Wikileaks, Blood Ties, and the Special Relationship: "America is the essential power"

It was inevitable that Julian Assange's wikileaks would give unwelcome publicity to the enduring and unequal relationship between Britain and the United States. The Guardian newspaper, under the headline "Tories promised to run a 'pro-American regime'" has exposed the Coalition government of Cameron and Clegg once again. While during the election campaign both leaders were proclaiming their "independence" of the United States, and criticising New Labour's "slavishness" towards the US, Cameron's foreign policy and national security team were paying homage to their imperial overlord. They promised a thoroughly "pro-American regime", if elected.

Like a puppy in desperate need of demonstrations of approval and affection from his master, Cameron's team - William Hague, Liam Fox, now heading the FCO and MoD, respectively - reassured the Americans they would be loyal and subservient. In future war-fighting, Liam Fox suggested the advantages of improved levels of "interoperability". Future Anglo-American wars - already being considered when Britain was/is in the depths of an economic and financial crisis? One hopes for more on this from wikileaks.

Told by an American representative that the US wanted a "pro-American regime" in Britain in the interests of the US and, of course, the world, William Hague reassured him of his loyalty by invoking blood ties: his sister is American. He also spends his holidays there. America, he said, is the "'other country to turn to'", the "essential" relationship, for people like him - "Thatcher's children". He could not vouch for anyone else, however, perhaps a nod towards those lacking kith and kin or ties of blood with the American 'cousin'. Was this also a hint of questioning of President Barack Obama's loyalties too? After all, he has, according to one cable, no "natural" ties to Britain. He's not an Anglo-Saxon, in other words....

Ahead of his first visit as PM to Washington, DC, last July, David Cameron, you may recall, admonished the press for "obsessing" about the special relationship, looking for every little sign that things were looking up or going sour. Now it turns out that the removal by president-elect Obama of a bust of Churchill's from the Oval office appeared to cause "paranoia" in both New Labour's and Cameron's circle that the special relationship was in peril.

Luckily, American officials provided reassurance that Britain was safe and special: it provides "unparalleled" help in achieving American foreign policy objectives and national interests. The same official thought it would be quite a wheeze to "keep HMG off balance about its current standing with us" as it might make London "more willing to respond favourably when pressed for assistance..." But British support was too important to play with.

"The UK's commitment of resources - financial, military, diplomatic - in support of US global priorities remains unparalleled". Britain is able and willing to fight wars in faraway lands alongside the United States and try to marshal others' support as well. This makes Britain almost indispensable to the US. So, the "essential" nation to Britain appears indispensable to the US too. Together, the Anglo-Americans keep going the global system.

None of this will be especially surprising to anyone remotely familiar with British foreign policy. What is interesting is the thoroughly subservient tone and character brought out by the wikileaks cables and the complete confidence that the special relationship remains central to the UK. This was as true of New Labour, Hague acknowledges in one secret cable, as it is of the Tories.

Of the New Labour government's national security strategy, Hague notes that his own party fully supported it although it required greater depth and detail. This suggests that talk of the death of the special relationship earlier in 2010 was, indeed, premature.

Other wikileak revelations concerning Anglo-American relations offer evidence of the enduring alliance between the two countries: evading laws to permit the US to keep cluster bombs on UK territory; protecting US interests in the Iraq inquiry, and trying to block the return of the people of Diego Garcia to their homeland, several decades after Britain evicted them to make for a US military base in the Indian Ocean.

The racial-colonial attitude at the heart of the relationship - pointed out above and in previous blog posts on this site - is further underlined in regard to Diego Garcia: their people are referred to as "Man Fridays" in the wikileaks cables. Man Friday was 'discovered' by Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe on 'his' desert island, and civilised by him after a suitable period of tutelage.

President Dwight Eisenhower got it right in the 1950s when he referred to Britain as "my right arm". He was referring to Tory PM, Anthony Eden, in the wake of the Suez disaster. During the Korean War, PM Clement Attlee declared Britain would stand shoulder to shoulder with the Americans; the Union Jack would follow the Stars and Stripes. After Basra and in Helmand, despite all the muttering about British military failures, Blighty remains America's indispensable ally.

And the Tories remain as much committed to delivering a "pro-American regime" in Britain as did New Labour.

Inderjeet Parmar is Professor of Government at the University of Manchester, Vice Chair of the British International Studies Association and an Associate of the LSE IDEAS Transatlantic Relations Programme.  This post first appeared at his excellent US Blog.

Lifted Lines and Lacks Vision: Cameron's Guildhall Speech on Britain's Global Role

It is said by many informed commentators that David Cameron's recent speech on Britain's global role was partly lifted from one delivered by former PM Gordon Brown and also lacked "vision". USBlog contends that is an impoverished and superficial conclusion from Cameron's speech.

"We have the resources - commercial, military and cultural - to remain a major player in the world. We have the relationships - with the most established powers and the fastest-growing nations - that will benefit our economy. And we have the values - national values that swept slavery from the seas, that stood up to both fascism and communism and that helped to spread democracy and human rights around the planet - that will drive us to do good around the world."

So spoke David Cameron at Guildhall last week. Britain is strong, capable, and a Force for Good in the World.

Those lines owe their origins not to Gordon Brown, or Tony Blair, or Margaret Thatcher - their provenance reaches back into British history - an imperial mentality forged over generations. Lord Palmerston said it in the 1860s; George Canning said it even earlier; Gladstone and Disraeli said it in their own ways in the 1870s and 1880s; the Foreign Office's Eyre Crowe sort of said it in 1907; Clement Attlee said it over and over after 1945, showing that 'de-colonisation' need not interfere with imperialism.

As Cameron acknowledged in his speech, Britain has "a glorious past" of "deep engagement around the world", an imperial "instinct to be self-confident and active well beyond our shores"; it's "in our DNA", no less.

No mention of "empire" of course when he talks about India, and China, and Korea, and Zambia, but "deep engagement" or "centuries-long engagement" which has "left a rich legacy". No mention of the rich legacy Britain left in Afghanistan in the imperial era, or the legacy it is organising there now in that tragic country, with hundreds of thousands dead in their wake.

Britain's national interests appear to focus on big business, as strong a military as Britain can afford (to assist its flexible approach to "threats" through "Brigade-diplomacy"), and the deployment of foreign aid more closely tied to building security and stability. Cameron does not aspire to a "perfect democracy" in Afghanistan, just a place from which "al Qaeda can never again pose a threat to us". The "us" means "US", I think, as 9-11 occurred on US soil.

And the United States remains not just "special" but "crucial" to Cameron's Britain - through G8, G20, NATO, intelligence cooperation, counter-terrorism, and the like. An attack on the US is an attack on "us" - a quiet assumption that has run through British foreign policy since the 1940s and shows no signs of abating.

Cameron's lines have been lifted from past prime ministers' Guildhall speeches; there is a Vision. It just isn't very inspiring for anyone with a sense of history, especially a sense of western interventions in the 'third world'. We have been here before. When will British elites learn that it is possible to be global in outlook, to see the interconnectedness of things, but realise that imperialinterventions - for whatever purposes, usually prestige, power, or material gain - are totally counter-productive? Just look at Iraq and Afghanistan.

