We think we're special, but she is seeing someone else
By Niall Ferguson

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/04/02/do0202.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2006/04/02/ixop.html

On arriving at Liverpool's John Lennon Airport on Friday (no doubt humming Love Me Do), the US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, was greeted with roughly equal quantities of bouquets and brick-bats. Local dignitaries mumbled the familiar old saws about the Anglo-American "special relationship". The anti-war rent-a-mob stood on the sidelines chanting their equally threadbare slogans. Snore.

More interesting by far was the criticism of the United States voiced by the Trade and Industry Secretary, Alan Johnson, on the very eve of Dr Rice's visit. A Blairite attacking America? Now that is news. For the Labour Party has seldom offered more unconditional friendship to the United States than it has under the leadership of Tony Blair.

Previous Labour Prime Ministers have been at best ambivalent towards Uncle Sam. Clement Attlee opposed the idea of using atomic weapons to win the Korean War. Harold Wilson refused to involve Britain in Vietnam. Less electable Labour leaders followed their party down the primrose path of unilateral nuclear disarmament, which would have meant the end of the trans-atlantic alliance.

But Mr Blair has more or less uncritically supported successive US military interventions in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq. And no prizes for guessing which other permanent member of the United Nations Security Council supports the American call for sanctions to punish Iran for its nuclear ambitions.

In return for what? Last Thursday, as Alan Johnson pointed out, the US Senate voted to tighten the laws governing foreign investments in American companies, on the ground that they might allow terrorists or hostile governments to acquire information prejudicial to national security. The proposed reforms of the Committee on Foreign Investments will hit Britain harder than any other country because there is no bigger international financial centre than London, and there is no bigger international financial transaction than the flow of foreign money into the US.

Not only is it economically foolish for Congress to make it harder for foreigners to invest in America, it is also a diplomatic kick in the teeth for Washington's most reliable ally.

To judge by opinion polls, Alan Johnson is not alone in feeling fed up with what he bluntly termed American "hypocrisy". On the eve of George W Bush's presidency, 83 per cent of British voters had a favourable opinion of the United States. According to the Pew Global Attitudes Survey, that figure is now around 55 per cent. We have a more positive view of Germany (75 per cent), France (71), Japan (69) and even China (65). And it is rather shocking to learn that a third of British voters think America's motive for invading Iraq was to control Middle Eastern oil, while a quarter think it was to "dominate the world", and a fifth that it was to protect Israel. I used to assume such views were confined to the loony Left. No longer, it seems.

Should Dr Rice be worried by such polls? The conventional wisdom among experts on international relations is that she should. Yet I am not so sure. For one thing, these surveys don't go back very far. The late 1990s, when they start, may well have been a high-water mark for Anglo-American amity.

In 1999 everyone but a few mavericks and malcontents was happy: the indestructibly charming Bill Clinton and the squeaky-clean Mr Blair had just terminated the late Slobodan Milosevic's policy of ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. The Right cheered because they had come to loathe Milosevic during the Bosnian war. The Left cheered because they saw humanitarian intervention as legitimate.

I suspect that the 1980s were much more like the early 2000s. Now that the American media have all but beatified him, it is easy to forget that Ronald Reagan was once portrayed by British cartoonists with just as much contempt as George W Bush is today. The image of the pea-brained cowboy has lost none of its appeal to insular British Left-wingers, who flatter themselves that they are smarter and more sophisticated than the US President.

No, Condi can relax; we have been here before. The special relationship is, in any case, a British illusion. True, for a majority of prime ministers since Churchill, it has made good sense to pose as the best friend of the world's pre-eminent power. But for US presidents there has never been a commensurate benefit in singling out Britain for special favour.

The more the UK has committed itself to West European integration, the less scope there has been for preferential treatment in economic matters. When it comes to international trade, there is no such thing as "Britain" as far as Washington is concerned; there is only the European Union. (True, the EU's Trade Commissioner is currently an Englishman, but he is the embodiment of all that Americans dislike about us. Should he ever have to quit his Brussels job - and such things have been known to happen - Peter Mandelson has a big future as a Hollywood villain.)

The key for a superpower is to have many special relationships, not one. There was a great rumpus at Harvard last week following the publication of a working paper, co-authored by Stephen Walt of the Kennedy School of Government, which criticises the power of the "Israel Lobby" in Washington. You don't have to agree with everything in the paper to acknowledge that Israel enjoys a special relationship with the US, and has done since the time of Harry S Truman. (If anything, the vehemence with which Walt and his co-author have been denounced in some quarters entitles them to say quod erat demonstrandum.)

A central difficulty of American policy in the Middle East is that the US commitment to Israel runs counter to another special relationship in the region - that with Saudi Arabia, which dates back to the time of Truman's predecessor, Franklin D Roosevelt. Nor should we forget the special relationship forged with Egypt by Henry Kissinger. (It's easy to forget that in some years since the 1970s, Egypt has been almost as big a recipient of American aid as Israel.)

Nor are those America's only special relationships. There are, in fact, at least two for each region of the world. In Europe, Britain used to have to share American affections with Germany; now it is the Poles who are the favoured Continentals. In Latin America, there are Mexico and Colombia. The case of Asia is the most intriguing. During the Cold War, the US put Japan first, followed by South Korea. That began to change with Richard Nixon's visit to China in 1972. Now sinophilia seems to be giving way to indo--philia, as Washington seeks a counterweight to the over-mighty Chinese. No one knows what that may mean for yet another special relationship - the one with Pakistan.

Once upon a time, the Bush administration's foreign policy was easy. There were three bad guys - the "axis of evil"'. Everyone else was either willing or unwilling to join the posse to round them up. Things have got more complicated since the Bushies rediscovered diplomacy. In place of three enemies, Condi now finds herself managing multiple friends, most of whom labour under the delusion that their relationship with the United States is somehow "special". Small wonder she's permanently on the road.

The trouble is that none of this peregrination can alter the political arithmetic of the UN Security Council, all five permanent members of which need to agree before action can credibly be taken in the name of the "international community". That unanimity was not forthcoming for the war against Saddam. It is equally unlikely to be forthcoming for sanctions against Iran. Remember: the other permanent members besides America and Britain are China, France and Russia.

So Condi can sing Love Me Do to all the special friends she cares to visit. Until she squares that not so friendly trio, her globetrotting diplomacy will be little more than a Magical Mystery Tour.

·  Niall Ferguson is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University 

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