States may throw us a climate lifeline

Critics said Biden and Boris would be the death of the special relationship. After that submarine deal, this peerless analysis by a historian with a foot in both camps proves them wrong

JOE Biden was last night poised to throw Boris Johnson a lifeline in his bid to keep alive hopes for a global deal on climate change.

The Prime Minister yesterday read the riot act to world leaders at the UN General Assembly in New York over their failure to meet their commitments to a $100billion (£70billion) fund to tackle climate change in developing countries.

The fund is seen as central to hopes of a deal at the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow which Mr Johnson will host in November.

And hope was rising in the British camp last night that the US President is poised to announce a major financial commitment when he addresses the UN gathering today.

President Biden’s climate envoy John Kerry said the world was ‘going to get it done by Cop26 and the US will do its part’. Asked whether Mr Biden would commit more funds, he told Sky News: ‘I’m not hoping... I’m telling you to stay tuned into the President’s speech.’

Earlier, Mr Johnson clashed with Brazil president Jair Bolsonaro over the destruction of the rainforest. No 10 said the PM had ‘stressed the important role Brazil must play, as a major South American economy and home to the Amazon rainforest, in tackling climate change’. Mr Johnson also chided Mr Bolsonaro over his scepticism of Covid vaccines.

The PM later told a summit of 30 world leaders that it was no longer good enough to simply agree that ‘something must be done’.

‘I confess I’m increasingly frustrated that the “something” to which many of you have committed is nowhere near enough,’ he said. ‘The gulf between what has been promised, what is actually being delivered, and what needs to happen... it remains vast.’

FOR 20 years — ever since I began to work in the U.S. — I have tended to say that the ‘special relationship’ between the United Kingdom and United States is more special to Britons than to Americans.

If the U.S. has a truly special relationship in its foreign policy, I used to say, it was with Israel, not Britain. Only in the imaginations of a few British prime ministers — Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair, for example, but not Harold Wilson or Edward Heath — was the relationship with the U.S. truly special.

On the eve of the invasion of Iraq, in March 2003, for instance, I wrote: ‘The costs of backing Bush are immediately obvious: we get to fight a war and perhaps also help with an occupation that is bound to cost at least some blood and treasure, and we become the Islamic zealots’ third-favourite target (don’t forget Israel).

‘The benefits, by contrast, are intangible.’

Not without some foresight, I warned Tony Blair of the huge political risk he ran in affirming, at that fateful juncture, Britain’s role as the primus inter pares of America’s allies.

Tensions

My view for years has been that Britons are too infatuated with all things American — Hollywood for a century, more recently the apps of Silicon Valley — to notice that U.S. citizens see the UK mainly as London shops, Scottish golf courses, and an odd society of violent, beer-swilling yobs led incompetently by Old Etonian prime ministers and infested by velociraptor journalists.

However, an Echelon Insights/ YouGov poll commissioned by the Policy Exchange think tank points to a surprising change in the relationship. Despite the transatlantic tensions of Donald Trump’s presidency and the widespread expectation that the Irish-American Joe Biden would give Old Etonian Boris Johnson short shrift, the ‘special’ relationship seems to have become more special to Americans than to us.

In all, 59 per cent of Americans regard the UK as an important ally, compared with just 43 per cent of Britons who feel the same about the U.S.

Again, 59 per cent of Americans think the U.S. and UK have a special relationship in Winston Churchill’s sense of the term, compared with just 28 per cent of Britons.

What is more, 39 per cent of Britons say the relationship worsened ‘in the past month or so’, compared with 30 per cent of Americans.

What might be going on here? Are we Britons suddenly just not that into them?

It’s important to note the poll was conducted soon after Afghanistan was abandoned to the Taliban, but just before the announcement of the new AUSUK defence cooperation agreement between Australia, the U.S. and the UK.

In other words, after a major humiliation for all America’s NATO allies and before a major boost to the special relationship that enraged at least one other NATO ally, France.

Not surprisingly, roughly half of Americans and Britons agree that the Kabul debacle hurt the reputation of the U.S. around the world. But Britons feel more resentment — after all, this was a decision made in Washington and foisted on its allies.

My guess would be that if the same poll were conducted today, in the wake of the AUSUK announcement, that gap between U.S. and British views would largely vanish.

Though it is far more strategically important for Australia, AUSUK is also a welcome win for Boris Johnson. It is the first real success for his post-Brexit ‘Global Britain’ strategy, and comes as balm after Biden ignored his plea to delay the Afghanistan withdrawal.

To Johnson’s ageing Conservative base, the effort to give substance to the ‘Anglosphere’ brings back memories of Margaret Thatcher’s version of

the ‘special relationship’, when she played Vivien Leigh to Ronald Reagan’s Clark Gable.

