MAX HASTINGS: As Churchill could have told you, Theresa, there IS no special relationship
By
Max Hastings for the Daily Mail
2 December 2017
President Donald Trump hit out at Theresa May this week when she condemned his retweeting of a British far-Right anti-Muslim group
What a nightmare for any prime minister! The leader of our closest ally chooses not merely to blow a kiss to a British far-Right anti-Muslim group, but then to insult
Theresa May for deploring his gesture, as she was bound to do.
It is impossible not to be dismayed by President
Donald Trump’s behaviour, which is unworthy of the head of state of the world’s greatest democracy.
But we should ruefully acknowledge that he treats this country no worse than any other nation on the planet, friend or foe. His own cabinet experiences the same level of manners every day.
Few of us ever expected the conduct of a U.S. president to be branded as oafish, but so it is. This is unnerving for the world, but is worst for the vast majority of civilised, honourable Americans.
Only last week I received an email from a Washington friend, who wrote about how heartbreaking it is ‘to watch a once-great power committing suicide in front of a global audience’.
We may hope that matters are not yet that bad. But more pressing for us on this side of the pond is what this week’s surreal and unseemly spat means for our Western alliance.
In short, the British Government must get on with conducting its relationship with Washington in the knowledge that Trump is the only U.S president we have got, and is likely to remain so for at least the next three years.
Here are two realities that may, or may not, offer consolation. First, the president is not the U.S. government. An enormous amount of routine business is conducted outside the White House loop.
Power in Washington is widely diffused — which helps to explain why so few of Trump’s battier policy proposals have made headway, such as the Mexican border wall.
Max Hastings begged Theresa May not to join the long list of British prime ministers who have deluded themselves that there is a ‘special relationship’
Second, it is delusional to imagine that, even with a president in the White House who flatters the British people when he comes to visit — such as Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton — that this translates into acts of generosity towards the UK.
Shortly after last year’s EU referendum, when it was obvious but not confirmed that Theresa May would be Prime Minister, I found myself sitting next to her at a country dinner party.
Our conversation was social until, just before we broke up, I said I hoped she would not take it amiss if I offered one thought, as a historian.
When she assumed the premiership, I said, she would go to Washington, receive a wonderfully courteous reception and do a press conference in the White House Rose Garden.
Amid the thrill of all this, I begged her not to join the long list of British prime ministers who have deluded themselves that there is a ‘special relationship’.
Britain and the U.S. have many interests and values in common, but it is hard to find historic examples of Washington doing London favours, unless it happens to suit the American playbook. This was the case in World War II, and remains so now.
I told my wife, as we drove home after dinner, that I was not foolish enough to suppose Mrs May was telling her husband what interesting ideas Max Hastings had.
Nonetheless, I only fully realised that I had been wasting my breath when Mrs May, visiting President Trump, made an unprecedented immediate offer of a State Visit to Britain.
The notion was put about that such a gesture might persuade the president to offer Britain a trade deal after Brexit.
But transatlantic diplomacy has never worked like that, and never will. Parts of Britain are constantly obliged to haggle and horse-trade with different bits of the U.S., and there are no shortcuts.
I remember the permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office in 2004 lamenting the fact that Tony Blair had stuck his neck out a long way for George W. Bush in the Iraq invasion, yet was getting no payback through bilateral negotiations on aircraft landing rights or technology transfers and such like.
Barack Obama, who was uncommonly civil to David Cameron — and the Queen, for that matter — was in the White House when the catastrophic 2010 Deepwater Horizon BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico began to wend its grisly path through America’s courts.
Winston Churchill was under no illusions about the relationship between Great Britain and the United States
It soon became apparent one of this country’s foremost companies was being crucified, suffering financial punishment from which it can never wholly recover.
The comparison is striking between the penalties and compensation BP has had to pay — running into billions of pounds — and the milder treatment of American oil companies that inflict environmental damage, as in the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska.
David Cameron, as Prime Minister, wailed to the White House about the evisceration of BP — and achieved nothing.
Even if President Obama wished to give his British barbecue pal an extra burger, as it were, on the issue of BP, there was no way that he could.
Leverage with members of Congress on Capitol Hill is far more likely to yield useful results — for instance, on a post-Brexit trade deal — than sucking up to America’s self-absorbed chief executive.
It is hard to overstate the naivete of successive prime ministers about U.S. attitudes to Britain. Sure, millions of our ex-colonial cousins enjoy watching Downton Abbey and coming to shop at Fortnum & Mason in London when the pound sinks low enough.
There is little hostility towards us. Americans simply do not think much about us at all.
Churchill, in the darkest days of December 1940, wrote a personal letter to President Roosevelt deploring Washington’s insistence upon a cash payment — using our gold reserves — for arms and supplies shipped to us across the Atlantic.
The Prime Minister warned that even if victory in the war came, Britain may ‘stand stripped to the bone. Such a course would not be in the moral or economic interests of either of our countries.’
Roosevelt never formally responded, and I have always thought this significant. The president did not want Britain to lose the war, but cared not a nickel for our welfare afterwards.
Barack Obama was uncommonly civil with David Cameron - but Cameron still could not stop the evisceration of BP
Churchill understood this. For all his effusive public compliments to the Americans, he would say to his private secretary in exasperation: ‘Here’s a telegram for those bloody Yankees!’
I have always believed Churchill’s absence from Roosevelt’s funeral in April 1945 reflected not the ‘duties of state’ invoked by Downing Street, but instead bitterness about the succession of slights the president had subjected both the Prime Minister and Britain to.
Publicly, however, Churchill never let his exasperation with the U.S. show — any more than Theresa May can afford to now.
Even if it was premature for her to have offered Trump a State visit, it would be diplomatic madness to withdraw the invitation because he was stupid enough to have retweeted material from a far-Right British fringe group.
A majority of Americans recognise the Trump presidency as a growing embarrassment. It may prove to represent an aberration of democracy.
But as long as he is in the White House, his own people and America’s allies alike must live with him. Soldiers who recoil from saluting an unpopular or incompetent officer are told: ‘You honour the uniform, not the man inside it.’
Trump the president must receive from Britain a respect that Trump the man has no claim upon. We should conduct relations with both him and his country without foolish illusions that we can expect favours from either.
To say that is not to promote hostility between two nations which still have much in common: it is merely to recognise the world, and the Atlantic bond, as they always have been, shorn of nonsense about a ‘special relationship’.
