Why America?

Abstract

On 4 December 2010, the Guardian published a front-page piece, claiming to be based on confidential cables between the US’s London embassy and the government in Washington. The cables had been published in WikiLeaks a short time earlier. Dating from before the 2010 British election, the cables revealed that William Hague, later to become foreign secretary, had offered the ambassador a ‘pro-American government’ if the Conservatives won, while Liam Fox made clear his desire to buy more armaments from the US to achieve interoperability, ‘since the US and UK will continue to fight together in the future’ (Guardian 4 December 2010). This statement of intent has been mirrored in the foreign policy of the 2010 coalition government. It also represents continuity with the policies of the Blair government towards the George W. Bush administration, only the three years of Gordon Brown’s government posing a question mark for a time over the closeness of cooperation. It is remarkable that these ties survived the transition from Republican to Democrat in the US, and from Labour to Conservative here in the UK. In many ways, a pro-American stance seems to be the default setting of Britain’s foreign and defence policy.

It is recognised that there is a significant existing body of work on the ‘special relationship’ between Britain and the US. See, for example: Baylis (1997), Danchev (1998), Dunn (2008), Wallace and Phillips (2009), Porter, P. (2010), Freedman (2006), among many others. The present piece acknowledges this literature, but departs somewhat from the approach conventionally taken in an academic article in that it is an analytical essay by a former practitioner intended to promote debate of the issues involved, primarily among practitioners. The opinions expressed are entirely the author’s own, and do not in any way reflect the views of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.