Obama is a Pragmatist, Not Anti-British
There has been much discussion about the president’s religion of late. According to a survey by the Pew Research Center, a growing number of Americans mistakenly believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim. The rise from 11 percent (March 2009) to approximately one in five (18 percent) is all the more amazing considering that polling was completed in early August, days before Mr. Obama defended the right of American Muslims to build an Islamic community center two blocks away from where the Twin Towers once stood. (A poll taken by Time magazine after his remarks shows that 24 percent—or nearly one in four—believe he is a follower of Islam.)
Myths about Obama are not confined to just one side of the Atlantic, however. An increasing number of Brits believe that the 44th President of the United States is an Anglophobe. Granted, this pales in comparison with the distressing fact that “Muslim” seems to have become a smear to be debunked. Yet what Rick Shenkman, the founder and editor-in-chief of HNN, says about matters on one side of the pond goes for those on the other side too: “The more anxious we become about the future (and we are very anxious right now) the more susceptible millions of us are to myths that make sense of the world.” In other words, saying Obama is anti-British helps elucidate why the UK’s standing in the world appears to be waning and why it may no longer appear “special.”
In the eighteen months since Obama entered the Oval Office, barely one has passed without the commander in chief’s purported anti-Britishness hitting the headlines. Reason magazine and the Daily Mail asked readers “Is Obama an Anglophobe?” (June 2010) and “Does Obama have it in for Britain?” (December 2009) respectively. The London Times ran with: “Beatings and abuse made Barack Obama’s grandfather loathe the British” (December 2008). These two questions, to be sure, would not have been asked had it not been for this third headline. I say this for the simple reason that for those who charge the president with Anglophobia, his memoir, Dreams From My Father, acts as exhibit A with its thirty-five pages devoted to the Mau Mau rebellion. Talk of Obama’s alleged personal animosity towards Britain has taken up so many column inches that it is hardly surprising 40 percent of those polled by the Guardian felt that “Obama [was] being anti-British” when it came to the Gulf oil spill (June 2010).
Lord Tebbitt, a member of Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet, went further and denounced the president’s “hate campaign against the British” in the pages of the DailyTelegraph. Yet, just because president 44 shows little evidence of the Anglophilia that led presidents 42 and 43 to deliver neo-Churchillian speeches does not mean he has contempt for the 41st Prime Minister who declared a state of emergency in Kenya in the 1950s.
What is more, the insulting remark made by a senior State Department official following Gordon Brown’s embarrassing reception at the White House in March last year (“There’s nothing special about Britain. You’re just the same as the other 190 countries in the world. You shouldn’t expect special treatment”) has little to do with an anti-British prejudice within the Beltway. As Sir Nigel Sheinwald, the British ambassador, said, the attention given to such remarks is “overdone.” Rather, it has more to do with Britain being—as one Democratic aide marked—merely “one of the crowd” of countries with which America has a special relationship.
Given the new global dynamic, post-Iraq, where talk of English-speaking peoples and Anglo-Saxon roots have become less important to officials in Washington, it is high time that those in London got used to the fact that they are unexceptional in the eyes of the current administration. Considering talk of a “new special relationship” with India, it would appear that Foreign Office mandarins have grasped this fact and taken on board the words of Walter Russell Mead. Writing in Foreign Policy magazine, the Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations says “the nature of the international system and the place of the United States in it will have to be rethought as new powers rise, old ones continue to fade, and attention shifts from the Atlantic to the Pacific.”
No wonder, then, British-based academics John Dumbrell and Axel R. Schäfer explore this theme in their timely volume, America’s ‘Special Relationships’: Foreign and Domestic Aspects of the Politics of Alliance (2009). As the editors remind readers, the U.S. enjoys some form of special relationship with the other 191 members of the United Nations. “America is the only country to which every other country,” they write in the introduction, “no matter how small or how regionally orientated, has to develop a policy.”
Yet two countries stand out in particular: Russia and China. President Obama has worked hard with his Russian counterpart, Dmitry Medvedev, meeting seven times in seventeen months to reset the relationship that has been fraught in the past. “Both sides are pursuing their national interests… Obama and Medvedev are both very pragmatic,” says Fyodor Lukyanov, the editor-in-chief of the Moscow-based journal Russia in Global Affairs. Pragmatism goes to the very heart of Obama’s foreign policy and his unsentimental realpolitik is evident in his dealings with Beijing. “The relationship between the United States and China will shape the 21st century, which makes it as important as any bilateral relationship in the world,” Obama told officials from both countries gathered in the Ronald Reagan Building last summer.
If truth be told, Obama’s pragmatism has been catching. The House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee said in a recent report that “the foreign policy approach we are advocating is in many ways similar to the more pragmatic tone President Obama has adopted towards the UK.” Yet the Labour-dominated committee was fundamentally wrong to declare the special relationship to be dead. Ministers have, in short, misinterpreted prejudice for pragmatism. You need only recall how Obama views his own country. His rejection of American exceptionalism concerns former Bush administration official John Bolton so much that he labels Obama “the first post-American president”—not the first American Muslim president, not the first anti-British American president, but “the first post-American president.”