“We are part of an Anglo-Saxon heritage, and he feels that the special relationship is special… The White House didn’t fully appreciate the shared history we have,” said an anonymous adviser to Mitt Romney, about the candidate to The Telegraph of Britain.
When this quote appeared ahead of Mitt Romney’s disastrous foreign policy outing, it was rightly maligned for being the sort of ethnocentric comment a well-off WASP would make to the British press. While Mr. Romney himself didn’t make it, and later the campaign denied anyone in fact saying it, it wasn’t hard for people to believe it. While there’s been plenty of talk about the sort of assumptions it reveals about how Mr. Romney and his team view the President’s foreign policy, I’d say the major strategic assumption here went unchallenged.
America’s “special relationship” with Britain is a relic of a bygone era; one in which we relied on British military might to nominally enforce our own Monroe Doctrine. Yes, the relationship is without a doubt one based on cultural closeness; but it no longer makes much strategic sense. Furthermore, it’s helped the British more than it’s ever helped America.
Consider that under the special relationship, Britain (along with France) was free to routinely violate the Monroe Doctrine, for example, going into Argentina to attempt to overthrow Argentine dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas or creating the Mosquito Kingdom as a protectorate. Consider that during the Civil War, the British (who had abolished slavery in 1833) seriously considered supporting the slave-owning illegal insurrection of the Southern states. It was only following the Civil War and the Indian Wars, as the American military turned towards areas across the ocean, rather than our own territory, that Britain began to pay attention to American strength in a serious manner.
While Britain was the largest naval power and world empire of the 19th and 20th centuries, World War One effectively signaled the decline of the British Empire. And it’s a war which started to create the “we saved your ass in World War…” mindset of Americans towards our European allies. Yet, World War One made no sense for the British to be in, and less for the United States to get involved in, except as a way to ensure that our debtors kept paying off their war debts. The peace that came out of WW1, the disastrous Treaty of Versailles, is directly responsible for nearly all the wars of the so-called “Short Twentieth Century”. The lines that the British and French drew within the defeated German and Ottoman Empires have caused in inordinate amount of death and destruction, and directly led World War Two.
In that war, there’s no disputing that Britain got its teeth kicked in by both the Germans and the Japanese, and in the aftermath, was financially ruined to the point where the sun finally set on their empire, with the “Commonwealth of Nations” taking its place. Britain benefited the most from the nation-building exercise of the post-war era; $3.297 billion were spent on Britain, a nation whose in the only fighting that involved its home soil was a Nazi bombing campaign that was nothing compared to the one that Britain and the United States had launched against Germany in the final years of the war. The next closest up: France (occupied for most of the war, invaded twice) received $2.296 billion. The money was well spent, it was largely successful in rebuilding the European economies and preventing takeovers by European communist parties; especially those tied to Moscow (which had sacrificed millions of lives fighting the Germans, and led Eastern European powers in rejecting Marshall Plan money).
Today, the United Kingdom is the fourth largest military spender. It is perhaps the sixth or seventh largest economy. It is a nuclear power. But in terms of importance to America, it should be no more than France, which is a comparable world power. In fact, in diplomatic terms, it really should be less important than France. France at least is part of the duopoly of leadership with Germany in the European Union. Britain holds itself at arm’s distance from Europe (“we’re with them, but we’re not really with them”).
Our relationship with Japan is one of far more potent strategic importance: Japan occupies a geographic position close to China, which really is the most important player in the American foreign policy sphere. Europe, even, isn’t entirely that important. They’re under our cultural hegemony. There is no realistic scenario where a military conflict could break out between Europe and America. With the end of large-scale European wars, Britain needn’t be that special.
We should resent them more than anything. After all, it’s the messes of the British Empire that America has been dealing with for the past seventy or so years. Even some of our own foreign policy seems to be the result of Anglophilia; the antagonism towards France or the terrible approach towards Africa; as examples (give President George W. Bush credit, he was great towards Africa). On the latter, China is making great in-roads by simply being a less awful exploiter.
Neither Mitt Romney nor Barack Obama are offering to shift away from the Anglophile foreign policy of the past. Mr. Romney’s foreign policy team seems to believe that they truly have the secret to the “special relationship”. Mr. Obama seems content to maintain the status quo (“that’s not change, that’s more of the same”). Which is a shame, because if there’s one thing nearly two and half centuries of British-style foreign policy has taught us, it’s that it doesn’t really work. It’s just bloody special.