Obama Doesn't Need a Poodle: The End of a "Special Relationship"?

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown ended his much anticipated, at least in Britain, two-day visit to the United States today. What is remarkable is how little attention the visit received in the United States as the two commentaries below clearly indicate. To be sure, the Prime Minister met President Obama in the White House, for a hot twenty minutes. He addressed a joint session of Congress, the fifth British Prime Minister to do so, where he received seventeen standing ovations. Never mind there have been more than a hundred such addresses by leaders from 48 different countries.

 

The British love their "special relationship" with their former colony, which burnishes their tattered claims to global power and relevance. But President Barack Obama does not seem to be in need of a poodle that the inarticulate President George Bush craved in the eloquent Prime Minister Tony Blair. It is a befitting irony that this little avaricious island that brought the world so much imperial grief might have lost its "special relationship" with its superpower patron now under one of the unimaginable offsprings of empire, whose grandfather was tortured by the British in colonial Kenya during the war of national liberation which he wrote about copiously in his autobiography, Dreams of My Father.

 

There is more to the erosion of this "special relationship" than the unwelcome ghosts of colonial history: Britain is simply a mid-level power of diminishing global importance in a world marked by the rise of the rest, especially China and India, themselves formal and informal former fields of British imperial exploitation. The United States seeks to latch its future to these rising new powers of Asia than the faded old ones of Europe. Also, as the United States becomes more diverse in its racial and ethnic composition, the monopoly of Britain and Europe in its self-identity diminishes. Look no further than the new president himself.

 

The long-term implications of America's growing de-Europeanization might entail the dismantling of the very notion of Western civilization formed with the rise of European global hegemony a few centuries ago--but given a much longer historical trajectory going back to ancient Egypt via Greece via Rome, which received its codification in the history curricular of American colleges as recently as the First World War. This civilizational narrative of the Eurogenesis of the United States is reproduced in the ethnic and cultural inflexions of the country's purported Anglo-Saxon and Judeo-Christian identities and traditions that totally ignore the African presence and contributions.

 

Thus the end of the "special relationship" between the United States and Britain and America's Eurocentric preoccupations and self-projections in general can only be welcome to Africans and their diasporas whose role in the making of the modern Atlantic world including the industrialization of Britain itself and the construction of the United States were profound but have yet to be fully recognized outside recent specialized scholarship and common historical sense. PT Zeleza, Editor, The Zeleza Post.

 

No Colgate Moment, Indeed By Dana Milbank

The Washington Post, Wednesday, March 4, 2009; A03

 

Our British cousins are getting the feeling that the new administration doesn't fancy them.

 

The murmurs began when President Obama returned to the British Embassy the Winston Churchill bust that had been displayed in the Oval Office since Tony Blair lent it to George W. Bush.

 

The fears intensified when press secretary Robert Gibbs, announcing British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's visit to the White House, demoted the Churchillian phrase "special relationship" to a mere "special partnership" across the Atlantic.

 

And the alarm bells really went off when Brown's entourage landed at Andrews Air Force Base on Monday night. Obama, breaking with precedent, wouldn't grant the prime minister the customary honor of standing beside him in front of the two nations' flags for the TV cameras. The Camp David sleepover that Blair got on his first meeting with Bush? Sorry, chaps.

 

Still, Brown kept a stiff upper lip as he sat in the Oval Office yesterday as Obama, skipping the usual words of welcome for his guest, went straight to questions from the news services. Brown didn't get to speak for six minutes, after Obama had already answered two questions. Gamely, the snubbed premier tried to speak the president's language.

 

"I don't think I could ever compete with you at basketball," Brown said. "Perhaps tennis."

 

"Tennis? I hear you've got a game," Obama replied mildly.

 

"Yes, we could maybe have a -- have a shot," the prime minister went on.

 

"We haven't tried it yet," the president said.

 

"I don't know," Brown said. "I think you'd be better, but there we are."

 

Obama smiled faintly. Brown spent much of the session with both soles planted on the floor, his palms gripping his thighs.

 

For the president -- beloved by the world largely for the fact that he is not Bush -- it was a surprisingly cool reception for an ally. Bush, of course, went in the opposite direction, disclosing at his first meeting with Blair, in February 2001, that they both used Colgate toothpaste. In the next 13 visits Blair made to the United States to meet with Bush, all but one included a full stand-at-the-flags-style news conference, according to CBS News's Mark Knoller, an unofficial statistician of the presidency. The one exception was Blair's last-minute trip after the 2001 terrorist attacks to appear at Bush's address to Congress. When Brown took over, he, too, got the Camp David treatment.

 

But not this time. Benedict Brogan of Britain's Daily Mail reported on his blog that "the joint press conference No10 was banking on is off. . . . Embarrassing." He later updated the report: "If Downing Street was expecting the kind of love-in that marked the first Blair-Clinton gala at the White House or the Blair-Bush Colgate and video moment at Camp David, this new administration has proved it wrong. There never was going to be a press conference, despite what No10 said. And there is no couple time planned. No Stevie Wonder, no Meet the Parents, no burgers."

 

Brown, agreed the Spectator's Alex Massie, "may have been treated a little shabbily."