For Washington, the deal also provides welcome clarity about what side the UK will choose in what I have been calling Cold War II.

Secret

As recently as January 2020, Johnson approved Huawei equipment for use in the UK’s 5G network. (He later backtracked under pressure from his own MPs.) Just six years ago, Johnson’s predecessor but one, David Cameron, spoke of a ‘golden era’ in UK-China relations. Even Theresa May courted China as a potential post-Brexit trading partner. Those days are gone.

The French government was caught completely off-guard by the AUSUK agreement. It reacted with petulance. More than the lost business, President Emmanuel Macron is incensed that Washington kept the talks secret from France.

Last week, French foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian melodramatically called the deal a ‘stab in the back’ and recalled the French ambassadors to Washington and Canberra — but not to London.

In Macron’s acerbic phrase this was, ‘for the same reason that when the cooking in a restaurant is not first class, you sack the chef, not the guy who washes the dishes’.

All this makes Macron look foolish. Having talked grandiloquently about the need for ‘strategic autonomy’ for the European Union, having not so long ago suggested that NATO was ‘brain-dead’ and having played a little too much hardball in the Brexit negotiations, the French president has brought this upon himself.

The equally febrile Chinese reaction to AUSUK illustrates the point that sometimes the best way to judge a novel idea is simply by looking at the people who are most against it.

Trivial

It’s traditional to joke that the citizens of the U.S. and the UK are ‘divided by a common language’. But confusions about the game described by the word ‘football’ or about the pronunciation of ‘tomato’ are trivial. Indeed, they provide easy ways to break the ice whenever their citizens meet.

Despite a couple of internecine wars in 1776 and 1812, the two most important Englishspeaking powers have spent most of the past 200 years as allies, not adversaries.

And just consider how much they have in common today. The pandemic hit both much harder than might have been anticipated, considering that in 2019 they were ranked first and second for pandemic preparedness.

On the other hand, despite suffering higher excess mortality in the past 18 months than most of their peers in the developed world, the U.S. and UK were among the world’s winners when it came to developing and deploying vaccines against the new disease.

Then there’s politics. British views of the U.S. may still be suffering from the shock of the 2016 EU referendum. Not only did Brexit come as a lasting surprise to a significant proportion of the electorate; an even larger proportion loathed Donald Trump from the moment he won the presidential election of that year.

The Brexit vote and Trump’s election continue to resonate five years on. Remainers are less enthused about the special

relationship than Leavers, for example. And American liberals are more likely to have a negative view of Boris Johnson than conservatives.

Take a closer look at the Policy exchange poll, however, and the extent of the transatlantic consensus becomes even more apparent.

More than two-fifths of Britons believe ‘Britain should only take action abroad when we have the support of our allies, especially the U.S.’

Roughly the same proportion believe the U.S. would aid NATO members who were attacked. And exactly two-thirds of Britons and Americans believe their countries would become less safe ‘if China were to become a superpower’. (Note to the pollsters: it already is one.)

Strikingly, Remainers and Leavers agree on these big strategic questions. Just over a half of both groups believe the UK would be less safe if the U.S. ‘were to pull back from the rest of the world and focus at home’.

On such issues, the real divide remains — as in Cold War I — between Conservative and Labour voters.

Britons should have no illusions. Americans think less about the UK than Britons think about the U.S. Yet there seems little doubt that, after a rocky patch, the special relationship is in better shape today than might have been predicted in 2016.

From the high points of the Blair years — when he joined forces with Bill Clinton over the Balkans, then with George W.

Bush over Afghanistan and Iraq — things went downhill fast.

British disillusionment with the War on Terror was quicker to set in than in America; yet Barack Obama, elected in 2008 partly due to his opposition to the war, was no Anglophile.

Paradoxically, it was during the Trump presidency that the transatlantic relationship came closest to divorce. Those — including Trump himself — who regarded the Brexit vote and his election as two waves in the same populist tide failed to see how most Britons disliked everything about him. And Trump’s stated fondness for Brexit did not translate into a free trade agreement with the UK.

To many commentators’ surprise, the Biden administration is continuing much of Trump’s foreign policy, especially when it comes to its Chinese rival.

The difference is that Biden’s national security team sees alliances — not only AUSUK but also the new ‘Quad’ with Japan, India and Australia — as crucial to containing China. The important role that Britain has in this is a relief not just to Boris Johnson, but to all those Britons — Remainers and Leavers — who would like their fondness for America reciprocated.

We are into each other again, it seems.

■ NIALL FERGUSON is Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a regular columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. His most recent book is doom: the politics Of Catastrophe (penguin).