But what can you do about imperial DNA?


Inderjeet Parmar is Professor of Government at the University of Manchester, Vice Chair of the British International Studies Association and an Associate of the LSE IDEAS Transatlantic Relations Programme.  This post first appeared at his excellent US Blog

Liberal Interventionism R.I.P.

While conducting fieldwork in Washington DC this summer, I was struck by the many complaints about President Obama’s lack of interest in pursuing liberal values abroad. “Those working in the ‘democracy sector’, haven’t seen many resources coming their way from this administration”, one critic told me in private. Others quibbled about Obama’s deafening silence on international human rights issues. Let alone the tsunami of TV commentators debating whether the President was keener on allegedly importing European-style big-government socialism rather than promoting, at home and abroad, America’s entrepreneurial spirit and free-market ethos.

Wondering whether these narrow policy complains reflected broader shifts in American strategic thinking, I turned to Obama’s newly released (May 2010) National Security Strategy (NSS) in search for clues. And I found them. Indeed, what I found was that America’s liberal interventionist grand strategic approach, which had come to define much of its foreign policy thinking and practice since the end of the Cold War, had all but faded. Roughly speaking, liberal interventionism is the belief that the active promotion of liberal values worldwide - such as free markets, human rights and democracy - are instrumental to maintaining international peace and stability and a vital U.S. security interest. Its advocates have generally proposed that the U.S. use its power to pursue and protect these values through direct intervention - even military if necessary - in the domestic affairs of foreign countries.

Take human rights and democracy promotion for example. At a close look of Obama’s NSS, riddled it is with the language of engagement, building cooperation and investing at home to renew American leadership, while impulses of intervening on humanitarian grounds or to spread liberty internationally seem to have gone. Compare Obama’s NSS, for example, with Bush’s 2002 NSS and Clinton’s 1998 NSS. One has to go to page 36, to have a hint of what Obama’s strategy to uphold “universal values” would be:

“The United States supports those who seek to exercise universal rights around the world. We promote our values above all by living them at home...America will not impose any system of government on another country…More than any other action that we have taken, the power of America’s example has helped spread freedom and democracy abroad.” (p.36)

Contrast this ‘exemplarist’ stance with Bush’s highly interventionist freedom agenda, which took center stage in his NSS. Indeed the document opened with the following lines:

“The United States possesses unprecedented - and unequaled - strength and influence in the world. Sustained by faith in the principles of liberty, and the value of a free society, this position comes with unparalleled responsibilities, obligations, and opportunity. The great strength of this nation must be used to promote a balance of power that favors freedom.” (p.1)

The 2002 NSS’ first key strategic objective was to “champion aspirations for human dignity” (i.e. democratic institutions and human rights). This logic then became a central ideological component in pursuing strategies of democracy promotion in the Middle East, build support in the run up to the war in Iraq as well as driving state-building activities in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

So too there are few echoes in Obama’s strategy of anything like the Clinton era concept of “democratic enlargement”. Nor are there many openings for possible humanitarian interventions, which instead peppered the 1990s decade.  Clinton’s 1998 NSS also articulated a more explicit activist approach to “promoting democracy and human rights”, than Obama’s current one, explicitly indicating it as the third core objective of its national security strategy.

“We must sustain our efforts to press for political liberalization and respect for basic human rights worldwide, including in countries that continue to defy democratic advances.” (p.34)

On the economic front, as well, the self-confidence in the necessity of advancing a liberal economic order internationally has evaporated from the 2010 document. Out of the post-Cold War era administrations, Clinton’s was the one which most vigorously articulated a foreign policy vision around the universal expansion of markets. Indeed he appeared at times to elevate economic interests at the same level of more traditional national security concerns. Globalization was the word of the day, while key American priorities were to extend open markets and free trade worldwide alongside building and beefing-up international liberal economic arrangements such as NAFTA, APEC and the WTO. During the 1990s, The Bretton Woods organizations were also given a freer hand in their lending and in advocating for a markedly neoliberal approach to poverty reduction and economic growth.

Similarly bullish was Bush’s NSS about the need to intervene internationally to advance neoliberal economic policies. A stated objective in the 2002 NSS was to “ignite a new era of global economic growth through free markets and free trade”. The 2002 NSS also tied economic liberty to the President’s freedom agenda:

“A strong world economy enhances our national security by advancing prosperity and freedom in the rest of the world. Economic growth supported by free trade and free markets… reinforces the habits of liberty. We will promote economic growth and economic freedom beyond America’s shores.” (p.17)

Then contrast this cavalier attitude of previous decades towards liberal economic prescriptions with Obama’s call for more state-led fiscal stimulus during the latest G20 meeting in Canada. In parallel the 2010 NSS has few words to spare for the universal application of liberal economic principles. It instead concentrates primarily on the notion of rebuilding the domestic foundations for American ‘prosperity’, by:

“Strengthening education and human capital, enhancing science, technology and innovation, achieving a balanced and sustainable growth” (p.2).

I’ll leave it to more rigorous academic analysis than this simple blog post to try and explain why such a shift away from liberal interventionism has happened. One can simply speculate that both international structural and domestic forces are at play here. The slow end of unipolarity with the rise of regional powers along with the soft balancing of an international public opinion which has repercussions on how far national governments can support a highly interventionist American foreign policy, may be at work here. Also domestic forces within the US, such as the high economic, military and human costs of repeated and protracted foreign adventures, could have dampened passions for more of the same.  Furthermore, particular policies have been delegitimized given their partial or complete failures. For example, the realization that protecting human rights abroad through military means is hopeless when there is no functioning state, as in the case of Haiti and Somalia. Similarly, the realization has taken hold democracy isn’t built in a day, as neoconservatives hoped for in Iraq and Afghanistan, and requires a more sustained commitment than interventionists might have previously assumed. Likewise, the 2007-2008 financial cataclysm appears to have deflated enthusiasms for neoliberal economic recipes. Given this scenario, liberal interventionism, which has defined much of American foreign policy strategy for the past two decades, has now been put to rest. 

Gregorio Bettiza is a PhD candidate in International Relations and IDEAS Centre Stonex Scholar at the London School of Economics and Political Science.  He serves as Programme Assistant on the LSE IDEAS Transatlantic Programme.

If 9-11 had Happened in the UK, would Bush have backed Blair?

A really interesting question that has a bearing on the character of the 'special relationship': had '9-11' (which I guess would have been dubbed '11-9' by us or else required elaborate translation for American audiences) happened on British soil and involving just as many casualties, how would the United States have reacted to it? I am not talking about the immediate outpouring of shock and sympathy but what followed - a declaration by the US of a 'global war on terror', the war in Afghanistan and, later, and more controversially, war on Iraq. Would President George W. Bush have backed to the hilt whatever course of action Prime Minister Tony Blair decided upon?

That question was put to me by a 6th form student at a meeting I addressed recently. What a great question to ask - it blew me away! It had never occurred to me to ask it; nor had I ever heard it asked by any academic expert or journalist, let alone a politician. So much for the political apathy of British youth - they are interested in the world around them and do ask questions when given a chance. I just wish that that student's question - her name is Caitlin - had been put to the three party leaders during the second election debate, a 'debate' which failed to address any issues pertaining to Anglo-American relations.

