When Sir Christopher Meyer was appointed Ambassador to the US in 1997, Downing Street instructed him to “Get up the arse of the White House and stay there”. “What a difference ten years makes”, says Gerri Peeve in The Scotsman. During Gordon Brown’s first visit to Camp David as prime minister last week, it seems he “opted for colonic irrigation”. The pundits were agreed. “More bulldog than poodle”, declared a headline in The Washington Post. Of course, this was all carefully choreographed, says Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian. Brown was keen for his Washington debut to look “nothing like the Bush-Blair love-ins of the past”: gone were the jeans, backslaps, and first-name terms. This was “strictly business”.
A close reading of Brown’s words at Camp David indicate a “deeper, strategic rethink in what Brown pointedly does not call ‘the war on terror’”. While President Bush talked of confronting “an ideology of darkness” and vowed to track down “the cold-blooded killers” who do “evil”, Brown declared that “terrorism is not a cause; it is a crime”. This immediately denies terrorists the dignity of an enemy and casts them as mere criminals. Brown was careful to be specific, talking of “Al-Qaeda-inspired terrorism”, not “terror” in the abstract. “Put simply, Brown sees the struggle against radical Islamism entirely differently from Bush, and therefore Blair,” says Freedland. While the mutual aim of Blair and Bush was forcibly to remove rogue regimes that posed a threat to the West, Brown sees the struggle with Islam as a battle for “hearts and minds”.
Hence Brown’s sense of urgency in alleviating Aids, poverty and debt. So far, he has kept Bush on side – winning his backing on Darfur, for instance – but Bush leaves office in 18 months and Brown needs other allies. That is why his praise at Camp David was for America rather than the Bush administration, and why he made a point of visiting congressional leaders on Capitol Hill.
Brown’s and Bush’s aims aren’t so very different, says Jim Rutenburg in the International Herald Tribune. Shared goals include ending the stalemate over the Doha trade talks and working towards a Middle East peace plan and a solution in Darfur. Bush and Brown also vowed to cooperate over the nuclear threat posed by Iran, address climate change and alleviate poverty in Africa. The fuss over Brown’s supposed chilliness towards Bush is a “storm in a British teacup”, says Damien McElroy in The Daily Telegraph. “Compared with the anti-war clamour from the Democrat-dominated Congress”, Britain remains the most solid of Bush’s allies. In any case, events in Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan have reached such a crisis-point that “British and American interests are practically inextricable”.
Britain needs America’s support in British foreign-policy objectives from Darfur to Palestine. Those whooping with delight at the perceived frostiness should “take a cold shower”. No one is saying that the transatlantic relationship isn’t important, says the Daily Mail, but Bush needs a “candid friend” to stand up to him, and he may have found one.