Whether it’s up in Westminster or down the pub, the British are looking for the side to pick in the upcoming US presidential election. In doing so, they project their own politics onto the American scene.
Generally, those of conservative leanings tend to prefer Romney, although one doesn’t detect much enthusiasm either way. Coming across as more stolid than solid, the Republican candidate doesn’t inspire misty-eyed affection: if you loved George Bush Sr., you’ll like Romney. Still, for a conservative to support Obama would be tantamount to high treason, or at least that’s the consensus.
Yet knee-jerk support for the seemingly more conservative candidate is ill-justified this time. If I were still qualified to vote in US elections, I’d vote for Obama, much as I despise him, his policies, everything he stands for and the horse he rode in on (its name is Demagoguery).
As his piece in the Telegraph demonstrates, Daniel Hannan doesn’t see it that way, not this time around. Four years ago, he supported Obama, mainly because he ‘enjoyed his speeches’. Let me get this right. The world economy was collapsing on our heads, the Middle East was ready to explode into a global conflict, British soldiers were dying God knows for what, and yet supporting a transparent nonentity with the gift of the gab seemed like the proper thing to do.
America and the rest of us needed a man with a golden touch, not a silver tongue, and yet Hannan, supposedly a conservative, favoured the man slated to become the most socialist US president ever. And anyway, how anyone can enjoy Obama’s demagoguery escapes me. His speeches always have been and always will be long on rhetoric and short on content, but then he’s a politician, as, come to that, is Mr Hannan. There must be some professional kinship there that transcends reason.
So what has changed this time? Barack still has a nice turn of phrase on him; he’ll talk your ear off with all the right resonances and diligently rehearsed gesticulation. Why not support him again for this reason alone?
Hannan goes into a long litany of Obama’s economic failures, which isn’t really worth doing. Pointing out Barack’s inadequacy in that area is like lobbing a wheelchair-tennis player: too easy and hardly sporting. We all know Obama is incompetent. But what makes us think Romney will be less so?
By way of reply, Hannan reverses the ancient wisdom by suggesting that the devil you don’t know is better: ‘Whether Mitt Romney can eliminate the deficit is not clear. What is beyond doubt, though, is that Mr Obama cannot.’ America national debt as percentage of GDP is 25 percent greater than ours, her budget deficit stood at 8.7 percent last year, and yet there’s an off chance that Romney will avert a global collapse. And even if he doesn’t, he’s unlikely to do worse than Obama. What better reason to support him?
And then comes the crux of the argument: ‘From a British point of view, the choice should be straightforward,’ writes Hannan. Obama doesn’t like us, whereas ‘Mr Romney, by contrast, is an old-fashioned Republican when it comes to foreign policy: he knows who America’s friends are.’
I’d say he knows it at least as well as George W. Bush did, he of ‘Yo, Blair!’ fame. These days, American presidents take it for granted that Britain will go along with any hair-brained adventure, any pointless and potentially catastrophic military undertaking. They count on us not the way a man depends on a friend, but the way he relies on his Alsatian to bark at a stranger or, if need be, bite him.
Over the last couple of decades, US foreign policy (and Britain, after all, is foreign to the USA) has been variously influenced, shaped or – under Republican administrations – dominated by neoconservative philosophies and personages.
Neoconservatism, it must be said, has nothing to do with conservatism – non-conservatism would be a more appropriate name for it. Unlike real conservatism it’s an eerie mishmash of Trotskyist temperament, infantile bellicosity, jingoism, expansionism masked by pseudo-messianic effluvia on exporting democracy to every tribal society on earth, Keynesian economics, Fabian socialism, welfarism and statism run riot. These are mixed together with a spoonful of vaguely conservative phrases purloined from the rightful owners to trick the neocons’ way to electoral support.
In an odd sort of way, neoconservatism plays into the hand of innate American activism: it’s not in the national psyche to believe that sometimes doing nothing is the best thing to do. ‘We must do something!’ was the Middle American battle cry after 9/11, which I prefer to call 11/9. George W. Bush, who at the time was still putting his family photographs on the Oval Office desk, is Middle America personified, so the cry resonated through his heart, skull and bone marrow. He! Had! To Do! Something!
The question was, what? And Bush relied on his foreign-policy advisers to answer it. Now those chaps were to a man either card-carrying, fully paid-up neocons themselves or at least hugely receptive to neocon ideas. That is to say they were ready to strike a blow for American supremacism, with democracy as the slogan inscribed on the banners of aggressive war. Islamist terrorism was for them not the tragedy it was for other Americans. It was a convenient pretext.
Over the next decade, America, with our help, succeeded in replacing every marginally friendly Middle Eastern regime with a madcap Islamist one, unsettling and radicalising the region, bringing it closer to an uncontrolled implosion and thereby creating a risk of global conflict. Thousands of Americans and their ‘friends’, Brits mostly, had to die to promote this neocon agenda, and, as Americans say, we ain’t seen nothing yet.
Now, if Bush’s foreign-policy entourage was mostly neocon, Romney’s is exclusively so. It doesn’t take a crystal ball to predict in which direction they are going to steer what passes for US foreign policy should Romney get elected. Nor does one have to be a seer to know that, when Americans say ‘Jump’, the only possible British response will be ‘How high?’
It’s entirely possible, nay likely, that a Romney administration would drag us into a war that may or may not have an invigorating effect on the US economy, but would definitely be ruinous for us.
So yes, Romney ‘knows who America’s friends are’. But does Hannan know who Britain’s friends are? On the evidence of his facile comments on the US election, one rather doubts it.