Back to that great question, which has me scratching my head. My immediate response was that the US would NOT have backed Britain to the same extent that Britain backed the United States. Why? Because an attack on Britain, a middle-ranking power, would have been seen as a 'regional' question and not a global one (by the US). Attack America and you attack the world's 'regional' power - the lone superpower, the planet's policeman, and its financial centre. That 'demands' a massive retaliatory response. Attack Britain, and the world order gets a bloody nose but the world order does not go into a tailspin. And the lone superpower would probably play a restraining role so as not to exacerbate the situation.

That was my immediate response. But I did tell Caitlin that I would probably have a better answer a few hours later. But all I could do was think up further arguments to back my initial response. When had Britain been militarily engaged before and what had been the US response? Well, there was the Argentine invasion of the Falkland Islands back in 1982: President Ronald Reagan had had to choose between two US allies and decided to back Britain with intelligence and logistical support but did not commit military support (but was not asked to either). That did not change my initial response to the Big Question.

Then there was the British-French-Israeli attack on Egypt - the Suez 'incident'/crisis - in 1956, when the US forced the aggressors to back down. That also suggested that US support after a British '9-11' would not be automatic. (But id did remind me that the US is happy to take its opportunities to increase its own influence in world affairs when they present themselves).

And then there was WWII - the US did not enter until the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor in December 1941 - over two years after was was declared. That also backed up my initial response (the US sold arms and equipment to the UK, provided aid too, but also moved swiftly into British overseas markets across the world, especially in Latin America: again, 'natural' opportunism of the type most states would engage in).

But a doubt kept nagging away centring on one thought: that the first response of Bush's National Security Adviser, Condoleeza Rice, to the 9-11 attacks was to ask how the US could use the event to assert American power? And that Tony Blair's liberal interventionism - displayed in the Bosnia/Kosovo conflicts, Sierra Leone, support of greater US interventions and attacks on Iraq and the Sudan in the 1990s- would have been highly persuasive in Washington, DC, given the strength of voices such as Vice President Dick Cheney's, among others, not to mention the neo-cons so close to Bush. The 9-11 attacks gave a clarity of vision to US policymakers as well as their Democratic political opponents because they furnished the world's superpower with a clear and present danger, a plausible enemy, a 'global' threat, with which to replace the Soviet 'threat'.

Would US policymakers have permitted such a political opportunity to pass? Or would they have reacted in the way they actually did after 9-11? There is still the matter that robust US responses to an attack on British soil would need 'selling' to the American public. And also that, as Britain was the victim, it would have to be seen to be calling the shots, as it were, as to what to do and how to go about it. But I cannot imagine that Blair, viewing the US as a 'force for good in the world', would not have urged America to flex its muscles, declare Anglo-America's moral superiority in a world of failing states and terrorist safe havens, and commit to a generations-long war on terror. And Blair's religiosity - there is 'good' and 'evil' in the world and the latter must be vanquished - would have played well in the White House.

Then I got to thinking about the Truman doctrine (1947) when the US president used Britain's inability to intervene in Greece to counter the Soviet 'threat' to declare that America was ready to support and defend 'free peoples' everywhere against 'armed minorities' and communist aggression.

It could well be, then, that had 9-11 been 11-9, the United States would have 'backed' Britain but with a view to re-legitimising and reasserting US global dominance. Maybe history would have turned out pretty much as it did after 9-11 but taking a slightly more circuitous route?

But I am still scratching my head. What a great question!

Inderjeet Parmar is Professor of Government at the University of Manchester and Vice Chair of the British International Studies Association.  This post first appeared at his excellent US Blog

Anglo-American Relations: An Immensely Special Relationship

A disappointing election debate last night from a foreign policy perspective.

What were the big questions on which hardly anything was said:
1. The Iraq War
2. British authorities' complicity in torture of terror suspects in US detention facilities
3. The timetable for withdrawal of British troops from Afghanistan or the illegitimate character of the Karzai regime
4. The attitude to the emergence of China as a global power.

Nick Clegg stood out as the only candidate opposed to the next generation of Trident nuclear missile systems and both David cameron and Gordon Brown told him to "get real": New Labour has travelled very far since the unilateral disarmament days of the early 1980s. They don't even listen to elements of the UK military establishment on this matter, raising the spectre of a nuclear-armed Iran (no evidence advanced on that matter, of course) and North Korea.

USBlog applauds Clegg on taking that stand and not caving in to extreme pressure, though he did justify scrapping Trident on the grounds that Obama was also decommissioning large numbers of US nuclear missiles (ironic really given what he said later in the debate). Cameron repeated the usual guff about Trident being Britain's "independent" nuclear deterrent, although he knows full well that the United States controls the "trigger" and targetting of Trident.

It was also Nick Clegg who declared that Britain should not be at America's "beck and call" on all matters, although qualified his comment by preceding it with the usual line: the UK's alliance with America is "an immensely special relationship" - though he did not define the characteristics that make it "special". As a recent book by Durham's John Dumbrell argues, America has quite a few "special relationships".

Yet, Brown (quite gratuitously) accused Clegg of being "anti-American". On that issue, USBlog may comment later.

But let's be clear: all three parties are for continued war in Afghanistan; are likely to go for more interventions abroad in the global war on terror; and will spend whatever it takes to finance military operations. Indeed, Gordon Brown emphasised that Somalia and Yemen are already in Britain's (and America's) sights.

Why? Because "Britain is a force for good in the world", according to Nick Clegg last night, the MoD, and the other liberal and conservative interventionists that dominate debate and decision-making. There are monsters to destroy out there and Britain will do its bit.

"IT CAN BE DIFFERENT," according to Nick Clegg: not on last night's performance.

3 parties, one view!

Inderjeet Parmar is Professor of Government at the University of Manchester and Vice Chair of the British International Studies Association.  This post first appeared at his excellent US Blog

Turmoil in Poland.

On the morning of 10 April a Polish plane carrying the Polish President and a high ranking team of politicians and military men, due to land in Smolensk, crashed killing all those on board.  The event marks the end of an estrangement between Poland and Russia which can be traced to the outbreak of the Second World War.  It also might become the beginning of what most hope will be a period of constructive co-existence which will be marked by realpolitik rather than nationalist posturing.

On 1 September last year when the Poles commemorated the anniversary of the beginning of the war they had hoped that Russia would finally make an apology for the deaths of thousands of Poles killed by the NKVD during the war.  This the Russian leadership was not prepared to do and instead hid behind the declaration that Poles – like the Russians – were victims of Stalinism.  It was therefore a source of surprise when on 7 April when Tusk the Polish Prime Minister went to the Katyn to commemorate the death of Polish officers,  Prime Minister Putin finally acknowledged the Soviet responsibility for the crime and apologised to the Poles unreservedly.  The death of President Lech Kaczyński might well have set the clock back.  But the opposite has happened.  Putin and Tusk were photographed standing at the site of the crash, united in grief and horror at the enormity of the tragedy.  And contained in that gesture is the full meaning of the transformation that is taking place in Polish-Russian relations, a transformation that has implications for European and US policies towards Russia and Poland. Poland has benefitted in recent years from the estrangement between the West and Russia, but these proved to be transient victories.  Likewise it has always been obvious that for Russia to become a full partner in the international community, the Polish issue which carried emotional, even if not always political weight, had to be resolved.  By responding sensitively and honestly to the tragedy Putin has made it possible for the present Polish government to declare that all previous misunderstandings have been resolved.

