Is America really our closest Ally?
Beyond the coronavirus and Brexit, undoubtedly one of the biggest political stories of the year so far has been the Huawei scandal. This is because Boris Johnson had allowed the Chinese company to set up their links to our 5G network, even though he has stepped back from that recently. Because of the company’s links to the country’s ruling Chinese Communist Party, this had rightly been noted as an outrage, with several Conservative MPs, who have noted that it is a threat to the privacy of British citizens and of national security, as the Chinese government can access our data far more easily than it should do. If anything, it indicated the first big Tory rebellion of the Johnson premiership. It had also called our US relationship in to question, with the likes of Mike Pompeo admitting that such a move undermines a trade deal between the US and Britain post-Brexit.
That being said, is our so-called ‘Special Relationship’ with America so solid? On honest examination, the answer inevitably no. It has been one of intense friendship on one hand, but also one of intense rivalry and distrust, something the Americans have never truly put to rest after the American Revolutionary War.
This was true even in its early days following the Second World War, and no event illustrates this better than the 1956 Suez Crisis. Here, when Britain tried to pursue a course in its national interest in taking back international property from the Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser, American threats of economic shutdown by the then President Dwight D. Eisenhower stopped it. This led Britain’s international reputation to take a blow which it still hasn’t fully recovered from, all the while allowed for the declining British Empire to be replaced by the proxy wars of the USA and the Soviet Union in the African continent. This showed that while America appreciates Britain, its needs trump ours when it suits.
Following that, other crises have shown that the relationship has still remained antagonistic to a degree. Take for example the Vietnam War. While Britain was right to keep out of a war deeply unpopular on both sides of the Atlantic, that didn’t stop Britain from sending over weaponry and soldiers to the country in order to please the US and its then President Lyndon B. Johnson. This was so bad at one stage that the likes of the Vietnamese referred to Harold Wilson as the United States’ ‘errand boy’. This is a precursor to a similarly disastrous policy in Iraq, and it was no better here.
Meanwhile, during the 1980s (the supposed peak of the Special Relationship under Thatcher and Reagan), the Americans did little to nothing about the money that the IRA was getting from Irish Americans in the States sympathetic to their cause. And this was at a time when the terrorist group, who acts of went as far to have the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, with some being killed and others (like the wife of Lord Tebbit) being seriously injured. This isn’t even going in to the numerous personal clashes between the two world leaders, as documented in the excellent book Reagan and Thatcher: The Difficult Relationship by Richard Aldous.
In the early noughties, this was no better as George W. Bush worked hand in glove with Prime Minister Tony Blair to overthrow Iraq, of which while was a vile dictatorship led by one of the region’s worst tyrants in the shape of Saddam Hussein, was a move that heavily split the British public, to the point whereby over 2 million of them went onto the streets of London to protest. Given the region’s subsequent collapse and the rise of ISIS from that, it is clear that such a move was a total failure. To make matters worse, as former spin doctor Alastair Campbell outlined in his diaries at the time, Bush threatened to have the then Conservative Party leader Iain Duncan Smith removed if he wasn’t compliant in building up to war. When the leader of our so-called greatest ally starts making threats like that which undermine other political parties that aren’t in government, doesn’t that demonstrate that may be they aren’t that?
It all culminated in the recent EU referendum, whereby President Barack Obama threatened that Britain with being in the ‘back of the queue’ for trade talks if it voted to leave the European Union. Now while it has been confirmed that this was passed on to by David Cameron to Obama by Ben Rhodes (one of Obama’s former special advisors), this was simply a series of events that proved their relationship with us was particularly hostile. This love-hate relationship towards Britain from his administration was similarly on full display when the British Parliament voted against bombing Syria back in 2013; John Kerry, the then Secretary of State refused to name Britain among America’s allies following the vote.
So it is clear we do not have a Special Relationship with the United States of America. Now it goes without suggesting that we share many common goals and values with the United States, and they are still in many ways a great national ally. And without doubt, the British side have occasionally been at fault for not being cooperative with the States when it needed to, mainly that of Edward Heath’s pro-European Economic Community views clashing with the economic plans of the then US President Richard Nixon. That being said, the majority of this relationship has shown that the Americans have truly wore the trousers, and have been prepared to show that might when needed to its own interests geo-politically, and many people whether that be historian Max Hastings or the journalist Peter Hitchens have grasped this.
Despite this, it is obvious to note that our relationship with America isn’t as special as nostalgists and others like to make out. Ironically we’re only now realising this at a time whereby current US President Donald Trump has been the rare exception for a while to actually treat us as if the relationship was strong. Sometimes this has been justified (like Trump stupidly retweeting far-right rabble rousers Britain First), other times definitely not, and this Huawei scandal is one example of that. If only Britain had a similar backbone to this before.
If Britain as a country has a true Special Relationship with anyone, it is with a country like Portugal, whose track record of friendship with us dates back to the 12th century, and whose track record of friendship and loyalty beats the US considerably. The United States may be a good partner and a great ally. But do we have a ‘Special Relationship’ with them? Probably not, and in a post-Brexit world, we must consider that.
Edward Howard
"English Language Grunge Flag" by Free Grunge Textures - www.freestock.ca is licensed under CC BY 2.0
