification is that the war in Iraq was part of a wider strategy of preventing rogue states, armed with sophisticated weaponry, from joining forces with Islamic terrorism. But the links between Saddam and Bin Laden proved as nebulous as British intelligence always contended. It actually took the war in Iraq to cement them. Sometimes, again, especially when appeals to the Left are required, it all becomes a matter of defending the Iraqi people’s human rights from a bloodthirsty dictator. To that, of course, the inevitable riposte is: “Why Iraq, rather than, say Chechnya or Zimbabwe, Myanmar or North Korea?” And, in terms of human rights at least, there is no answer.

Mr. Blair has managed to lose himself in a morass of obfuscation and emotionalism because he simply cannot understand that the British electorate is remarkably mature about the gritty issues of war and peace. Hard headedness and straight talking about the national interest are still possible. The habit has, after all, a lengthy pedigree and was memorably expressed by the great nineteenth century British Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston, who proclaimed: “Our interests are eternal, and those interests it is our duty to follow.”

Of course, Mr. Blair cannot behave quite like Palmerston. British gunboats are not sufficiently numerous. It is to America that Britain has to look to guarantee her interests in an enormous range of ways. There is no point in being delicate about this. But nor does it detract from the underlying analysis.

If Mr. Blair had been frank with the British public when it was clear that America intended to overthrow Saddam Hussein, he had a powerful case to make. He could have begun by stressing that Britain’s national security was in every respect guaranteed by the United States. And then again in assessing the intelligence about WMD, he could also have been more honest. He should have admitted that it was not conclusive, though in the light of Saddam’s known character and record it was worrying. But because America intended to act, Britain was bound by overwhelming interest to give every kind of military assistance in the campaign. He could thus have challenged the anti-American argument head-on. Mr. Blair could also have accepted, rather than disputed, the economic argument for regime change: Britain, as a major world economy, albeit a minor oil producer, could benefit from ensuring that Iraq’s oil reserves were brought on stream without filling a hostile government’s coffers. It would also make it easier to deal with other potentially dangerous oil producers like Iran and, at some future date, a radical Saudi Arabia.

Finally, he could have done what it is now clear that some advisers wanted him to do – namely find international authority for the Allies’ action in Saddam’s repeated failure to comply with the previous UN Resolutions governing the ceasefire after the 1991 Gulf War.  This sort of approach would have been less dramatic than the moral crusade which Mr. Blair personally prefers. But it would have found echoes in the United States, where Bush was trying to remedy the earlier shortcomings of another. Above all, given the successful outcome of military operations, it would have left the British Prime Minister in an unassailable position, rather than straining his health and staining his reputation to defend the transparently indefensible.

In one sense, the British public are right to think of Mr. Blair as the President’s poodle. Mr. Blair always seems to be resisting and then conceding to Mr. Bush’s demands, only belatedly and insufficiently explaining why. Moreover, the Prime Minister’ own deviations from the American line are usually on matters which find no resonance at all in mainstream British politics – like the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, the International Criminal Court or the European army.

Britain’s interests do not, in fact, always coincide with those of America. Britain, for example, has to remain a major player in Europe without losing her freedom of action: the US has no leverage over and little concern for this objective. Only Britain can resolve this conundrum.  On the other hand, Britain has no fundamental interests involved in the Israeli-Palestinian question: America, by contrast, is more closely bound to Israel than to any other state – including, Whitehall should remember, Britain. But more immediately, why did not Mr. Blair rail publicly about America’s steel tariffs? Why did he not publicly demand a healthy pay off for British business in the reconstruction of Iraq, rather than meekly advocate that other Western powers be allowed their snouts in the trough? 

Nor need Mr. Blair be expected to model himself on Palmerston. He could pay closer attention to Margaret Thatcher’s management of the special relationship. Lady Thatcher was, of course, a passionate believer in Anglo-American solidarity. But Anglo-American relations were frosty on many subordinate matters of foreign policy, such as the US invasion of the Commonwealth island of Grenada. The Falklands War, Thatcher’s finest hour, was from first to last a British operation, enjoying only limited US support. Above all, the Reagan-Thatcher partnership was perceived, even if misperceived, as one of equals. It thus increased Britain’s standing and self-respect.

Unfortunately, such nuances are lost when viewed from across the Atlantic. Tony Blair’s travails will convince many Americans that he is the victim of anti-Americanism. Every opinion poll suggests that he is not. Britain suffers from none of that embittered envy of American great power status that affects much of continental Europe.

The main responsibility to rectify matters lies with the Conservative Opposition. Michel Howard’s forensic skills in the debates over Hutton will need to be complemented by a broader statesmanship. He will have to explain to the British public why the Anglo-American relationship is a keystone of national interest, and at the same time that national interest alone must determine the priorities of British foreign policy. It will be equally necessary, and still more difficult, to explain to America, beginning with conservative America, that Tony Blair is not and never was John Bull.

Robin Harris was a member of Margaret Thatcher’s Downing Street Policy Unit. He is Consultant Direct of the Politeia think tank. A version of this piece has also appeared in the Spectator.