The crash has created a potentially dangerous vacuum in the Polish political landscape.  President Kaczyński was accompanied by most of the leadership and key ideologues of the opposition PiS party.  On the aeroplane were also the presidential candidates of the SLD left wing party and the PSL peasant party.  The date of the forthcoming presidential elections was to be announced soon and a mood of pre-election rivalry had dominated recent political debates. The governor of the national bank and the head of the Institute of National Memory, where the secret service files have been deposited, both closely connected with Kaczyński, died with him in the crash. The presidential elections have now to take place by 20 June but only the candidate of the ruling PO party Bronisław Komorowski is there to stand.  PiS is paralysed by the tragedy, but so are the SLD and the peasant parties.  How will the ruling party behave?  Will the electorate trust them to guide the nation through the period when PO politicians are likely to take over most decision making roles? At stake is not merely the hitherto healthy democratic system in Poland but the newly forged Polish-Russian reconciliation.  Once the period of official mourning comes to an end there will be a need to ensure that no party exploits anti-Russian sentiments to steal a march on the ruling party.  So far Russian politicians and the media have been helpful in creating that necessary mood of thoughtful contemplation. Polish leaders led by Prime Minister Tusk have likewise remained dignified and appreciative of all the aid given by Russian experts investigating the causes of the crash. Polish media have been determined not to allow speculation to take the debate in the direction where anti-Russian sentiments could be fanned. It is difficult not to conclude that both sides know that they are being observed by the European and US governments which would not support another round of squabbles.

Dr Anita Prazmowska is Professor of International History at the London School of Economics.

Living in the Real World: The Nuclear Posture Review

“We live in a real world, not a virtual world” was Nicolas Sarkozy's veiled riposte to Barack Obama's vision of a globe free from nuclear weapons, articulated in his Prague speech of April 2009. Some commentators on the right are echoing this criticism in response to the administration's declaration in its Nuclear Posture Review (NPR), “that the United States will not use or threaten to use nuclear weapons against non-nuclear weapons states that are party to the NPT (Non-Proliferation Treaty) and in compliance with their nuclear non-proliferation obligations.” This would pertain even if the US came under biological or chemical attack.

Internationally, this commitment is important because it seeks to strengthen the NPT prior to the Review Conference in May by providing a clear incentive to be in compliance with the treaty's terms, whilst bolstering US claims that it will not take advantage of its nuclear status at the expense of those countries without an independent deterrent. However, critics charge that Obama is pursuing his nuclear-free idealism at the expense of American security: they argue that clarifying under what conditions the US would consider using nuclear weapons invites potential adversaries to test those limits, thereby degrading the country's deterrent.

In fact, the NPR reflects strategic realities. The political costs of using or even threatening to employ nuclear weapons are immense and unpredictable, particularly against a country that does not possess them. By contrast, the US capability to dismantle a state through conventional means has increased exponentially in recent decades and does not carry the same political stigma. Under these conditions, the NPR's assurance that an American conventional response to a chemical or biological attack would be “devastating” is far more credible than the latent threat of massive nuclear retaliation. Importantly, the pledge does not pertain to those regimes that the administration has designated “outliers”: Iran and North Korea. Nor does it apply to other nuclear weapons states, leaving the US with a free hand in dealing with almost all potential crises where the deterrent could be useful.

The NPR also reflects domestic political conditions by sidestepping arms control advocates' calls for US commitment to no first use of nuclear weapons. This may reflect divisions within the executive, but it also indicates that Obama is prioritising concrete steps towards disarmament over grand gestures. To ratify the New START treaty, the President will need sixty-seven Senators to vote for it. The administration is already treading a fine line between domestic pressure for freedom of action on missile defence and Russian attempts to restrain US defensive deployments through linkage with New START. Commitment to no first use would have opened up the Senate debate over New START into a wider discussion of whether the administration's nuclear policy was weakening national security, damaging the treaty's ratification prospects. At a time of intense partisanship in Congress, it is vital for the administration to defend itself against criticism that equates New START with a degradation of America's ability to respond to potential threats. The President may have established a global security environment free from nuclear weapons as his ultimate aim, but his steps towards this goal show that he is living in the real world and not a virtual one.


James Cameron is a PhD student at the University of Cambridge, writing on the development of US anti-ballistic missile (ABM) defence policy from 1955 to 1972.

No Longer Special?

A recently released report by the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee has received more than its fair share of analysis by the commentariat who rarely, if ever, look at the committee’s reports with much care. The reason for such attention is clear. The headline news coming out of the committee was that the ‘special relationship’ between the United States and the UK was either no more (if you read some newspapers) or (if you read others) was a term that should rapidly be expunged from public discourse. Nor was this all. The UK, it continued, should increasingly stand up for itself and not be as deferential to the United States as it had traditionally been in the past. It should even, sometimes, say no.

Of course, headlines are not designed to capture complexity or nuance; and so it would seem to be with this report. Indeed, its collective authors readily concede that the relationship still remained strong – stronger now than ever perhaps now that the popular Obama was in the White House. Moreover, they did not call for any new alignment with any other particularly special country, like say France or Germany. God forbid. Still, there was no doubting what the report was seeking to do: namely, set off a debate about why Britain’s relationship with the United States might be in flux and should therefore be re-examined.

Such a rethink after Bush and now in the era of Obama – who has other, rather more important things on his mind than to worry about the sensibilities of the Brits – is to be welcomed. That said, the report suffers from one basic flaw: a disjuncture between the evidence presented and the conclusions apparently arrived at.

Thus while we are told that the relationship should not officially be referred to as being ‘special’, largely because the term is ‘misleading’ and might offend others if used too frequently, most of the evidence presented would appear to suggest that it is precisely that, most obviously in the area of intelligence (see p. 5). Nor does the special quality of the relationship end there. In the areas of trade, culture and finance for example, according to the report the two countries look like having an especially dense relationship – one of the ‘densest’ no less. Furthermore, on many big issues, the UK and the US look like they agree about most things. We even like to visit each other’s countries in our millions. We also seem to like each other quite a lot. And we exchange our pop stars and movie actors and actresses with ease.

Finally, as Douglas Hurd pointed out in his written evidence, there is no chance at all of the UK waging a major war - and waging it successfully - without the complete backing of the United States. In short, it all sounds pretty “special” whether or not you like to use the term.

But this is not the main problem or the real issue. Basically, it is not so much what is in the report that is significant, as much as what remains unstated or understated. Put another way: what is really going on here?

