In a
thoughtful piece in today's Financial
Times about how the anti-European impulses of David Cameron's Tories may lead
to a chill with Washington, Philip Stephens writes that "[President] Obama is
unsentimental about alliances." I think it goes further. I think that Obama is just plain unsentimental about most aspects of his professional life. (One
senior administration who compared Obama's "synthetic intelligence" favorably
with that of Bill Clinton, said Obama was one of the "coolest characters I have
ever seen in that kind of job. He places an exceptional emphasis on rationality
and calm analysis.")
Among those things impacted by Obama's cool rationality are
all of America's international relationships ... and in particular the role of
history in those relationships. While cognizant of historical context in an
academic sense, Obama seems not to place much stock in old traditions be they
of friendship or of enmity. The stirring shoulder to shoulder images of the
Second World War, while rhetorically rolled out for suitable occasions, are not
part of his life experience. This is a guy, after all, who entered high school
after the Vietnam War was over and who did not begin his professional, post-law
school life until after the Cold War was over. George W. Bush, by contrast, is
fully 15 years older than Obama, son of a World War II veteran who was a
traditional Atlanticist and cold warrior. Obama is a very different breed of
cat from what we have seen before.
That's not to say he's indifferent to alliances. It's not to
say he doesn't appreciate the importance of NATO or old friendships. But the
impulse to engage
former and current enemies, to
sign on to the G20 as a replacement for the G8, to seek a different kind of
relationship with Israel, to give the
Cairo speech, to travel early to Africa-all these steps suggest a
willingness not to be captive of the mold of his predecessors. Imagine ... right
now the United States arguably has a better relationship with French leaders than with
the leaders of the U.K. or Germany.
As Stephens rightly points out in the FT, as far as the U.K.
goes, this trend is only likely to grow more pronounced once David Cameron
takes office as he presumably will. Cameron and Obama got off to a bad start,
they are from opposite
sides of the ideological spectrum, and to the degree Cameron and his
colleagues undercut the Lisbon Treaty and push back from the table of Europe,
they will be both making life more complicated for the United States and all their
allies and pursuing a very different world view from the U.S. president.
When asked by other colleagues in the diplomatic community who has the U.K.
brief in the U.S. government, the current U.K. ambassador to the United States, Sir Nigel Sheinwald, has jokingly replied that he hardly knows because it
doesn't seem to be a top priority for anyone. This is no doubt due to the fact
that the relationship works pretty well and there are few sore spots crying out
for immediate attention. But should Cameron come to power and behave as he
implies he will, Sheinwald's successor could feel even more neglected and the
Cameron administration is likely to get a cold shoulder that makes Gordon
Brown's need
for five pleas for a meeting with Obama at the U.N. General Assembly before
he got one seem positively warm and inviting.
U.S.-U.K. history and cultures are such that the
relationship will always be different from that we have other countries. But it
seems quite possible that with an unsentimental post-modern president in the
White House who seems destined to have a chilly partnership with the odds-on
favorite to be the next Prime Minister of the U.K. the special relationship
will be considerably less special in the future than it has been at any time in
recent memory.
Mario Tama/Getty Images
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