Boris, Biden and the Not-So-Special Relationship

William Atkinson (Committee Member) is a third year reading History at Christ Church.

You won’t have heard of David T Johnson. That is not surprising. He is an obscure American diplomat who served such an uneventful tenure as Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs that Wikipedia doesn’t even know when he left the job. More importantly, in 2004 he was the second-in-command at the US Embassy in London. Working in an embassy, his job was mainly to massage the ego of his host country, hold a lot of champagne receptions and keep a tight hold on the Ferrero Rocher expenditure. Johnson filled at least one of those requirements* by telling his hosts at the time of that November’s Presidential Election that America had been prepared historically ‘to stand by your nation, through thick and thin’.  It seemed hard to quibble with such homespun Atlanticist sentiment in the context of the Iraq War, the Bush-Blair bromance and the 60th anniversary of D-Day. Still, some did. A letter appeared soon after in The Times that consisted of only one word and a well-placed question mark: 

‘Suez?’

With that one word, our letter-writer encapsulated perfectly both the ahistorical nonsense of not-quite-an-ambassador Johnson and the painfully one-sided nature of the US-UK relationship. For Suez, like Vietnam or the Falklands, is a crisis and a war, not a place. For those of you unlucky enough not to know the contextual ins-and-outs of the crisis over the Suez Canal – hello, PPEists! – it involved Anthony Eden’s Britain and France (a tad sneakily) intervening to reverse General Nasser’s nationalization of the Suez Canal in Egypt. Having decided that this was none of President Eisenhower’s business and that he, therefore, didn’t need informing in advance, the outraged former General used America’s financial muscle to allow a run on sterling. He wanted to use the offer of a loan to force Britain to withdraw.  It was a humiliation, a disgrace and treated by a generation of politicians and diplomats as the nail in the coffin for Britain’s status as an independent world power. Since then, few Prime Ministers have been willing to stand up to Washington. Future interventions in the Middle East to face down uppity dictators would have us trailing in the Americans’ wake; the proud British lion had been reduced to a Yankee poodle. 

It is something to keep in mind when we reflect on the potential relationship between Prime Minister Boris and President Biden. As I write, whilst the President-Elect struggles to find Britain on a map (or to remember what a map is), diplomats in the Foreign Office will be hitting the phones to ingratiate themselves with his prospective White House team. Before too long, we’ll hear the Prime Minister or Foreign Secretary utter that painful phrase, “the Special Relationship” to describe our relations with our cousins across the Pond. It was gifted to the English language like so many notable phrases by the best argument for Anglo-American union there has ever been: Winston Churchill. The part-Yankee Churchill’s vision of the relationship between Britain and America put a romantic gloss on an unfortunate necessity. As much as we could hold out against the Luftwaffe in our island home and hope that the RAF could try and level the Nazi war machine from the air, only the United States could provide the money and manpower needed to liberate Europe. From the day he became Prime Minister in those dark days of 1940, Churchill understood he would have to call “the New World” forward to the “liberation and salvation of the Old”. Though, as ever, the Americans took their time about it. 

Similarly, Churchill’s long-distant successor, biographer and occasional imitator understands well how important our relationship with America is for Britain’s foreign policy. Having been born in New York, it would be difficult for Boris not to be an instinctive Atlanticist. It must therefore come as something of a pain to him to admit that he starts on the backfoot with Joe Biden. The President-Elect and his allies do not like Boris Johnson. One former adviser to Barack Obama responded to the PM’s message of congratulations by Tweeting 'we will never forget your racist comments about Obama and slavish devotion to Trump’. Though he did at least compliment Boris on a ‘neat Instagram graphic', so perhaps the Prime Minister’s social media can save some British pride in Washington. The adviser was making a rather overblown comment about an article Boris once wrote about why President Obama had opposed Brexit on the basis of his Kenyan ancestry. Nevertheless, it does suggest that, however doddery the President-elect might appear, the Blue Donkey of the Democrats never quite forgets. 

Biden doesn’t like Brexit, claiming it imperils the Irish peace process. Like all American politicians, Biden claims Irish ancestry to make himself sound more interesting. But this does rather stifle our chances of a trade deal if we go ahead with the Internal Market Bill or leave without a deal. Moreover, Biden considers Boris as a carbon copy of Donald Trump. As incorrect as that might be, it does mean he will be dialling up Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel from the shiny West Wing telephone before he puts a call through to Number 10. Expect quite a lot of talk about the importance of NATO and mending fences with partners in the EU, as well as a few stuttered homilies about the downsides of going it alone. I’m sure the irony is lost on a country that had the first Brexit in 1776. 

