An Argument For Clear Eyes

Although still notably not in his Times column, Fraser Nelson anticipates November’s seventieth anniversary of Suez by ascending into the company of Peter Oborne, Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Stephen Glover, Peter Hitchens, Peter McKay, and the ghosts of Andrew Alexander, Christopher Booker and Frank Johnson:

The King’s visit to Washington was always going to be delicate - now it has a leaked tape to go with it. Remarks made by Sir Christian Turner, Britain’s new ambassador to the US, to a group of sixth-form students in February have been passed to the Financial Times and they contain the sort of thing that sends the foreign policy establishment into a spin. Asked about the “special relationship,” Turner said he disliked the phrase. It was, he said, “quite nostalgic, it’s quite backwards-looking, and it has a lot of baggage about it.” As for which country actually has a special relationship with the United States - he thought that was “probably Israel.”

Yes, embarrassing for it to leak. More so for him to be recorded speculating about when Keir Starmer may get the heave-ho. But on the ‘special relationship’, Our Man in DC is making an important and strategic point, not confessing a terrible secret. The argument he made to those students was made at length - in a bestselling book - by Sir Christopher Meyer, who served as Britain's ambassador to Washington from 1997 to 2003. Meyer covered 9/11 and the run-up to Iraq and I came to know him before he died. He is the most candid ambassador the US embassy has produced. And in DC Confidential, his 2005 memoir, he made Turner's case at length and with greater force than Turner had the opportunity to. 

The first thing that British diplomats must do is to take an unsentimental look at the ‘special relationship’. It is a phrase sustained by a curious conspiracy. American presidents are briefed to use it in the presence of British guests because, they are told, the British are profoundly attached to it. The British press, where Pavlov’s dogs rule, stoke the conspiracy. A quick and easy way into a story about Britain and the US is to take the temperature, yet again, of the ‘special relationship’ and usually to declare it dead or dying.

This is not the observation of a cynic about the alliance. Meyer believed in the substance of the relationship deeply. The intelligence ties, the military collaboration, the economic interdependence. He fought hard for British interests in Washington across six years covering 9/11 and the lead-up to Iraq. What he was describing was something more specific: a phrase that had become a trap, flattering British vanity while obscuring the actual work required to maintain influence.

He was also clear about why the phrase was dangerous for diplomats in particular. He worried, he wrote, that his staff would “approach their work with a set of delusions: that Britain’s relations with the US were different in kind from those with any other country; that the Americans would therefore grant us special benefits, unavailable to other nations; and that, as a result, developing a relationship with the US of advantage to Britain would require less effort than with other governments. I wanted our diplomats to take nothing for granted.”

His solution was the same as Turner’s instinct: do not use the phrase. As he wrote in a piece I commissioned for The Spectator in 2020: “When ambassador in Washington, I would not allow the phrase ‘special relationship’ inside the embassy.”

On the specific question Turner raised - whether Israel, not Britain, is America’s real special relationship - Meyer made precisely the same argument twenty years ago. The phrase, he wrote, “merits use only to describe those very few relationships where a foreign government has the ability significantly to influence US politics and, through this, the direction of US foreign policy. Only Israel, Taiwan, Saudi Arabia and the Irish Republic have shown this quality consistently over the years. It is measured as much by influence in the US Congress as with the US administration itself. America’s rock-solid support for Israel over the years is founded on vast, instinctive pro-Israel majorities in both Senate and House.”

Meyer was equally precise about how American attitudes to Britain were changing even then - and the implication for any approach that relied on inherited goodwill. Each September, he wrote, he would address new arrivals at the embassy with the same message: “think of the US as a foreign country; then you will be pleasantly surprised by the many things you find in common with this most generous and hospitable of peoples. Think of America as Britain writ large and you risk coming to grief.”

He had noticed something significant during his years speaking at American universities: among younger Americans, “the mythology of the ‘special relationship’ and its history were terra incognita.” The same is true trying to find a Frenchman familiar with idea of an ‘auld alliance’ with Scotland: it’s a myth that my generation of Scots tell ourselves.

The generational transmission of Anglo-American sentiment that the ‘special relationship’ assumed was not happening in 2005 and isn’t happening in 2026. The tides of new immigration, Meyer noted - “largely Asian and Spanish-speaking, remote from the traditions and history of the Anglo-Saxon world” - were producing an America less instinctively oriented towards Britain with every census. Obama was born in Hawaii. Meyer was writing about the 2000 census. The 2020 one continued the same trend.

