Lloyd Grove: Great Britain ... America's New Frenemy?
[Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast.]
Can this marriage be saved?
When British Prime Minister David Cameron and President Barack Obama meet Tuesday at the White House, they might want to bring along a family therapist, if sovereign nations can make use of such services. The long-vaunted “special relationship” between the United Kingdom and the United States has seldom been more tetchy and irritable.
They have, as the shrinks say, issues. Not just the BP mess and the Lockerbie bomber flap, but also nearly opposite economic policies—Obama calls for taxpayer-funded global stimulus while Cameron is slashing his government’s budget—and the increasingly troublesome dilemmas of Afghanistan and Iraq.
“There are significant strains in the Anglo-American ‘special relationship,’” says British-born historian Nile Gardiner, who directs the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at the Heritage Foundation in Washington. “Cameron inherits from Gordon Brown a rather difficult period. Under Brown, the U.S.-U.K. alliance hit its lowest point in several decades, not least because Brown and Obama did not get on personally at all—and very little effort was made by the Obama administration to reach out to Britain.”
Notwithstanding that British voters rejected the hapless former prime minister, they are unlikely to forget that Obama seemed to go out of his way to humiliate their head of government, reportedly spurning at least five requests to meet privately with Brown during last September’s United Nations confab in New York and the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh. That was insult added to injury after Obama, during Brown’s March 2009 visit to Washington, reciprocated the prime minister’s thoughtful gifts of an ornamental pen holder made from the timbers of the Victorian anti-slave ship HMS Gannet, plus a first edition of Sir Martin Gilbert’s magisterial seven-volume Winston Churchill biography, with a rather shabby collection of DVDs that apparently couldn’t even be played on British gear.
The new prime minister, of course, is no Gordon Brown—a dour Scot with no gift for small talk. Cameron is young and charming, and on several previous meetings, he and Obama were very simpatico. “David Cameron has a very high emotional IQ,” says an American who knows both men.
But some Brits suspect that Obama just isn’t that into them...
Read entire article at Daily Beast
Can this marriage be saved?
When British Prime Minister David Cameron and President Barack Obama meet Tuesday at the White House, they might want to bring along a family therapist, if sovereign nations can make use of such services. The long-vaunted “special relationship” between the United Kingdom and the United States has seldom been more tetchy and irritable.
They have, as the shrinks say, issues. Not just the BP mess and the Lockerbie bomber flap, but also nearly opposite economic policies—Obama calls for taxpayer-funded global stimulus while Cameron is slashing his government’s budget—and the increasingly troublesome dilemmas of Afghanistan and Iraq.
“There are significant strains in the Anglo-American ‘special relationship,’” says British-born historian Nile Gardiner, who directs the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at the Heritage Foundation in Washington. “Cameron inherits from Gordon Brown a rather difficult period. Under Brown, the U.S.-U.K. alliance hit its lowest point in several decades, not least because Brown and Obama did not get on personally at all—and very little effort was made by the Obama administration to reach out to Britain.”
Notwithstanding that British voters rejected the hapless former prime minister, they are unlikely to forget that Obama seemed to go out of his way to humiliate their head of government, reportedly spurning at least five requests to meet privately with Brown during last September’s United Nations confab in New York and the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh. That was insult added to injury after Obama, during Brown’s March 2009 visit to Washington, reciprocated the prime minister’s thoughtful gifts of an ornamental pen holder made from the timbers of the Victorian anti-slave ship HMS Gannet, plus a first edition of Sir Martin Gilbert’s magisterial seven-volume Winston Churchill biography, with a rather shabby collection of DVDs that apparently couldn’t even be played on British gear.
The new prime minister, of course, is no Gordon Brown—a dour Scot with no gift for small talk. Cameron is young and charming, and on several previous meetings, he and Obama were very simpatico. “David Cameron has a very high emotional IQ,” says an American who knows both men.
But some Brits suspect that Obama just isn’t that into them...