Biden’s opposition is rather a shame as it is rather nonsensical. Boris, after all, has far more in common with Biden than he ever did with Donald Trump. It has been very easy for lazy commentators to play up the superficial similarities between the Prime Minister and the outgoing President. Both are from New York; both have idiosyncratic blonde hair. Both have been divorced twice, and both have a problem with keeping it in their trousers. Both won unexpected victories in 2016 on the backs of provincial voters disillusioned with the status quo. Both have agenda committed, in some way, to repudiating the international order, reducing immigration and reviving the economically depressed parts of their countries. Indeed, these are similarities that the President has done much to play up.  Seeing Boris and him as being two peas in a pod might be one of the few political positions the outgoing President shares with my Marxist Aunt. 

Nevertheless, the Trump-Boris comparison is what your average New Yorker would call a load of baloney. Since Boris has become PM, his approach to Trump has been that of a disinterested crush – occasionally showing a bit of affection when necessary, but largely spurning the affectionate advances of their would-be amour. Where Trump challenged Iran or quit the Paris Climate Change Agreement, Boris affirmed his commitment to sticking to Obama’s Iran Deal and to tackling climate change multilaterally. Trump cut funding to the W.H.O – Boris increased it. He is a big believer in international institutions that have names comprised of more than two vowels. On Coronavirus, the two couldn’t be further apart. The Daily Telegraph columnist or Spectator editor inside the PM might be yearning to throw off the shackles of lockdown like the President has done, but in practice, he has been painfully cautious. I think this must come down to fundamental differences in background between the two. Trump is a bodacious businessman and reality TV star who has y written more books than he has read. He has made a career out of telling it like it is or at least pretending to. Boris, meanwhile, has also made a career out of being suitably shifty about his beliefs when he needs to be and for giving his audience what they want. But his background is in Classics, the Union and journalism. He is well-read, knowledgeable and able to produce some philosophic coherence to his arguments covering why he wishes to climb the greasy pole. More than anything, he is a typical upper-middle-class liberal Englishman with an Oxbridge degree and home in North London. Trump is a boorish wealthy American. It should be no surprise that Oxford and Manhattan offer an incompatible clash of cultures. 

With that in mind, can Number 10 afford to be cautiously optimistic as to the potential relationship between the Prime Minister and President-elect? Biden is not inherently anti-Britain. He backed us during the Falklands War, for example, when the Reagan administration was initially decidedly cool. Though Biden many oppose Brexit and see Boris as a mini-Trump, the two are close on many other issues. On climate change, Number 10 and the White House are likely to be far more co-operative than in the previous four years. Biden has made it a key issue of his Presidency. He will aim to take America back into the Paris Agreement it formally left last Wednesday. With Britain hosting the COP26 climate change summit in Glasgow next year, this is the perfect opportunity for the Prime Minister to butter up the new President and produce some mutually beneficial agreements that Biden can hold up as a success from his decidedly short time in office. Progress on that fabled US-UK trade deal might also be more successful under a Biden Presidency than one might think. Though trade remains an unpopular issue in those states like Michigan and Pennsylvania that Biden had to flip to win last Tuesday (and Wednesday, and Thursday, etc), analysts think he also provides the best chance for America re-joining the Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership between 11 American and Asian nations. Britain has sought to join this and doing so could take the chlorinated chicken-based rancour out of negotiations between Britain and America directly. Action on free trade and climate change is a world away from Donald Trump, and something Boris will be eager to get going with. 

More than anything else, a Biden Presidency will represent, to quote future President Warren G. Harding, a “return to normalcy” in both America and around the world. This was Harding’s pitch to be President in the 1920 Election. Especially in the week of Remembrance Day, I wouldn’t want to compare the trivial agonies of the Trump Presidency to the horrors of the First World War, but it cannot be said that the last four years have been without incidents and upheavals. Whether risking nuclear confrontation in a willy-waving context with Kim Jong-Un or slapping tariffs on China at the drop of a hat, President Trump kept the world guessing from week to week and Tweet to Tweet. Sleepy Joe will be much less exciting. Though policy on China will likely remain quite tough – Sinophobia being about the only thing Republicans and Democrats can agree on – you will see less cosying up to Putin or threats to quit NATO. Our relations with the United States are likely to be off the front pages, and her Majesty will no longer have to cringe at the thought of who is coming to dinner at a state visit. 

But I started this article with a mention of Suez for a reason. As nice a change as a Biden Presidency might seem, or as affable as the old codger might appear on a personal level, the story of Britain and America since 1914 is one of continual disappointment. In their own parlance, America has always found a way to screw us over. They were late to both World Wars. They only joined the second after holding us over a barrel with Lend Lease, thinking that our desperate lonely stand against Nazism represented an excellent opportunity to screw us out of our bases and assets in return for some moulding old Destroyers. Never mind the Attlee government’s frittering away of post-war Marshall Aid on socialist dogma; that only came after the Americans had cut off much-needed loans as soon as the war was over. Not only did Eisenhower refuse to back us over Suez, but he and Kennedy forced us to buy a nuclear weapons system that we could not operate without American permission. Since then, the idea of an independent British nuclear deterrent has been nonsense. Even my hero Ronald Reagan was lukewarm on the Falklands and didn’t warn Mrs T about the invasion of Grenada. Only in my lifetime have we seen hundreds of British lives lost in Afghanistan and Iraq for no discernible benefit than promises of American ‘goodwill’ and the felation of Tony Blair’s ego. A fat lot of good that has done us in trade negotiations so far. Let us face facts – the ‘Special Relationship’ is a mirage, cooked up in Whitehall and to which President Biden won’t give the slightest regard. 