Three things I would speculate. First, in spite of all the nice words about Obama in the report, there is an uneasy sense ‘over here’ that ‘over there’ they really don’t give a damn any more. So, we had better get used to the fact; and what better way of getting ready for rejection at worst (indifference at best) than by acting a little bit coy?

Second, British power is on the wane – as Stryker Mcguire of the LSE pointed out in a much quoted essay published in Newsweek last year (‘Forget the Great in Britain’, 1 August 2009). Decline does all sorts of strange things to people and states, but one thing more than anything else is for those so afflicted to speculate at length about who they are, what they are, who loves them and who doesn’t. In this sense, I read this report as symptomatic of a crisis in the making about Britain’s position in the world.

Finally, there is no doubt that whatever the UK might have gained from the relationship – and it has not been inconsiderable - it has fed British illusions about its role in the world. This was fine during the Cold War perhaps, and even during the 1990s before the rise of China, the uneasy emergence of the European Union, and 9/11. Now the relationship is proving more of a liability – however special it might remain. And this is what the report is really trying to say without, however, saying it too bluntly (that might after all damage the ‘special relationship’).

But where does this all leave the UK? In a most uncomfortable position I would suggest. Uneasy and uncertain about a relationship from which it cannot escape in a world that is now more dangerous than ever – and dangerous in large part because of the way Blair joined forces with Bush – the UK is caught between a very hard rock and equally hard place: between an affair she cannot abandon and a future she cannot contemplate without having her powerful, muscular lover by her side holding her hand and reassuring her that she still remains attractive.

Professor Michael Cox is co-Director of LSE IDEAS

US-Russian Relations and Disarmament

Conclusion of a nuclear arms deal has infused US-Russian relations with a new sense of optimism reminiscent of the late 1980s amid indications that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s bid to “reset” relations with Moscow has borne fruit, and the phantom of a new “Cold War,” perceived by gloomy pundits in recent times, has faded at last. It is as if Washington and Moscow have resolved to resume their relationship from a historic point it had reached before Russia, convulsed by post-Soviet agony of defeat and impotence, spoiled America’s triumphant nineties with mean barking in Eastern Europe and devious plots, hatched in partnership with China, to ruin US-led new world order. Obama and Medvedev can stand tall shoulder-to-shoulder as once Gorbachev and Reagan had stood before a dawn of new partnership, and a promising future for the world.

Yet, in some respects, recent breakthroughs in US-Russian arms negotiations bring to mind not so much the hopeful late 1980s as the sober early 1970s, when US President Richard Nixon and the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev presided over the conclusion of the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, and the broader détente it represented for Soviet-US relations. At the time the Soviet leadership hailed détente as an outcome of US acceptance of Soviet “equality”; for Brezhnev, détente symbolized his own legitimacy as a peacemaker and a ruler of a superpower. But better relations with Washington did not constrain Soviet foreign policy. By contrast, the Soviet Union became more assertive on the international stage, supporting quasi-revolutionary movements and militant clients, especially in Africa and the Middle East. Détente also had little effect on the Kremlin’s domestic struggle with dissidents of various stripes: screws were tightened, and opponents of the Soviet regime were silenced in prisons and asylums, or deported overseas.

Unfortunately, the “resetting” of US-Russian relations does not add up to a promising partnership Gorbachev and Reagan once looked forward to. There is no reason to think that the Kremlin will hold punches in the immediate neighborhood (e.g. Georgia or Ukraine) to please the Americans; by contrast, the legitimizing aura of an upbeat relationship with the United States will embolden Moscow to act with greater confidence vis-à-vis embittered foes of Russia’s regional hegemony. There is no doubt, on the other hand, that whatever may transpire in US-Russian relations, the Russian leadership will ruthlessly and consistently suppress domestic dissent, which had grown considerably in the last two years in view of deteriorating economic conditions and endemic corruption.

The Obama Administration may well close their eyes to these aspects of Russia’s domestic and foreign policy, and even ridicule critics for being unrealistic or moralistic, or ignoring Russia’s legitimate interests. In this respect, the lessons of the early 1970s are all the more pertinent. After all, who can argue that the moral relativism of Nixon and Kissinger were exceptionally useful in the making of triangular diplomacy, which had placed the US, demoralized by the Vietnam War and economic woes, in a position to play one foe (the USSR) against the other (China). But Obama is inconsistent, for although he has been willing to push for a better relationship with Russia, come what may, he has also antagonized China by selling weapons to Taiwan and complaining about the human rights’ record in the People’s Republic. Triangular diplomacy of the Obama-Clinton team has not worked out so well.

Circumstances change but history repeats itself. The détente of the 1970s was followed by the Second Cold War and new lows in Soviet-US relations. The dynamic of the Kremlin’s domestic and foreign policies maintains Russia on a course, which will only widen US-Russian antagonisms in the years ahead. I am not even confident that the prospects of Russia’s support for the US vis-à-vis Iran and North Korea have improved significantly with the “resetting” of relations; the Kremlin will do what it has done in the last few years – look after its own interests in both regions, and these are not so much to see that the lingering problems are resolved, but that they are not resolved on US terms. In the 1970s Nixon and Kissinger pioneered the concept of “linkage”: offering the prospect of better relations with the USSR in exchange for Moscow’s self-imposed moderation and cooperative attitude on a range of issues important to the US. It did not exactly work then. It will not work now.


Sergey Radchenko is a lecturer in Asian-American Relations at the University of Nottingham (Chinese campus). He is based in Ningbo, China and a Fellow of the LSE IDEAS Cold War Studies Programme.

“The Connection Was Reset”: Google goes to War for the West

Internet users in China last night discovered that the domain Google.cn redirected to Google.com.hk, as the world’s largest search engine shut down its Chinese servers and redirected traffic to Hong Kong, where – crucially – the search engine results would be uncensored by Google themselves.  Of course, users with IP addresses in mainland China attempting to search for material deemed ‘sensitive’ by the Chinese authorities would still be prevented from accessing information by the ‘Great Firewall’, with its tell-tale error message: ‘the connection was reset’.

Yet Google’s decision is of limited significance to Chinese surfers.  Experienced activists in China have ways and means of getting round the authorities’ controls, for example by using IP blocking, VPNs and proxy severs.  Indeed, within China Google accounts for only around 20% of searches, with the home-grown search engine Baidu holding the kind of dominance Google is used to enjoying, with 75% of all searches.  Having said that, China’s technology for blocking and filtering web results is less sophisticated and effective than the rules Google voluntarily applied to its Chinese ‘spiders’ four years ago, so the move does represent a very small, but nonetheless welcome, boost fro freedom of information in China.

