Politics:Richard Aldous takes a look at two books which examine the love-hate relationship between the US and the UK
Old world habits die hard. "It is no secret that I am a life-long admirer of America," the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, declared at the Lord Mayor's Banquet last autumn in his first major foreign policy speech. "I believe that our ties with America - founded on values we share - constitute our most important bilateral relationship." It was a statement that could have been made by all but one of his predecessors (the exception is Edward Heath) stretching back to Churchill. Yet this was a U-turn for Brown. He came into office last June promising greater detachment from the US. He infuriated the White House by naming one of its leading critics, the former UN apparatchik Mark Malloch Brown, as a foreign office minister. Early talks with George Bush at Camp David were marked by a distinct coolness. Even the presidential jacket presented by Bush to Brown was unceremoniously dumped. The banquet speech, however, represented a hasty return to normal service. With Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel making eyes at the Americans, Gordon Brown found himself in the uncomfortable position of appearing like Rachel in Friends, who thought she was "on a break" only to find her boyfriend flirting elsewhere.
PERHAPS BROWN WAS right to be confused. The story of Britain and America's association is a long and complicated one. It is often described as a "special relationship", although foreign office diplomats since the 1970s have been trying to eradicate the use of that term. Some view the connection as the anchor of an alliance of English-speaking nations that has preserved liberal democracy against dictatorship and totalitarianism. Others, in contrast, have presented the bond as entirely subservient: "Churchill/Macmillan/Thatcher/Blair (delete as appropriate) is America's poodle".
In her meticulously researched new book, Old World, New World, Kathleen Burk, a historian at University College London, presents the most wide-ranging history of the Anglo-American story to date. Her approach is comprehensive in breadth and depth. Much of the focus on Anglo-American relations has tended to concentrate on the period starting with the alliance forged between Churchill and Roosevelt during the second World War. Instead, Burk takes us right back to the beginning - the English merchant adventurers who founded a colony in Virginia in 1607 and those Catholics, Quakers and dissenters who followed soon afterwards in Maryland, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts - and spends 800 pages bringing us up to the present. She manages to explore almost every possible political, financial, military and cultural affiliation between the two countries. The result is an absorbing work of intelligent, nuanced scholarship.
Much of Old World, New Worldis concerned with how Britain passed the mantle of Number One power to America. "We play the game with great advantage," wrote the American Ralph Waldo Emerson as early as 1856. "England, an old and exhausted island, must one day be contented, like other parents, to be strong only in her children." The symbolic moment in this American coming of age was surely when, in 1917, the US lent Britain billions of dollars to support the war effort. "When the war is over," crowed president Woodrow Wilson, "they will be financially in our hands." Roosevelt would repeat the trick in the second World War, a conflict in which Britain lost a third of its entire national wealth and put itself in hock to the Americans for more than a generation.
Yet, as Burk notes, America would "discover that financial power does not automatically translate into political or diplomatic power". In the bipolar world of the cold war, Britain's clever use of cultural "soft" power - not least through the highly respected BBC World Service - ensured that it retained a "reputation for tolerance and for being open to the world". Added to this was Britain's unique position of simultaneous membership of the G8, the European Union, NATO, the Commonwealth and a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. Even at moments when British policymakers doubted themselves, Washington never lost sight of the fact that Britain remained a player.
ULTIMATELY, BURK IS unconvinced about a special relationship between Britain and America. Instead she views the tie as one of "love-hate", a "curious combination of attraction and repulsion". In this judgment Old World, New Worldstands in direct contrast to Walter Russell Mead's God and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World. Mead begins with a very bold claim. "There are three leading points of view about the special relationship between the United States and Great Britain," he writes in the invigorating style that characterises the book. "They are all wrong."
Those three points are, first, that the US required Britain to support it unequivocally; second, that the feckless British have constantly deluded themselves that a special relationship exists; and third, that Britain clings to America because, pace Dean Acheson, this former imperial power has lost its empire but not found a new role.
Mead, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York, demolishes these arguments. Yet he does not replace them with a cosy, sentimental view of the special relationship. Instead, he presents a bracing alternative: the relationship is "special" because both countries recognise in each other a ruthless desire to win. For 300 years, Britain and America have been on the right side in every major international conflict from the Spanish war of succession to the cold war. Their relationship (even the revolution that broke their colonial tie) was defined by a desire to make money and exercise power on a global scale. Add to this two societies that managed to balance religious faith with reason, and you have the recipe - "God and Gold" - for the greatest geopolitical success story of the modern age.
MEAD PAINTS THIS argument in primary colours, which makes his book a thrilling read. Even when he stretches a point, the reader forgives him just for the vibrancy of the prose and the ambitious scope of the argument. God and Gold is an audacious and highly original work. Although it is easy to disagree with individual claims, what is incontestable is his central thesis that, for better and worse, the modern world is one created and sustained by the Anglo-Saxon powers.
"For roughly three centuries now," he writes, " the English-speaking peoples have been more or less continuously organising, managing, expanding, and defending a global system of power, finance, culture and trade."
Success for that length of time brings with it a certain comfort level. At the Guadeloupe Summit in 1979, the British prime minister James Callaghan dropped by unannounced at Jimmy Carter's bungalow just as the president was about to take a nap. With Carter sitting in his underwear, Callaghan used the moment to extract from the president a commitment to supply the UK with the new Trident submarines, thereby guaranteeing for a generation Britain's position as a nuclear power. At the end of the day, when prime ministers can talk comfortably to presidents in their underpants, you've got something special going on.
Richard Aldous is head of history & archives at UCD. His most recent book is Great Irish Speeches ( Quercus ). The US and paperback editions of The Lion and the Unicorn: Gladstone vs Disraeli were both published in autumn
Old World, New World: the story of Britain and America by Kathleen Burk Little, Brown 830pp. £25 God and Gold: Britain, America and the Making of the Modern World by Walter Russell Mead Atlantic Books 449pp. £25