Does it have to be this way? Is Britain doomed to trail in America’s wake, strung along by the false promises of that star-spangled tart? Of course not. There are two Prime Ministers who have stood up to America since the war more effectively than any others. The first was Harold Wilson. An unprincipled chancer who was convinced MI-5 were after him, Wilson refused to send troops to help America in Vietnam. This was simply political pragmatism; unlike his later successor Tony Blair, he was canny enough to avoid getting involved in unpopular America wars. But he was still enough of a doe-eyed Atlanticist to be won over by American hospitality, writing back from Washington to cabinet minister Barbara Castle in 1975 to tell her the “ceremonies of welcome went far beyond anything I have had before”. As ever, the grandeur and pomp that the Yanks do so well pulled the wool over the eyes of a Prime Minister used to the stuffy corridors of Parliament and the damp décor of Number 10.

A far better example of leadership for us Tories when it comes to dealing with America would be the long-lambasted Edward Heath. There was much wrong with Heath, from his disastrous u-turns on economic policy to his cold and priggish manner. Nevertheless, he had one abiding drive in his political career, and that was to take Britain into the EEC. Having seen the horrors of European disunity first hand as a Captain during the war, Heath passionately believed in the European ideal. The crowning achievement of his career was to see Britain join the Common Market in 1973. One would imagine recent political developments would have disappointed him greatly. Still, Heath’s Europhilia came with a welcome ability to reject America’s cloying advances. He delighted in telling Richard Nixon that Britain’s membership of the EEC would mean he would now have to get used to dealing with the nine members of the EEC as one. This was not necessarily advice that Nixon and his myriad successors would have to follow too closely, but it proved that Britain could stand up to America if we wanted to. This didn’t mean we’d necessarily turn against the United States, something painfully proved by the hike in oil prices against both of us by the Arab countries following our mutual support for Israel in the Yom Kippur war. What it did show is that America is not the only option out there for Britain when it comes to finding international allies. 

You might this is a bit rich to be writing as we leave the European Union. By looking to the example of a Prime Minister who wanted us in Europe more than any other just as we exit, I might be said to be being needlessly contrarian. But if ‘Global Britain’ is ever going to be anything more than a Foreign Office slogan, it means that Britain needs to be able to take a fresh look at her foreign policy. Being trapped in a failing arrangement due to governmental inertia was the whole reason we were stuck in Europe for so long in the first place. We remain a UN Security Council member, one of the world’s biggest democracies and leading military powers. We authored the language of the globe. We are a cultural superpower and possess the finest universities, noblest Parliament and warmest beer of anywhere in the world. It is no surprise that the Cambridge international relations specialist Brendan Simms marks Britain up as the world’s third great power on the basis of our economic and military potential, population, ‘soft power’, diplomatic influence, political resilience and self-determination. Britain is more than capable of being an independent force in the world. We can say no to the Americans when we want to, rather than fretting over what a doddery old man in a big office thinks about Brexit. Leaving the European Union is therefore the best time to recalibrate our relationship with America and the rest of the world. 

Though I’ve no doubt that Britain is capable of charting its own course in the world, a necessary part of a new approach to foreign policy will involve reconnecting with the very same ally that we spurned after the Suez disaster back in 1956. Suez had seemed to suggest that the way forward lay in keeping on the Americans’ good side, rather than hugging close to the other remaining European imperial power. But France is a fellow UN Security Council member with a genuinely independent nuclear force and the only military in Europe to rival ours. Our cousins across the Channel are not to be dismissed out of hand. I know we have not always got along too well with my French. As one of my teachers used to say, we’ve played 40 wars, won 27 and lost 13. Our ties with them go as deep as those with Americans. 

Yes, America is the product of a group of religious nutcases and tax fraudsters 250 years ago deciding that their rights as Englishmen were best defended by declaring independence from Britain. She is an accident of history, a bit of Britain that took a wrong turning and has developed in its own idiosyncratic way. In that respect, we will always feel tied to her, if only because we feel somehow responsible for her errors and cockups. But we speak the French language in schools, we visit their Disneyland on holidays and drink their wine on crew dates. They have invaded us; we have invaded them – it is our flirting. If you believe Edward III, we should even share the same monarch; like the American Revolution, I’m sure the French one will eventually prove temporary. So, with an open mind and a copy of a decent phrasebook, we should stick a Churchillian two fingers up at the newest inhabitant of the White House. It’s time to establish une nouveau relationship spéciale with France instead. 

*I’ve no evidence for how much ghastly American champagne or complimentary chocolate hazelnuts were served at this particular occasion.