Gaza='Prison Camp'

We're not used to this kind of language from America's staunchest ally. This is British Prime Minister David Cameron speaking on a visit to Turkey:

“Turkey's relationships in the [Middle East] region, both with Israel and with the Arab world, are of incalculable value. No other country has the same potential to build understanding between Israel and the Arab world. I know that Gaza has led to real strains in Turkey's relationship with Israel. But Turkey is a friend of Israel. And I urge Turkey, and Israel, not to give up on that friendship. Let me be clear. The Israeli attack on the Gaza flotilla was completely unacceptable. And I have told PM Netanyahu, we will expect the Israeli inquiry to be swift, transparent and rigorous. Let me also be clear that the situation in Gaza has to change. Humanitarian goods and people must flow in both directions. Gaza cannot and must not be allowed to remain a prison camp. But as, hopefully, we move in the coming weeks to direct talks between Israel and the Palestinians so it's Turkey that can make the case for peace and Turkey that can help to press the parties to come together, and point the way to a just and viable solution.“

'Special Relationship': R.I.P.

My piece in the Daily Mirror today following David Cameron's article in the Wall Street Journal, asserting that "I am hard-headed and realistic about US-UK relations. I understand that we are the junior partner—just as we were in the 1940s and, indeed, in the 1980s":

Finally! Why did it take a Tory prime minister to put in its place the so-called special relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom? The short answer is the Iraq war - but I'll get to that later.

The fact is that the special relationship has been a crumbling anachronism for two decades. The long goodbye began at the end of the Cold War, when, amid Britain's slow economic and geopolitical decline, Washington cast its gaze across the Pacific toward Asia.

Having lived here since 1996 and been a dual citizen since 2004, I've been both sentimental and uneasy about the bittersweet relationship.

Sentimental? After 9/11, a handwritten note was slipped through my family's Victorian letter box in London as we tried to come to grips with what had happened back in New York.

The note, which was so lovely and, I think, British in its kindness, was from our neigh-bours. "I can see the lights on in your house, but I don't want to disturb you. Be assured you are surrounded by friends." It was signed, "With love, Sandy and David."

Uneasy? Tony Blair tarnished the special relationship for me and, more importantly, for the United Kingdom. He was truly close to Bill Clinton, with w h o m he shared a modernising, centre-left ideology; Blair had tears in his eyes at Warwick University in December 2000, when Clinton came to Britain to speak one last time as President.

But for Blair the relationship with America was much more than personal. He saw it as a way of magnifying post-imperial Britain's role in the world. Then along came President George W Bush and Iraq. Blair's star fell from the sky. The special relationship became a joke.

If you know only one thing about the relationship it is this: its importance depends upon which end of the telescope you view it through. It's a big deal viewed from Britain. But from the US, for better or worse, it's a speck on the horizon.

A caricature Cameron - an anti-European Eton toff slavishly beholden to the American behemoth - might well have wallowed in the familiar territory as the heir to Margaret Thatcher, who with Ronald Reagan presided over the high point of the post-war special relationship in killing off Communism.

To his credit, he didn't.

Rethinking Britain's Greatness II

From a column in the Guardian today by Madeleine Bunting:

What "punching above your weight" means in practice is unbridled ambition and massive risk-taking. The obvious parallels with BP are those other former giants of British corporate power, the banks HBOS and RBS. All are now cautionary tales of corporate hubris. In 1998 Blair made a speech in Dublin in which he talked of Britain "emerging from a post-imperial malaise". It was the era of Cool Britannia and the beginning of Blair's military adventures: culture, finance, military participation and corporate ambition were the key, mutually reinforcing, planks of his project.

One by one they have either led us to some form of disaster (financial sector, BP), or to embarrassing failure (liberal interventionism in Iraq and Afghanistan). Last August Newsweek's London bureau chief, Stryker McGuire, wrote an influential front-cover article on how time was up for "once-great Britain". He argued that Blair had tried one final stab at greatness by locking Britain into America's wars, but that he was merely postponing the inevitable decline in the country's place in the world.

This is one of those issues on which it is very hard for politicians to conduct a serious conversation. Nick Clegg was pilloried in the election campaign for his commonsense remarks on Britain's second-class status in the world. It is compulsory piety for politicians to talk of Britain as great, and anyone who challenges that delusion is dismissed as talking Britain down. But we should be very wary of delusions of grandeur now that we are counting the cost of the devastating fallout – from the Gulf of Mexico and the Muslim world to the bank bailouts – of a decade and a half of this notion of punching above our weight.