Jew World Order

One purports to find the fact that the most powerful leader on earth calls our
premier by his Christian name a cause for ‘worry’; another denounces Cameron
for ‘swanking’, another for showing ‘unease’ (it can hardly be both).
Another even clamied that we were no longer as important to America as
Brazil. (Oh really? When President Dilma Rousseff comes to America, is she
greeted by 6,000 people on the White House lawn, a State dinner with 1,000
guests as well as a huge lunch at the State department and a flight in Air
Force One?)

Even those who do accept that the Americans have shown special attention to Mr
Cameron on this trip – which they could hardly deny with his 19-gun salute
in Washington – write that British prime ministers are ‘pathetically
grateful for being taken seriously by a US president and unfortunately Mr
Cameron is no exception’.

What is truly pathetic is that we Britons don’t want to accept that the
Americans are genuinely grateful for fighting shoulder-to-shoulder beside
them in a noble cause in Iraq and Afghanistan, and want to salute us for our
sacrifices, and in the most public way possible.

I have lived in New York for two years now, and have yet to meet an American
who is not full of admiration and gratitude for Britain’s stand in
the struggle against Islamicist jihadism. Instead of celebrating the fact
that the leaders of the English-speaking peoples get on very well
personally, we want to carp and moan.

Some have argued that the trip was unnecessary because the leaders could phone
one another instead. Yet anyone who has been on a transatlantic
video-conference call knows that how advanced technologically it simply
cannot be the same as prolonged, face-to-face, getting-to-know-you sessions
like last week’s.

When discussing issues as important as the extradition treaty, Syria, Iran’s
nuclear ambitions, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, of course it helps to
have Cameron, William Hague and George Osborne meet Obama, Joe Biden and
Hillary Clinton in person. These summits build personal relationships,
mutual trust and informal connections that history shows matter enormously.

For all that the Special Relationship is bigger than individual politicians,
it is not predetermined that presidents and prime ministers get on. Lyndon
Johnson thought Harold Wilson was ‘a little creep’ who was ‘too clever by
half’ and Edward Heath and Richard Nixon disliked each other.

The forthcoming, highly revisionist book by the British historian Dr Richard
Aldous, ‘Reagan Thatcher: The Difficult Relationship’, shows how,
despite personal admiration, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher vigorously
disagreed over a surprisingly large number of important issues throughout
the 1980s, but the Special Relationship was too important to both countries
to jeopardise. As so often Thatcher put it perfectly when she declared at a
banquet in 1985: ‘It is special. It just is, and that’s it.’

One of the giveaway signs that the Americans truly value the Special
Relationship is the way that they milk it for electoral purposes. It plays
well to the electorate.

It was no coincidence that Obama took Cameron to watch a basketball game in
Ohio, the most important of all the swing states for this election.

Cameron’s (admittedly pretty cringe-making) remarks about Obama’s ‘strength,
moral authority and wisdom’ will be replayed a good deal by the Democrats in
the months leading up to November, so he will have some smart footwork to do
should Romney win the election, having not met a single Republican candidate
this trip.

Accusations of being an American poodle goes with the job of Prime Minister,
of course, and are almost always undeserved – but he hardly needed to wag
his tail as vigorously as he did for a man whose sole claim to moral
authority is an absurdly premature Nobel Peace Prize.

Otherwise, in Libya, the Iranian riots, the Arab Spring and now Syria, Obama
has been ‘leading from behind’ and conspicuously not living up to the
promises of his Cairo Speech.

It is far too early to know whether – assuming they’re both re-elected – the
eight years’ stewardship of the Special Relationship by Barack Obama and
David Cameron will rate alongside the personally closest – of Churchill-FDR,
Reagan-Thatcher, Macmillan-JFK, and Bush-Blair – or the more workmanlike
ones like George HW Bush-Major and Carter-Callaghan.

This successful visit tends to suggest the possibility of the former, which
would be a good result for the English-speaking peoples, whatever the
carpers might say.

The fact that Obama and Hillary Clinton – neither of whom are naturally
dewy-eyed Anglophiles – pushed out the red carpet so unmistakably for our
leaders simply cannot be a proper cause for whingeing, as so much of our
media has.

State visits are notoriously a time for hyperbole. When Cameron said that
Obama had ‘pressed the reset button for the moral authority of the entire
free world’, he was straying into the realm of satire.

Yet the Americans’ profuse welcome and hospitality, and the obvious mutual
friendliness and warmth, might at least encourage some in Britain to press
the reset button on their cynicism over a visit that can only advance the
cause of the English-speaking peoples.