The term ‘special relationship’ describing the putative kinship between Britain and the US was first used by Winston Churchill in 1946.
It certainly made sense at the time. Churchill had just led his beleaguered country to a victory that might never have happened without the help of the United States.
American Lend-Lease aid arrived in the nick of time, when Britain was running out of the wherewithal to continue keeping the Nazis at bay. The relationship between the two countries was then indeed as special as that between a drowning man and his rescuer.
But contexts change over history, and what’s true today may prove false tomorrow and might have been false yesterday. So let’s just say that it’s not only the common language that divides the two countries, to quote Churchill again.
That’s why I think the subtitle of Daniel Finkelstein’s article in The Times is wrong: “Conservatives have always admired the US,” he writes, “but the Trump camp is causing chaos, so it’s time we found better friends.”
The peg on which Lord Finkelstein hangs his narrative is the Nazi salute given at a rally by Steve Bannon, “one of the political leaders of the Trump right.” The peg is solid: the gesture was indeed disgusting, as is Steve Bannon.
I doubt, however, that most Trumpists share Bannon’s apparent innermost cravings. The issue is deeper than that, and it’s not just the Bannons of this world who bring the special relationship into doubt.
The thing is, Lord Finkelstein is mistaken. English conservatives haven’t always admired the US. In fact, I doubt they ever did. Saying otherwise betokens playing fast and loose with historical facts or else, more likely, using the word ‘conservative’, capitalised or not, in an arbitrary meaning.
“How is it,” wrote the quintessential Tory, Dr Johnson, at the start of the American Revolution, “that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?” He was expressing a widespread Tory attitude to the colonists as rebellious, sanctimonious upstarts in the grips of a faddish ideology.
I can’t cite any statistically significant research, but I’d suggest from personal observation that many real Tories still feel roughly the same way. The people who unanimously worship America aren’t British conservatives, but British neocons in the mold of Douglas Murray and Niall Ferguson.
The difference between conservatives and neoconservatives is that between a trilby and a MAGA cap, or that between an 18th century Whig and a 21st century liberal, or that between chicken stew and chicken manure (I’ve promised Penelope not to use the word I really mean).
Neoconservatism is an eerie mishmash of Trotskyist temperament, infantile bellicosity, American chauvinism (not exclusively on the part of Americans), expansionism masked by pseudo-messianic verbiage on exporting democracy to every tribal society on earth, Keynesian economics and welfarism – all mixed together with a spoonful of vaguely conservative phrases purloined from the rightful owners to trick the neocons’ way to broader public support.
This movement has thrived in its original American habitat, and its British followers unfailingly pay obeisance to the US. Murray, for example, has been known to say ‘we’ when talking about Americans. Real Tories ‘identify’ by different pronouns.
That Toryism, which is really English conservatism, has little in common with the US ought to be clear to anyone taking the trouble to see what Toryism’s essential features are. They can all be summed up by the triad “God, King and country”.
Tory patriotism is based on monarchism and commitment to the established church, especially its High Anglican branch (that used to be called ‘the Tory Party at prayer’). They trace their heritage back to the Cavaliers who supported the Stuarts in the seventeenth century – and in the next century opposed the secession of the American colonies.
The briefest scan of Toryism will show nothing in its political and philosophical makeup that Americans don’t loath. Theirs was the first successful rebellion against European monarchy, and they detested not just established religions but also apostolic ones.
Catholic proselytising was a capital offence in 11 out of the first 13 American colonies, and High Anglicanism didn’t fare much better either. And American patriotism is at odds with ours as often as not. The buzz phrase, “We stood shoulder to shoulder in both World Wars”, ignores all the wars in which the two countries stood apart.
For example, President Eisenhower threatened to crash the pound sterling if Britain didn’t stop her invasion of Egypt in 1956. And in 1982 President Reagan put pressure on Britain not to resist the Argentine invasion of the Falklands. When the South Atlantic Operation did start anyway, Reagan tried to withhold vital intelligence information, and only the surreptitious intercession by Defence Secretary Weinberger overturned that attempt at sabotage.
Even during the Second World War, America enjoyed a much more special relationship with Russia than with Britain.
After all, Lend-Lease aid was provided to Stalin free of charge. But America’s arrangements with the moribund British Empire, whose commitment to the democratic values touted by the USA was rather firmer than Russia’s, were different.
The UK had to pay for everything in cash, IOUs being accepted only grudgingly and with the understanding that no defaults would be allowed. (Britain finished paying her wartime debts only in December, 2006). Specifically in 1940, when Britain’s survival hung by a thread, all transactions had to be done strictly on a cash-and-carry basis.
Alas, both cash and precious metals were rapidly running out, and Britain had to dump all her overseas investments at derisory prices to settle her accounts with the transatlantic champions of democracy. The entire gold reserves of the British Empire had to be used up to pay for American generosity.
Victory was won at the expense not only of British lives but also of Britain’s post-war economic prospects. Churchill knew this was coming.
On 7 December, 1940, he wrote to Roosevelt, pleading that the brutally unsentimental terms on which American aid was being proffered would consign Britain to a position in which “after the victory was won with our blood and sweat, and civilisation saved, and the time gained for the United States to be fully armed against all eventualities, we should stand stripped to the bone. Such a course would not be in the moral or economic interests of either of our countries.”
Roosevelt acknowledged receipt and promptly collected Britain’s last £50 million in gold.
Churchill pretended not to understand that “such a course” was precisely in America’s “moral and economic interests”. Morally, the demise of the traditional British Empire, the last major stronghold of Christendom’s political order, played into the hands of American ambitions of leading the post-Christian world. And economically, British cash helped America emerge from the war better off than she had been before it.
That the ‘special relationship’ is a travesty has been manifest for a long time, and what keeps the two countries together is mutual interests, not necessarily mutual admiration, certainly not on the part of British conservatives or American masses.
NATO represents a confluence of such interests, those dealing with defending the West from barbaric invasions. Trump’s understated commitment to keeping the US in NATO, and his siding with the barbarian invaders against vital Western interests, smash common interests to smithereens.
Lord Finkelstein is more correct in the second part of his subtitle than in the first: “the Trump camp is causing chaos, so it’s time we found better friends”. I’m open to ideas: exactly where should we find those better friends? Russia? China? Hamas?
No, of course not. As a committed Remainer, Lord Finkelstein desperately wants Britain to rejoin the EU, a project that real conservatives admire even less than the US.
Should the US leave NATO, a pan-European defensive alliance would become a matter of civilisational survival. But that ought to be as far as it goes. British conservatives find the socialist, supranational European Union abhorrent – for some of the same reasons they don’t invariably admire the US.
Membership in the EU represents the debauchment of each element in the triad of God, King and country. That’s why a conservative British Remainer is an oxymoron. But then lifelong socialists like Lord Finkelstein don’t understand that.
P.S. Not having at my disposal a pen as sharp as Jonathan Swift’s, I can’t do justice to Trump’s AI design of his Gaza Riviera.
Clearly, there are no boundaries of gaudy bad taste that his MAGAlamania can’t expand. I only wonder if the giant statue of himself in the middle of the Trump Gaza Plaza will be hollow inside or made of solid gold. The man is in urgent need of psychiatric help.
Well, I did not ever dare to hope that I would find any political commentator with, IMHO such a clear view of the ugly reality in which we find ourselves. But here we are, spot on! Every facet of the ugly realities clearly stated. Thank you,Mr Boot! Thank you! Mr Boot to stand for Parliament and once there, to be dragged into the Prime Minister’s seat!