Nor is Google’s decision of particular significance for the finances of the company itself in the short term, even if the decision has been taken – as was the case in 2006 when Google decided to filter its results in China – very much from a business perspective.  China accounts for less than 1% of Google’s total income: whilst companies like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo have been eager to gain access to a rapidly-growing market with up to a billion new customers, the fact is that currently revenues from China are insignificant.  Indeed the business decision that Google appears to have taken is that their stance on China has begun to erode their position in other markets.  Google’s idealistic founders may have based the company around the slogan ‘don’t be evil’, but that clever piece of marketing disguised the essential truth behind the search engine’s success: yes Google was fast; yes it returned different, and ultimately better, results; but the key to Google’s dominance was that their users had trust in it.  And user trust is all the more important as firms compete to control user data as more and more computing takes place ‘in the cloud’.  So whilst Google’s decision is based on a long-term business argument that has brought it great success to date, it risks little in the short term in the Chinese market.  Google also clearly believes that Chinese censorship is unsustainable, and that once controls are removed it will be able to return to that market victorious, able to generate user trust quickly on the basis that it – unlike Microsoft or Yahoo – has a genuine commitment to open information, that it had not been evil.

And here is the rub: by revealing the Chinese government’s widespread hacking regime – a fairly open secret in the IT world – and by withdrawing from China, Google has raised the stakes in the ideological conflict surrounding the rights of people versus the rights of governments; it has essentially gone to war for liberalism.  Whilst China may have embraced the economic tenets of liberal capitalism fairly convincingly over the last two decades, its attitudes to political liberalism lag far behind.  Ultimately – as Google rightly believes – sociologically the two cannot be separated: free consumption requires political freedom and vice-versa, and the progress of Chinese economic growth, particularly as it seeks to develop its economy past the core manufacturing stage to focus on R&D and information services, cannot hope to proceed smoothly without political liberalisation.  Google’s actions, however, are a spur to that process, which will both embolden activists, weak though they remain in the face of the Chinese state, and more importantly detract from China’s ability to continue to progress its economy into more advanced sectors.

It is, as well, inconceivable that Google would have taken this move without consultation with the United States government.  Whilst the administration is truly a ‘team of rivals’ with regards to policy on China, with Hilary Clinton significantly more hawkish than the President and Vice-President, the government’s enlisting of Twitter as a policy adjunct during the Green protests in Iran demonstrates that the administration understands the power of open information in driving social and political change conducive to US interests.  So while China is able to defy the diplomatic demands of the US on the level of the Yuan, on sanctions for Iran, or on human rights, in Google it may encounter an irresistible force for the spread of political liberalism.

Dr Nicholas Kitchen  is a Fellow of LSE IDEAS and Programme Coordinator of the LSE IDEAS Transatlantic Relations Programme.

Afghanistan: Can the troop surge be effective?

Welcome to the Shifting Sands blog at LSE IDEAS. We invite PhD students and academics from throughout the UK and abroad to analyse current events in the Middle East and add to the ongoing deliberations over policy prescriptions. Our next contributor, Karl Sandstrom, explores how well General Stanley McChrystal’s new surge strategy in Afghanistan is working.

We look forward to exploring both regional and topical issues relating to current events.
Amber Holewinski, Editor, LSE IDEAS Middle East International Affairs Programme Blog

Afghanistan – Will the surge work?

By Karl Sandstrom

The surge and connected strategy are logical when viewing the situation through Westernised lenses but pose a number of issues. General McChrystal explained the strategy of expanding bubbles of security that the surge will support in a recent interview. NATO/ISAF forces would provide a slowly expanding security presence and gradually be replaced by Afghan forces. Under this security umbrella farmers would chose to grow wheat instead of poppy and go to the market instead of to the gun. This makes perfect sense in a Western perspective. The war however is in Afghanistan.

Firstly, the surge is limited in time and there are questions about the capacity of the Afghan security forces to eventually assume responsibility. The main concern seems to be technical and numerical capacity but there are more serious issues in the shape of ethnicity. The focus of General McChrystal’s plan is on the Pashtun South of the country but the Afghan National Army is controlled by non-Pashtun groups. Government representatives have already made themselves very unpopular among other power-holders in the South. Add to this a ‘security force’ controlled by non-Pashtuns in an ethnically fragmented and violent environment and there is a distinct risk that the insurgency will grow. Ethnic mobilisation has a long shelf-life as shown, for example, in Bosnia. In Afghanistan, the civil war in the 1990’s, the ethnic divisions, and the ‘Northern Alliance’ ousting of the Taliban with outside help makes the violence recent and close to the surface. The atrocities committed against Pashtuns by other Afghans under the guise of targeting the Taliban are not likely to be forgotten any time soon. Not in Balkh, not in Kunduz, and certainly not in the South when the surge now goes on the offensive partnered with a non-Pashtun Afghan army.

Secondly, the assumption that farmers will choose the market over the gun - if surge forces provide security - assumes that mobilisation of insurgents is largely economic. This may be a contributing factor but there is also pressure from local leaders and loyalty issues involved. There exist local conflicts that put families or other factions on opposing sides and there is no reason to assume that the pattern will be different than in, for example, the Kapisa province. While the smallest of the Afghan provinces, the Southern part of it is the scene of a violent competition between a number of shuras as well as several ongoing feuds. The scale in the South of the country however will be much larger. Social constraints are very much present for local commanders but less so for outside Taliban fighters. Some local commanders have shown that they are willing to allow schools and clinics under some conditions if the population so demands. One example of local mediation is increasing Islamic teachings from two to five hours per week making a school ‘acceptable’. Understanding these dynamics at the fragmented level required, after close to 40 years of war and displacement, will be time consuming but necessary. Localised conflicts should be addressed and the surge may create a window of opportunity for doing so. If this happened it could reduce the capacity of outside insurgents and other elements to use these conflicts to gain a foothold and support in areas where they were previously not welcome. Such an effort requires understanding of the context of the local conflict and concentrated planning which unfortunately is unlikely to be in place.

Thirdly, with providing security also come a need to apply repressive pressure but the intelligence quality generates problems. Major General Flynn has criticised the capacity of the US Army for social analysis and understanding of networks and drivers in Afghanistan. There are many accounts of interpreters and others using this weakness to manipulate NATO intelligence and, for example, airstrikes can be provoked by false intelligence in order to settle local disagreements. While less trust is now placed in limited sources, the capacity to contextualise the information appears to be as weak as before. Confusingly there is a function, the Human Terrain System, created to provide social analysis and context. If this situational and operational understanding is lacking then what is the strategy of the surge and the assumptions of Afghan responses based on?

Fourthly, will US/ISAF unit commanders pull in the same direction? A few incidents involving incorrect targeting or raids on women’s wards in hospitals will jeopardise any gains. Overall NATO/ISAF command may be onboard but if unit commanders can run their own boots-through-the-door-operations the ‘security’ provided will hardly endear Afghans. While the knee-jerk modifications of reality seem to have been replaced by a standard statement along the lines of taking all allegations of misconduct seriously, will it be enough to sway the remarkably fast Afghan word-by-mouth? During research in Kabul there were repeated protests in reaction to an alleged burning of the Quran by foreign forces in Wardak. An independent Afghan investigation had reportedly concluded that the rumour was not true but it still generated large protests weeks later.

This conflict is largely about perceptions and contextualising action and intent. It is about not being perceived as an occupying force, a threat, an imposition. This has obviously been understood, but something happens between realisation and implementation in both military and civilian strategies. The right questions are there after eight years but the answers seem removed from local reality. The possible respite created by the surge should be used to understand the social context and dynamics but time appears to be in short supply. The surge looks more like an ‘Iraqification’, the propping up of the situation to create the illusion of stability and facilitate an exit.

