The question now is whether Britain will distance itself decisively from its ally, leaving the United States more isolated in the war on terror. Gordon Brown, the all-but-anointed prime-minister-in-waiting, restricts himself to tepid endorsements of Bush’s foreign policy and evidently feels no love for it. David Cameron, the fresh leader of the opposition Conservative Party, knows how to read the national mood. He is not going to pick up the pro-American baton. But the Anglo-American alliance will soon recover–beginning the day after Bush leaves office.
Forget those polls showing an alarming anti-Americanism in Britain. In fact, the pull of pro-Americanism is strong–and growing stronger. Remember: when first elected in 1997, Blair was expected to rebalance Britain’s foreign policy away from the United States and in favor of Europe. The forces binding Britain to America prevented anything of the sort from happening. And during the late 1990s, Blair bonded with the Clinton administration even more passionately than he later bonded with Bush. His rampant pro-Americanism did not impede a landslide re-election.
Blair’s serial love affairs with Washington reflect changes in British life that are certain to outlast him. In the Britain of the 1970s and 1980s, a Blairish affinity with America was almost inconceivable. Britons inhabited a country in which class resentments were intense, success was regarded as suspect and pessimism was the unofficial national religion. The only relief from the sensation of national decline came from a perfunctory military victory over a third-rate Argentine dictatorship.
That changed in the 1990s. Unemployment plummeted, the economy bloomed and Britain started to outpace some of its Continental European rivals. In this atmosphere of possibility, optimism ceased to be a heretical credo; a go-getting meritocracy hatched from the cracked husk of the class system. London became a city of American investment bankers and Indian entrepreneurs. The national football team was coached by a Swede, and the most celebrated football club was owned by a Russian.
If you could date the crystallization of this new mood, it was the moment of Blair’s 1997 election. “New Labour, New Britain,” his campaign slogan proclaimed, and he showed what he meant by promoting women and racial minorities, chasing hereditary lords out of their privileged position in the upper house of Parliament and championing energy and ideas rather than caution and tradition.
This new exuberance was naturally accompanied by an infatuation with the United States, land of eternal optimism. In the late 1990s, Blair joined with the Clintonites in embracing Third Way social policies–eschewing both the statist left and free-market right in favor of a brand-new synthesis. After the terrorist attacks of 2001, Blair joined the Bush administration in embracing an even more ambitious foreign-policy vision. In both cases, Blair could not resist the sense of possibility that American optimism allows–the sheer idealism of it.
In electing Blair nine years ago, Britons showed that they identified with this can-do spirit. Two more Blair victories later, this remains true on a profound level. Continued economic growth has shoved the old class system even further off to the margins; melting-pot meritocracy has been strengthened. Whatever the current backlash against the Bush-Blair axis, Britain is a world away from the congenitally pessimistic and anti-American nations of Continental Europe. The next phase of the Anglo-American affair will not be long in coming.
