Anyone who reads my weekly think-tank roundups* will be familiar with the Henry Jackson Society. The sometimes comically hawkish group was formed in honour of the Democratic Senator Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson and favours “a robust foreign policy based on clear universal principles such as the global promotion of the rule of law, liberal democracy, civil rights, environmental responsibility and the market economy”. Formally they deny any affinity with neo-conservatism but some of the US Republicans closely associated with the Bush administration (Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz) were once Democrats and close aides to Jackson who quickly tired of the left of the Democratic party and the Carter administration – in that sense the ideological overlaps are clear.
Anyway, all this by way of highlighting the latest offering from HSJ – a trenchant criticism of Gordon Brown’s handling of the ‘special relationship’ and a plea for David Cameron to restore it to rude health.
But Gardiner’s agenda is pretty straightforward – as you might expect from the director of the Margaret Thatcher Centre for Freedom. The foreign office is chastised for daring to ‘refer to Washington in the same breath as Beijing’, Brown gets it in the neck for his miserly funding for the military during his years at the Treasury and we learn of the imminent ‘death of the special relationship through a combination of political indifference, a decline in British defence spending, and the erosion of British sovereignty within the European Union’. There’s no great endorsement of Cameron’s position on ‘Washington v’s the EU’ but there is a the hope that “the increasingly popular leader of the Conservative party will reinvigorate the alliance if he is propelled to power at the next election” – ‘Scoop’ Cameron is born.
For me most of this is overblown – there’s certainly substance to the charge that military funding has been inadequate over the last decade (particularly in light of the demands placed on them) but Brown’s attitude to Washington & the EU strikes me as simply more pragmatic than Blair’s, not necessarily more hostile. Brown just seems to have got the balance about right whereas Blair (the ‘West Wing’ fan) may simply have been too in awe of the Bush White House and his proximity to power (witness Christopher Meyer’s book) to get things right. It’s not a surprise that Gardiner and the HSJ prefer the latter.
Anyway, all this by way of highlighting the latest offering from HSJ – a trenchant criticism of Gordon Brown’s handling of the ‘special relationship’ and a plea for David Cameron to restore it to rude health.
“[T]he strikingly uncharismatic Brown has adopted what can charitably be described as a laissez faire approach to the Anglo-American alliance, and this posture oozes indifference at almost every turn. His meeting with President Bush at the White House last July was businesslike but funereal in style, with little chemistry at all between the two world leaders. Indeed, the new prime minister had all the enthusiasm of an errant schoolboy forced to go on a school trip to the local transport museum”The author, Nile Gardiner, is clearly ignorant of the domestic pressure Brown was under to at least appear less enthused by Bush than his predecessor was. You could argue his actual level of enthusiasm has yet to be properly tested and when it is it’s far from clear that Nile will be disappointed - Brown is a known atlanticist and far more sceptical of Europe than Blair was.
But Gardiner’s agenda is pretty straightforward – as you might expect from the director of the Margaret Thatcher Centre for Freedom. The foreign office is chastised for daring to ‘refer to Washington in the same breath as Beijing’, Brown gets it in the neck for his miserly funding for the military during his years at the Treasury and we learn of the imminent ‘death of the special relationship through a combination of political indifference, a decline in British defence spending, and the erosion of British sovereignty within the European Union’. There’s no great endorsement of Cameron’s position on ‘Washington v’s the EU’ but there is a the hope that “the increasingly popular leader of the Conservative party will reinvigorate the alliance if he is propelled to power at the next election” – ‘Scoop’ Cameron is born.
For me most of this is overblown – there’s certainly substance to the charge that military funding has been inadequate over the last decade (particularly in light of the demands placed on them) but Brown’s attitude to Washington & the EU strikes me as simply more pragmatic than Blair’s, not necessarily more hostile. Brown just seems to have got the balance about right whereas Blair (the ‘West Wing’ fan) may simply have been too in awe of the Bush White House and his proximity to power (witness Christopher Meyer’s book) to get things right. It’s not a surprise that Gardiner and the HSJ prefer the latter.
* This weeks roundup coming shortly....
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