But the perceived broken promises left behind will not be forgotten and abandonment is not likely to be forgiven. Not again.

Karl Sandstrom is currently in his final year of his PhD thesis at the University of St Andrews’ School of International Relations. He is informed by field research in the US, the UK, Somaliland (NW Somalia), and Afghanistan. Karl continues to keep a close watch on the developments in these regions and how they affect strategy formation and implementation.

Next Week: Iraq: What happens when America pulls out?

NATO goes into Marjah

NATO launched a major offensive today against the Taliban stronghold of Marjah in central Helmand. The strategy is interesting and unique for a few reasons. First, the attack was widely publicised in an attempt to get civilians out of the way to avoid casualties, but also in the hopes that the inhabitants of Marjah would side with the NATO forces and inform on the Taliban. Second, this is the first NATO assault where Afghan government forces - military, civilian, and police - will be following immediately in the wake the NATO operation. NATO forces will also remain in situ, but the Afghans are supposedly going to be starting with development and governance as soon as the dust follows. This is good in theory, but it remains to be seen how effective this has been. There as supposedly 1,000 Afghan police following on NATO's heels. If these are 1,000 honest and well trained police then Marjah will certainly be better off. If these are a bunch of poorly trained, corrupt and belligerent police - problems endemic in the Afghan police force - I am not sure their presence will do much good. Ultimately Marjah will be a test case for the wider NATO and Obama strategy in Afghanistan. The question is, why should the Taliban stay and fight in Marjah when they can melt away and move to other parts of the country not saturated with international forces? Hopefully the new strategy works, but I have my doubts given that international forces will never be present enough in all parts of the country to shut down the Taliban. Therefore, in addition to offensive operations the Government of Afghanistan needs to establish parameters outlining how to involve some Taliban in the government, while the international community needs to be much more effective at training and equipping Afghan police and military forces.

Barack Obama's Nobel Prize: A Debate

Barack Obama's award of the Nobel Peace Prize, with nominations having closed just a month into his Presidential term, has raised eyebrows. Here a number of Contributors discuss the award. Why was it made, and is it deserved? What’s the political thinking behind it? How will affect Obama’s ability to pursue his foreign policy objectives? What will be reaction domestically?

Arne Westad - This is a Nobel for good intentions rather than for achievements, Since Obama had been in office for all of a week and a half when the deadline for nominations ran out (on 1 February), it is obviously the promise of Obama that is being rewarded. In this sense it is probably first and foremost intended as a prize to the Americans for having had the courage to elect him. But it is hard to claim that the prize is going to the one who has done most for the cause of peace over the past year.

Nick Kitchen - It's hard to see that this can be a Nobel Prize 'for' anything - whilst the committee can always make decision after the end of nominations and do not have to draw solely from the official list of nominees, what exactly is Barack Obama supposed to have actually done to merit the award?

Nigel Ashton - This is the Nobel Prize for hope. You can't make a case that Obama has achieved anything yet in terms of ending the conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq or Israel/Palestine. It's also the Nobel Prize for not being George Bush.

George Lawson - The Nobel Foundation has had its fair share of odd moments. In its time, it has nominated Stalin and Mussolini, ignored Churchill and Ghandi and given the peace prize to Henry Kissinger and Theodore Roosevelt, neither of whom can exactly be regarded as peaceniks. Awarding the prize to a president who, by his own admission, has barely even started to make an impact on the world stage is right up there amongst the committee's quirkiest decisions.

Danny Quah - I think the Global Financial Crisis and the trillions of dollars the international community committed to global rescue has thrown into disarray all semblance of calm, reasoned, longer-term thinking in anything but the hard sciences [in which I would include Physiology or Medicine] and, paradoxically, the higher, more abstract realms of thinking [Literature]. In between - Peace, Economics - everyone has been only grabbing at straws and even, perhaps with hindsight years from now, decisions that might eventually turn out to be wise will right now seem knee-jerk and unthinking.

Mick Cox - Am I the only one who thinks it may have been a very good idea to have awarded President Obama the Nobel Peace Prize? We can of course twitter on about it being too premature and all that. However. we do need to remind ourselves why he may have been considered fit for the peace prize. After all, in less than a year, Obama has talked seriously about nuclear disarmament, made a real effort to overcome the divide between the West and the Moslem world, done something to restore the peace process in the Middle East, kept open some line of communication to the Iranians when urged not to, got rid of a provocative Ballistic Missile system in Europe, tried to defrost the US relationship with Russia, moved quickly to maintain good relations with China, led enthusiastically on global warming, made evident his desire to seek some new deal with Cuba, and stressed the need for the United States to work with and through the UN. Indeed, in his speech to the UN he even defined security in ways that should have warmed the cockles of every cosmopolitan and world society heart. So what is so bizarre about the decision?

NK - Perhaps the fact that on each of these issues any 'progress' is at best encouraging first steps. Even on Guantanamo, the key 'peace'-related pledge of the campaign, is not closed yet, and the practice has proved more difficult than the good intentions.

NA - Probably the most bizarre element of the announcement was the emphasis placed on Obama's supposed quest to rid the world of nuclear weapons. This part of his agenda isn't even supposed to be achievable.

Charlotte Armah - When I first heard of the award - I was surprised. 'So soon?' I thought and then I smiled as I realised that I had tacitly accepted that he was a contender and was just quibbling over the timing. Even John Bolton's whinge is not that Obama was awarded the Prize, but that it seems to go to Democratic US presidents! So what exactly is the issue here? That Obama was awarded the prize at all or that he has been awarded the prize so early into his presidency that he has not had time to achieve anything significantly concrete to deserve the award?

AW - Certainly within the United States, there is the danger of the Peace Prize being seen as Norway’s way of rewarding liberal US leaders just for being liberal.

NK - The Right are going to have a field day: for the listeners of Limbaugh the only thing worse than a liberal is a liberal who's feted by Europeans.

GL - But you can see where the decision is coming from. It has hardly been a vintage year for peace. The world is a mess and Obama, for many people, is its best hope. There is going to be little progress in the Middle East, Afghanistan or any other global hotspot without active engagement from the US government. And undeniably, the president and his advisers have been nothing if not active over the past few months. However, initiatives don't always yield outcomes and it is not yet clear whether Obama's presidency will succeed, or offer a 21st century rerun of the Carter administration, another occasion when a relatively inexperienced president scored high on hope, but low on delivery.

AW - It's certainly a sign of how oriented towards US affairs the Nobel Committee is. It's easier to encourage someone of promise and power than rewarding those who take risks for the cause of peace and human rights – say, Chinese dissidents or Iraqi critics of the occupation

DQ - The first thought I had when I saw the blogosphere reaction to the Nobel Peace Prize Laureate was, Thank goodness, this takes the heat off Economics - nothing that happens Monday will be worse than what's just happened with Peace. My second thought was, Well, actually, maybe not. I figure that this only rounds up a terrible year since September 2008. The various Nobel Committees here should have just called the whole thing off this year - stopped early for lunch and quietly gone home.

