Airstrip One

When I talked about post-Blair foreign policy and the need to detach the Atlantic Alliance from the intimate strengths of Blair and Bush, little did I realise that Cameron's foreign policy speech would include similar points, with a greater emphasis upon the word "slavish".

Mr Cameron, addressing a British-American audience in London, said he wanted to revive the "best traditions" of the so-called special relationship, in which Britain would be a "long-standing friend", prepared to tell the truth to its leading ally.

"We will serve neither our own, nor America's, nor the world's interests if we are seen as America's unconditional associate in every endeavour," he said.

Britain should be "solid but not slavish" in its friendship with America. However, since Mr Blair had been in No 10, Britain had combined "the maximum of exposure with the minimum of real influence over decisions".

As the current approach has tanked badly in the polls, Cameron's "rebalancing act" nevertheless took courage: contrasting Tory difference with Thatcher's presence at the commemoration of 9/11. Indeed, if the special relationship required survival, it needed rebalancing after Blair's close shadowing of Bush's policy in particular areas.

Cameron attacks anti-Americanism:

"Anti-Americanism represents an intellectual and moral surrender. It is a complacent cowardice born of resentment of success and a desire for the world's problems simply to go away."

He said Tories were "instinctive friends of America and passionate supporters of the Atlantic Alliance".

George Jones in the Daily Telegraph argued that this represented a breach between the Tory party and US neo-conservatism. Guido Fawkes plays up the parallels with Fukuyama as the main focus is still on the war on terror.

Cameron has read the polls: fight terror but avoid the failures of the Bush-Blair special relationship.

(Cross-posted from The Bewilderness)

Reginald Dale of the Centre for Strategic and Intelligence Studies (CSIS), looks at post-Blair British foreign policy. He argues that the 'special relationship' will survive despite the current antipathy towards the foreign policy of the United States. Given that this relationship oscillates between hot and cold spells, we are moving towards a lukewarm era where the imtimacies of Bush and Blair are lost.

There are a number of issues on which Dale is too optimistic and underestimates the potential for blue water to open up between Britain and the United States. He correctly notes the current antipathy of the elites to the wars of the Middle East, but he does not take the antedeluvian attitudes of the Labour Party into account. Blair's very enthusiasm for the United States may engender a long-lasting reaction. The Left is in no mood to compromise. The trade unions are in a far stronger position than they have been for twenty years. Any new leader will find that their hands are tied, and that the 'special relationship', Trident and other baggage may become sacrifices to an unelectable Labour administration.

The other assertion that Dale makes lies on the other end of the pendulum's arc. Dale states that "no British prime minister is likely to join America in major military ventures for the foreseeable future." Again, there is no clear indication that this has acquired permanent status. Polls show that British attitudes towards the United States and the 'war on terror' have become personalised and contradictory: the public wishes to prosecute the war on terror through European rather than US agencies, primarily because they distrust the judgment and the effectiveness of Bush's policies. The anti-American flavour of current polls is unlikely to last beyond the end of Bush's term and Blair's downfall, since the United States is the only reliable ally who can prosecute these campaigns with vigour. Once the current preconditions for the polling results disappear, support for military action may resume. This is without the play of contingency, where further 'spectaculars' may result in more diplomatic revolutions.

It is not possible to predict a post-Blair foreign policy. You can define what it will not be, when the personal relationships and ideological rhetoric of the Prime Minister are taken into account. The constraints tying his successor are also clear: the demands of the Left and the public dislike of Bush render an enthusiastic Atlanticist policy problematic until 2008.

(Crossposted to The Bewilderness)