 

Still, Brown labored not to show the hurt when he was whisked into the West Wing yesterday without ceremony. He brought Obama a pen holder carved from the timbers of the HMS Gannet, sister ship of the HMS Resolute, the wood of which was used to make the Oval Office desk. A small pool of reporters was admitted to the Oval Office to question the two seated leaders, and they emerged with a sometimes-shaky video of the session plagued by audio gaps.

 

After a question about Russia, the BBC's Nick Robinson observed to the president that "it's often been said that you, unlike many of your predecessors, have not looked towards Europe, let alone Britain."

 

"The special relationship between the United States and Great Britain is one that is not just important to me, it's important to the American people," Obama assured the British, hitting all the requisite points about common language, culture and the fact that Britain is "where my mother's side of my family came from."

 

Brown used the moment to deliver his opening statement, which he had not had a chance to make earlier. "Let me -- let me just thank President Obama for his -- for his welcome, for his hospitality, for his leadership," the prime minister offered. He declared that he was "grateful, too, that Michelle and Sarah will be meeting later this afternoon."

 

A second British reporter asked the two men to describe their personal relationship. Obama, thus prompted, reached out to touch his counterpart's shoulder. "I will say that this is my third meeting with Prime Minister Brown, and I'd like to think that our relationship is terrific," he said. "And I'm sure he won't dispute me -- in front of me, anyway." Obama then listed various impersonal commonalities such as free markets and rule of law before mentioning their "spectacular wives."

 

"This was very obviously no Colgate moment," the BBC's Robinson judged.

 

"There was a lackluster quality to it all that did little to assuage the fears," agreed Tim Shipman of Britain's Telegraph.

 

Somewhere in the British Embassy, a bronze bust of Churchill was turning in its storage crate.

 

A One-way Special Relationship By Niall Stanage

The Guardian  Wednesday March 4 2009

 

Gordon Brown's speech to Congress went down well, but it is clear that he needs Obama more than Obama needs him

 

Gordon Brown's speech today to a joint session of Congress was billed in Britain as a landmark address with the potential to save his premiership. Here in the US, it might have helped Brown move towards a more modest objective: helping Americans work out who on earth he is.

 

Yesterday morning, as the prime minister was preparing to meet Barack Obama for the first time since the Democrat moved into the White House, Gallup released an opinion poll. It found that when Americans were asked what they thought of Brown, the answer was a resounding: "Who?" A full 40% of Americans had never heard of him, the poll indicated. A further 29% said they did not know enough to express a positive or negative opinion.

 

The American media are not exactly helping Brown hit the big-time. CNN's most prestigious evening news show, AC360 ? which might best be described to Britons as a cross between a main news bulletin and Newsnight ? last night confined itself to a few seconds of footage of the prime minister, merely mentioning his meeting with Obama in the course of a broader look at the US economy's many woes, the power of rightwing talk-show host Rush Limbaugh and the disappearance of two NFL players on a fishing trip.

 

The newspapers are no more helpful. The prime minister failed to make the front papers of this morning's "Holy Trinity" of the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal. The Times and Journal ran medium-sized stories deep in the paper about yesterday's meeting. Brown's greater prominence in the Post ? page three, no less ? was in large part attributable to him becoming the whipping boy du jour of that paper's main sketch writer, Dana Milbank. Full previews of the Congressional speech were conspicuous by their absence.

 

I do not mention this to rain on Brown's parade. But it is, at the least, worth offering a corrective to Britons labouring under the misapprehension that their prime minister's visit here is arousing anything like the kind of interest Obama would be sure to receive were he to visit London.

 

This, in turn, brings forth a more important point. The idea of a "special relationship" between the US and Britain, above and beyond any other American alliance, is not just hackneyed. It is also, at this point, hollow and delusional. (Obama's as-if-by-rote recitation of the magic but ill-defined words yesterday does not alter this fact.) This does not mean that Britain is irrelevant: it is an important American ally, and is likely to remain so, especially at moments of crisis. But it is also one of several nations which fit that description.

 

Strained British attempts to prove that their country enjoys a unique closeness with the world's hyperpower tend to backfire, in ways both trivial and substantive. A perfect example came during Obama and Brown's brief public appearance yesterday. The prime minister jested awkwardly about sports, lamenting his lack of basketball ability, and then brought up tennis, only to hurriedly tell Obama that, in this too, "I think you'd be better."

 

Seeking to portray a kind of cosy camaraderie between two statesmen, Brown only succeeded in casting himself as the school nerd seeking to ingratiate himself with the coolest kid around.

 

More seriously, Brown's grand notion of the two nations driving forward a "global new deal" was met with noticeable tepidity by the White House. Obama not only avoided the phrase during their joint appearance. His aides also made clear to the New York Times that he had avoided referring to that concept during their private lunch.

 

Today was better. There may have been a few empty seats on the House of Representatives' floor, but the large crowd that was present heard Brown give a speech simultaneously personal and powerful. He got warm applause for everything from a commitment to fight global warming to the announcement of an honorary knighthood for Edward Kennedy.

 

But, underlying all the fine words and good feelings, were two irreducible truths ? that Brown needs Obama more than Obama needs him, and that the relationship between Britain and America remains fundamentally unequal, the former always craving the latter's favour.

 

Even in America's current straitened circumstances, there are no signs that will change.