LONDON - Great Britain is America's best friend. Now that might not be saying much, given that the Bush administration has managed to alienate so many of our other friends that it was reduced to trumpeting Micronesia and the Marshall Islands as proud members of the "coalition of the willing." Still, the government of Tony Blair did more than play nice over Iraq. The British committed money, troops and hardware. Prime Minister Blair delivered much-quoted Churchillian speeches making the moral case for taking out Saddam Hussein. When Donald Rumsfeld insultingly implied that the British might not show up for the war, they graciously shrugged it off: just another example of American hoof-in-mouth. And they didn't even get a first crack at one of those lucrative rebuilding contracts.
We think we know Britain and the British. We share so much: the language, the legacy of the Common Law, the long history of democracy, consumer culture - there's a Starbucks on every London corner, next to the Blockbuster Video. Prince William appears on as many magazine covers in the United States as he does in the United Kingdom. We cross-pollinate: American television is full of re-imagined British shows, from Survivor to The Weakest Link, while (at a more serious level) Tony Blair is re-imagining the British legal system along American lines, with an independent supreme court rather than judges sitting in the House of Lords.
And yet . . . can we assume that Britain is on the same page as America, with the same goals and aspirations, the same worldview, a sort of unofficial 51st state with warm beer and its own currency? Don't bet on it.
Most Americans seem happy to accept that, hey, maybe there weren't any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq after all, and, yeah, maybe the government massaged the "evidence." So what? Hussein was a bad guy and we got rid of him. End of story. The British public, on the other hand, increasingly feels lied to. People here were already skeptical about this war. When British soldiers were in combat, the country rallied around them. But now that the conflict has been declared "over" (a strange word to use since people are still dying), the focus has shifted to government mendacity. George Bush may get away with endlessly declaring victory, no matter that we don't know where Hussein is, don't know what happened to the chemicals and nukes and germs with which he allegedly threatened Western civilization. Tony Blair, faced with tough questions from his voters, will not. What this means for the United States is that the next time our government wants to take pre-emptive action, our best friend over the water may politely decline to help.
Britain increasingly defines itself as a part of Europe, not a vassal of the United States. This seems difficult for some American officials to fathom. Just in the past couple of weeks we've had trans-Atlantic dust-ups over the size of the U.N. Security Council (Britain wants to expand it), the international court (the United States is trying to hamstring it) and the always-controversial genetically modified food. Washington's ambassador to the Court of St. James recently wrote an aggrieved essay in a British newspaper explaining to the British nation that they were being unreasonable about "Frankenfoods." His argument was basically "we eat GM and we're just fine!"
The America the man or woman in the pub (or the Starbucks) watches on the news or encounters on a vacation to Florida or New York is a place that's at once friendly, impressive, staggeringly wealthy, and frightening in its violence, its arrogance and its unchecked power. They've all seen Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine. Certainly the British hold some oversimplified and unfair views of America as a cowboy state - not that we've done much lately to disabuse them of this notion. But cultures, nations, make choices about who they want to be. And the British don't want to be us. They want to keep their "socialized medicine," their organic farming, their functional left wing (the Democratic Party should study it), even their godawful tabloids.
Militarily, America may be the only game in town. But it's not the only game in town economically. The British are trying to find a way to be British in Europe. They may resist joining the single currency for the foreseeable future, but the reality is that their ties grow stronger with the European Union - a bigger commercial market than the United States - every day. Tony Blair has done just about everything the Bush administration asked of him to help with the Iraq war. Now he's paying for it with voters who are increasingly cynical about American veracity and motives. Rumsfeld and the rest of the hawks are sharpening their beaks, talking about Iran the way they talked about Iraq. If the Bush administration targets Tehran (or Damascus or Beirut or Riyadh) with anything heavier than leaflets and money, it's unlikely the British will offer support. We'll just have to make do with Micronesia and the Marshall Islands.
- Diane Roberts, a former Times editorial writer, is a professor of English at the University of Alabama.
