London
BOTH POLITICAL PARTIES in Britain have just concluded what they call their conferences--the rallying of party activists to discuss policy and hear from their leaders. Labour met last week in Bournemouth and lurched left, reasserting its confidence in centrally controlled targets to make the dysfunctional health care and education systems perform better. The Conservatives' meeting closed this week. Members of this often-fractious gathering united, and rallied to their young leaders' call for lower taxes, more prisons, controls on immigration, and tax policies that favor families.
All this against a background of an economy that has experienced a good old-fashioned run on a bank, forcing the government to guarantee deposits; the beginning of a problem as mortgage rates re-set (virtually all mortgages have variable-rate clauses in the UK): and nervousness that the credit squeeze will hit the real economy very hard.
Most important to Americans, Prime Minister Gordon Brown nipped over to Iraq, in part to steal headlines from the Tory conference, in part to re-announce a troop draw-down, in part to prepare for what looks like a very-soon general election. The theory of the Brown government is that relations with Europe are now important and feasible given the new leadership in France and Germany, and that Bush is so unpopular in Britain that keeping him and America at several arms' lengths is important to electoral victory. That's why Brown went out of his way to be unhelpful when he visited Bush at Camp David--never returning the President's praise, and maintaining the stiffly formal air one reserves for a conference at which "full and frank discussions were held"--diplomatese for "we disliked each other intensely and disagreed about almost everything."
American foreign policy analysts will now have to work on a new policy in which Britain cannot be relied on to stick with America should the president decide to take military action against Iran, or in almost any other crisis involving the use of force. Indeed, the UK will be unable to do so even if it wants to: it has gutted its military to the point where British soldiers beg departing American troops for body armor and desert boots, must rely on American helicopters with which they often cannot communicate because their equipment is antiquated, and its fleet is so puny that Admiral Nelson is turning over in his grave.
The "special relationship" might survive, as it has before, but it certainly is not likely to have much operational meaning in the medium-term.
Irwin M. Stelzer is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD , director of economic policy studies at the Hudson Institute, and a columnist for the Sunday Times (London).