This is not an argument for despair. It is an argument for clear eyes - for treating the US, as Meyer put it, as a foreign country, and doing the work of influence rather than assuming it as a birthright. It is, in other words, exactly Turner’s argument: the relationship must be “different,” Britain must make clear what it brings to the table, and Europe must “work to redefine” its security relationship with Washington rather than simply relying on the American umbrella.

There is also a parliamentary dimension that has received less attention than it deserves. Six days ago - on 22 April - the House of Lords International Relations and Defence Committee published its report into the future of the UK-US relationship, having taken evidence from all four living former British ambassadors to Washington. Its conclusion was unambiguous. Lord Robertson, the committee chair, said: “One of our central conclusions is that the UK must move beyond the sentimental notion of a ‘special relationship.’ That does not mean turning away from the United States. Ours is a long-standing partnership rooted in diplomatic, economic, military and intelligence cooperation, and this will endure. What must change is how the UK approaches the relationship.”

The Lords committee found, as Meyer had found two decades earlier and Turner said to students two months ago, that relying on the phrase was a substitute for strategy rather than a guide to it. America is becoming more transactional, more interest-based, less shaped by historical sentiment. In that environment, invoking Churchill is not a policy. Making the cost-benefit case for the alliance - as Turner explicitly said Britain needed to do - is. I’ve just finished giving a speech at a school where one of the sixth formers asked me about this and I said the same. America was moving away from this under Obama’s Pacific pivot; whoever follows Trump will expect Europe to police its own near-abroad. We can’t use ‘special relationship’ as code for ‘Uncle Sam will always bail us out’.

Sir Christian told the sixth formers that Starmer is a “stubborn guy”. Indeed so. He speculated that Labour “will be able to go over that threshold (of 80 MPs) and remove him” if Labour ranks in the local elections. Unwise to say so, but a correct summary of the UK constitutional position. And on Mandelson, he said “The vetting thing’s a bit of a red herring”. He’s right about that: everyone knew what kind of guy his predecessor was. The real problem was that “he had a bunch of associations that were embarrassing to him - and the government - that had not been revealed.” Which seems more a reference to his lobbying interests than Epstein. Listening to these taped disclosures, I confess to thinking that Turner was right on all counts. Dangerous to be so candid with sixth formers, but his judgment is sound.

Kim Darroch had to resign as Ambassador to the US after leaked reports showed him calling the White House “inept,” “dysfunctional,” “clumsy” and saying Trump “radiates insecurity.” Turner’s remarks are ill-advised and embarrassing, but not in the same league.

Meyer opens his memoir with a quote from Palmerston: “We have no eternal allies and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow.” Applied to Washington, he wrote, “this eternally wise observation leads to clear conclusions.” He ended his account of the phrase with an injunction that his successors have intermittently followed and the politicians around them have persistently ignored. The Anglo-American relationship, he wrote, “will not take care of itself.” Neither will the phrase that purports to describe it.

In his speech standing next to the King, Trump gave a rather moving account of the way that America was a project of the English sense of liberty (he means British).

For nearly two centuries before the revolution, this land was settled and forged by men and women who bore in their souls the blood and noble spirit of the British. Here on a wild and untamed continent, they set loose the ancient English love of liberty and Great Britain’s distinctive sense of glory, destiny, and pride… The American patriots who pledged their lives to independence in 1776 were the heirs to this majestic inheritance. Their veins ran with Anglo-Saxon courage. Their hearts beat with an English faith in standing firm for what is right, good, and true.

In recent years, we’ve often heard it said that America is merely an idea. But the cause of freedom did not simply appear as an intellectual invention of 1776. The American founding was the culmination of hundreds of years of thought, struggle, sweat, blood, and sacrifice on both sides of the Atlantic. Fate drew a long arc from the meadow at Runnymede to the streets of Philadelphia that ran through the lives of people born and bred on the British code that no man should be denied either justice or right.... In the centuries since we won our independence, Americans have had no closer friends than the British. We share that same root. We speak the same language. We hold the same values. And together, our warriors have defended the same extraordinary civilisation under twin banners of red, white, and blue.

All true. But this is history, not foreign policy - and its dangerous to pretend otherwise. So let’s not pretend that Turner said something controversial on the special relationship. The phase is a damaging cliche and Turner’s refusal to use it is entirely consistent with a diplomat who knows that strong relationships are earned and constantly renewed, rather than inherited.