Nothing Special

Peter Hitchens writes:

When I lived in Washington DC I tried for many months to find the famous 'Special Relationship' which I had heard so much about back home. It was not there. I could find nobody, including our then Ambassador, who admitted its existence.

What was more, I noticed that my country was pretty unloved in the American capital, despite the increasingly shabby and embarrassing Winston Churchill and/or Margaret Thatcher cults common among a certain type of American.

In fact I was later able to witness, at very close quarters, the complete diplomatic defeat of Britain in Washington by the tiny Irish Embassy. Bear in mind here that the British Embassy on Massachusetts Avenue is a relic of Imperial grandeur, both magnificent and huge. The Ambassador's residence, a fine piece of Lutyens in a sort of semi-country-house style, is a rather melancholy reminder that we were once great. The nearby Embassy buildings, though architecturally frightful, are large and suggest (correctly) that Britain maintains a very large staff here, much of it devoted to military and intelligence cooperation, or attempts at cooperation.

Yet, during 1994 and 1995, this whole apparatus knew less about the White House and its intentions than the Irish, and was quite unable to win a diplomatic battle over what amounted to American recognition of the Provisional IRA as a negotiating partner.

I was once phoned up by a White House official who had become aware that I was writing uncomplimentary articles about this. She wanted to brief me into softening my views. But she wrecked the whole thing by comparing Bill Clinton's intervention on the side of Gerry Adams with his involvement in Yugoslavia.

'So', I said to her 'You regard Britain, your wartime ally, a sovereign democracy with a thousand years of history, the origin of your own constitution, as the equivalent of Serbia?'

She went very quiet. Because in fact that is exactly how the White House then regarded Britain, and I should think is pretty much as the White House regards us now.

This was nothing new. There's a very good scene in Ian Curteis's excellent Falklands Play (still yet to be broadcast on BBC1 or BBC2), during which Margaret Thatcher goes intercontinental when Al Haig suggests that the US ought to be even-handed between Britain and Argentina.

And it's been clear for ages that, in its desire to have a 'single phone number' when dealing with what some Americans refer to as 'Yerp', the US State Department has been anxious to cram Britain into a European Superstate. In fact it's often been suggested that the CIA has been involved in various backstairs pro-EU campaigns in the past. I've never been quite sure how the various neo-conservative admirers of the USA, Eurosceptics to a man, cope with Washington's strong pro-Brussels policies. I expect they just ignore them.

Now, I love the USA as much as many and more than most. I'm glad it's there. If we can't be top nation any more (and we can't), I'm glad it's the USA that has taken over the position. But I won't get sentimental about it. They don't. The American national anthem is an anti-British song about the Royal Navy's bombardment of Baltimore, in which the presence of British soldiers on American soil is referred to as 'their foul footsteps' pollution'. At the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia (to whose foyer I was once admitted) stands a statue of Nathan Hale, America's first spy, hanged by...us, the British. American schoolbook history is full of dubious stuff about British oppression of the Colonists, and many Americans believe the sort of tripe encapsulated in Mel Gibson's appalling film 'The Patriot", in which British officers are portrayed as being more or less like the Nazis. Meanwhile the cruel and intolerant treatment of the very large numbers of pro-British loyalists left in the USA after the revolutionary war is forgotten. Canada, where they mostly fled, is their memorial.

More recently, it was our ally the USA which ended British naval supremacy (and in effect put a stop to our Asian Empire) with the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty. This was in truth the moment at which the British Empire was finished, though we had to go through several defeats before we believed it. And of course there was the desperate indebtedness of Britain to the USA after the Second World War, which enabled Washington to demand the dismantling of the Empire in return for aid.

Not to mention Suez, where the US Sixth Fleet actively harassed British warships on their way to Egypt, and President Eisenhower threatened us with bankruptcy if we didn't withdraw.

Well, that's all right. Why should it be otherwise? America's accession to the topmost rank could only have come at our expense. America's interests are different from ours. Nations don't have eternal friendships, as Palmerston long ago pointed out.

But in that case isn't it time we stopped the pretence, which survives only in London, that we are somehow specially close to the Americans? Mightn't we actually get more out of them, and have a more healthy relationship, if we rather more frequently told them we were not doing as they wished?

France, through stroppiness and refusal to cooperate with the USA, has probably received just as much military help and support from Washington as we have, if not more, and its nuclear forces are more independent than ours.

Now here's an opportunity to declare independence, as we might put it. The miserable behaviour of the British government, in ordering the suppression of a British court judgement on the allegations that Binyam Mohamed, is deeply embarrassing to anyone who believes either in truth or in national sovereignty. Our judges cannot say what they wish, apparently, because of a fear that we will then be denied US intelligence cooperation.

Then let it be so. I am sure that no American judge would be silenced by British government threats of this kind, even if they had any substance to them. The case of Mr Mohamed isn't even the point. The point is, do we run our affairs or not? And if the answer is that we cannot run them without annoying the Americans, then let us annoy the Americans. What good has our slavish following of US policy in Iraq or Afghanistan actually done us, let alone Iraq or Afghanistan? I am told that relations between the two militaries are now poorer than they were before, which isn't much of an achievement. If this is what being special involves, I would rather not be special any more.

America entered the War for her own reasons, and on her own strictly businesslike terms with us. Nothing wrong with that. But it gives the lie to the popular fantasy of a "special relationship", a term which no American has ever used.

We went to Korea, but so did a lot of other people. The Americans opposed us in Suez (when they were right, but that is not the present point), and didn't go to Malaya. We stayed out of Vietnam. They were practically on the other side in the Falklands War, when our nearest thing to an ally was France. And the first Gulf War was much like Korea.

All in all, there is simply no factual basis whatever for the warmongering lie that we have an unbreakable military alliance with the United States. We have not. And if you don't believe me, then just ask the Americans themselves.