Kathleen Burk, Professor of History at University College, London, has written a magisterial overview of Anglo/American relations from 1497, when John and Sebastian Cabot, in Hakluyt’s words, ‘discovered that land which no men before that time had attempted’, until the modern age. Old World, New World is a remarkable achievement, based as it is upon massive and wide-ranging scholarship. It will undoubtedly become the first port of call for anyone seeking to understand this vast subject.
But Professor Burk is, in Isaiah Berlin’s terms, a fox who knows many things rather than a hedgehog who knows one big thing. Her survey lacks a conclusion, and, in a sense, lacks also an overarching theme. Unlike her former teacher, A. J. P. Taylor, she is a pointillist, a Seurat not a David or a Géricault.
Her conclusion, such as it is, is that there is ‘a love-hate Anglo-American special relationship’ — but perhaps most special relationships are rather like that. She is more comfortable analysing the hard realities of military and economic power than the ideological underpinning of the relationship. That leads her perhaps to underplay those deep-seated sentiments of solidarity which persist even during periods of conflict. ‘We support you because you are British,’ an American senator declared during the Falklands crisis in the 1980s. ‘We were with you at the first. We will stay with you to the last’, insisted Tony Blair after 9/11.
In 1911, during the Agadir crisis, ex-president Theodore Roosevelt had analysed the Anglo/American relationship in explicitly power-political terms:
As long as England succeeds in keeping up the ‘balance of power’ in Europe, not only in principle but reality, well and good; should she however for some reason or other fail in doing so, the United States would be obliged to step in at least temporarily, in order to re-establish the balance of power in Europe, never mind against which country. In fact we ourselves are becoming, owing to our strength and geographical position, more and more the balance of power on the whole globe.
This was an astonishing prediction of the course of 20th-century history. And yet Anglo-American relationships cannot be wholly explained in terms of power politics. For the way in which nations perceive their interests depends upon how they think about both themselves and other countries, but also upon their instinctive reactions to events.
No doubt Britain and America often think about foreign policy in very different ways. Yet on most issues of foreign policy since the 1930s, Suez and the American invasion of Grenada in 1983 being the two notable exceptions, they have tended to reach similar conclusions. That is because their basic instincts are so similar. It is largely for this reason that British governments, with the single exception of Edward Heath’s administration, have so strenuously resisted the Gaullist notion that there is a fundamental choice to be made between Europe and America.
In no period since the great days of Bevin and Truman has Anglo/American co-operation been closer than under Blair and Bush. Though hardly ideological soulmates, both were liberal interventionists, whose outlook owed more to Gladstone and Woodrow Wilson than to practitioners of realpolitik. Blair has often been held to be Bush’s poodle, and yet the policy of liberal interventionism was laid out in 1999, well before the Bush presidency began, in Blair’s Chicago speech, when he declared of the intervention in Kosovo, ‘We are fighting not for territory but for values.’ Bush, by contrast, came to the presidency promising, in reaction to Clinton, a more ‘humble’ America, a promise he kept until 9/11.
Winston Churchill, believing with some reason that an Anglo-American alliance could have prevented both world wars, sought at the end of his life a political union between the Commonwealth and the United States, a union of the English-speaking peoples; and indeed, during the era of Churchill, from 1898 to 1956, the idea of such a union did not seem entirely fanciful. Today, of course, it is of purely historical interest, and yet the links between Britain and America continue to remain extraordinarily tenacious. The British government is currently preparing a National Security Strategy. Who can doubt that the foundation of this strategy will be a new doctrine of international community by which the democracies pledge agreement on measures to deal with terrorism and the threat from rogue states, and that Britain and America will have a special relationship in the forefront of nations seeking to implement such a strategy?
Kathy Burk defines herself as ‘a proud defiant empiricist’, who is ‘undoubtedly happier with a document to dissect rather than with a mind to fathom’. But perhaps empiricism is not quite enough when it comes to understanding the profound bonds of amity and kinship which lie behind the modern Anglo-American relationship. Old World, New World is a wonderful book, but the intangibles which it omits are also a fundamental part of the story.
Vernon Bogdanor is Professor of Government at Oxford University