MC - There have certainly been odder - and less defensible - decisions made by the "Committee" in the past. What about Woodrow Wilson (who loved the Old South and opposed racial equality)? Menachem Begin (a terrorist in some people's opinion), Mother Terrsa (who seemed to loved other people's poverty while hating condoms)? And of course, dear Henry K. the man who gave so many green lights to so many horrible regimes and dictators in the Third World that one wonders why he was never arraigned for crimes against humanity.

DQ - I don't discount the reaction from the wired masses - even if I reserve the right to disagree with them. They are literate and numerous (the ones I read, anyway), and the integrated weight of their judgement is, after all, the coalface where both peace and social science scratch global reality. But I thought most telling in all the lamenting and complaining on Obama's being awarded the Prize, I have heard no strong well-defined, anywhere close to a majority, statement of the kind "It should have been X instead." The controversy surrounding Obama's being awarded the Prize is not that his actions have taken the world forwards in some people's eyes, and backwards in others. That we could live with, and indeed, it is that that has formed the controversy in all previous Laureates. In this case, however, the controversy, if you want to call it that, is that there has been yet either no action or no result. The difficulty is there was no one else the Nobel Committee could have turned to instead to award their Prize. In these circumstances, the Nobel Committee should have just shut down for the year.

NK - It's certainly an odd assumption to make that the world merits an annual award of this nature - the absence of standout candidates shouldn't mean we plump for potential.

CA - I'm not an academic or an IR expert so I can't debate whether there have been worthier winners or if someone more deserving was overlooked. I agree with Danny that it's very telling that the outcry is not 'It should have gone to .............. fill in the blank.'I would point to the fact that there is almost no international issue in which the transformational impact of positive US engagement is not considered a critical success factor - whether it's Iran, Korea, Afghanistan, Pakistan, nuclear proliferation, the Middle East peace process, climate change, or the global economic and financial crises.

GL - In truth, awarding the prize to Obama is likely to have little substantive effect on the prospects for peaceful change around the world. Far more important will be what goes on beneath the surface of these global celebrity contests - in the nitty gritty of debates in Washington, Tehran, Moscow and elsewhere. But that is not really the point. The prize is a symbol, partly given it must be said, out of fear that things could get worse before they get better. Just as his failure to swing crucial IOC votes to Chicago's unsuccessful Olympic bid did not destroy - or even significantly dent - Obama's appeal abroad, the award of the Nobel Prize is likely to end up as a minor footnote on a busy presidency. Obama can afford to win - or lose - the world's beauty pageants. But there are other, much thornier, aspects of world politics where he cannot afford to fail.

MC - That's right: moreover, if we were to be real purists, then why fetishize the prize at all? Set up by a Swede who made a fortune from wars - perhaps we should be arguing against the prize in toto rather than against specific individuals who have won it. So let's not join the hue and cry. Lots of people have already attacked the decision including some sympathetic to Obama himself. But many have not - including a very large number of people with the least power and influence who, rightly or wrongly, see Obama not as an American but as a symbol of hope in a world where there isn't much of that commodity going around right now.

CA - We all saw the way the US presidential campaign captured international imagination - who would have thought that the French (the French, for God's sake) would be clamouring to meet a black US president! These are unprecedented times on just about any level we can think of - and in Obama, we currently have an international leader of the superpower that has this incredible impact on people. When was the last time we saw world leaders jostling each other to have their picture taken with the US president or seasoned, hard bitten journalists using their camera phones to take pictures for themselves after they'd taken pictures for their newspaper or magazine? We can sit and debate whether or not Obama is a worthy winner, or if this impact will last and all sorts of logic. Sometimes, we just analyse too much. And sometimes it's as simple and as complex as needing hope and finding it in a single individual. Maybe, it's not a bad thing for him to have received an award so early in his Presidency that reminds him, it's not just the hopes of the American people he carries on his shoulders.

NK - This may however be exactly the kind of thing that creates domestic barriers to the achievement of those hopes. A good deal of the American people resent being constantly called upon to be the world's saviour and punish Presidents who value international acclaim over America's domestic priorities or national interest. In that sense, the Nobel committee, in seeking to encourage the early intitiatives of the Obama administration, may have created a rod for the President's back.

Snapshots of Obama’s First 100 Days: A French Spring in Washington?

When Barack Obama fielded questions from an adoring French audience in Strasbourg earlier this month, he pleased his hosts by singling out a shining example of European ingenuity in public transportation – the high-speed rail system. The president disclosed his envy for high-speed trains to the audience, and it should not be taken lightly when American presidents get envious. Just two weeks later in Washington Obama actively campaigned for a similar network in the United States and committed $8 billion for good measure.

Riders of the TGV rejoiced at high velocity, no doubt. Six years ago, seldom were heard any encouraging words for all things French. Claims of France’s relegation to the “old Europe” highlighted the opinion that America could replace Paris with Prague and Berlin with Budapest. The election of the progressive Obama has seen off that argument. In a strange twist of fate that would make Donald Rumsfeld smolder, we see a lot more of France in American public policies these days.

Looking at the ambitious agenda laid out in these lively first 100 days, the social democratic tendencies are remarkable. In response to the ongoing financial crisis, the Obama administration is considering deals to secure a large ownership stake in 19 of America’s largest banks. Speculation rose this week that it would seize a majority stake in the nation’s largest automobile manufacturer, General Motors. The stimulus bill passed in February includes $27 billion devoted to transportation infrastructure, in addition to the money set aside for high-speed rail. And then there’s health care component: $634 billion in the administration’s proposed budget to serve as a “down payment” for overhauling the fragmented and ineffective private system into a public-private entity, aimed at driving down costs and providing universal coverage.

You would think a merry band of French social democrats decamped from the rive gauche to infiltrate the Washington area (although surely not on the Potomac’s own left bank, Virginia). To make sure the parallels did not get out of hand, the Brookings Institution convened a panel asking the now mind-blowing question: “Is America the New France?” Senior Fellow and moderator Justin Vaisse quickly pointed out that if the United Sates was indeed turning into France, the journey to New York would take a mere 90 minutes, all citizens would enjoy health coverage, eighty per cent of homes would be powered by nuclear energy, and the food of far higher quality. Clive Crook, the chief Washington columnist with the Financial Times, opined that while the differences are narrowing, Americans and the French still retain vastly different views of the individual’s relationship to the state and of what one should expect of his government. Brookings Senior Fellow William Galston underscored this point with compelling data from a recent OECD survey: French public spending is 15 per cent higher than in the United States. This translates into France boasting half the poverty rate of America and 25 per cent less inequality between the rich and the poor. France also offers twice the amount of benefits to its unemployed, which recently rose to 8.2 per cent.

Overall, the panel concluded, embracing French public policies can yield only limited benefits for Americans. The overriding concern is that the American government, in the absence of a viable and coherent opposition, will exert too much control over its citizens - a decidedly transformative prospect, and not one for the better. All agreed that over-indulging in the American social democratic experiment would be detrimental to the American self-image as independent, self-determined, and hard-working. As for the upgrade in gastronomy, the American appetite will surely abide without any qualms whatsoever.