Post-Brexit Britain cannot rely on a special relationship

THE timing could have been better. Three-and-a-half years after Britain voted to leave the EU, Brexit is about to become a legal reality. This week's falling out with the Americans about China was a striking reminder that "taking back control" from Brussels does not confer the power to act as an independent player. The world has returned to great power politics. Britain will have to choose its side.

The decision to allow the Chinese telecommunications company Huawei to help build Britain's 5G digital network was a bad one. Not because it drew the ire of US President Donald Trump's administration, but because it traded future security for short-term political and economic gains. Forget assurances that the spooks can mitigate the admitted risks of inviting a Chinese company into Britain's critical infrastructure. The risks were avoidable.

The charge by some of Mr Trump's more excitable supporters that the decision shows Britain has reclaimed sovereignty from Brussels only to hand it over to Beijing is unfair, even when levelled against a government that has yet to formulate anything resembling a post-Brexit foreign policy. Talk about a new "Global Britain" does not amount to a grand strategy. The anger in the White House is a useful signal that Washington is not about to come to the rescue.

When in 1944 Winston Churchill told the exiled French leader Charles de Gaulle that Britain would always choose the Atlantic over the Channel, he was addressing a hypothetical. The Brexit vote was not framed as a choice between the US and the EU. The outcome, though, is the same. After 40-odd years during which Britain described its role in the world through close allegiance to Washington and its partnership in Europe, America is now what it has left.

Governments in London inevitably will tilt policy more heavily towards what Churchill popularised as the "special relationship". The old balancing act - Britain serving as the transatlantic bridge - was often uncomfortable, but most of the time it worked. With the exception of Edward Heath, every postwar prime minister prized invitations to the White House above summitry in Brussels. But there was a choice. Post-Brexit, where else do they go?

No one can be sure how much weight the relationship will bear. There is no insurance policy against Mr Trump's capriciousness. On a good day, the president says that Boris Johnson is a great pal and promises the prime minister "the best trade deal ever". On bad ones, he has threatened sanctions were Mr Johnson to give the go-ahead to Huawei.

Mr Trump, one hopes, is an outlier, but there are lessons to be taken from postwar experience. The first is that the Americans are entirely unsentimental about what the Brits like to call the special relationship. British prime ministers have typically followed Churchill's lead by wrapping it up in cuddly allusions to shared language and history, common values, kith and kin and such like. For the Americans, it has always been about hard national interests.

Sentiment counted for nought when Harry Truman severed Britain's financial lifeline in 1945, when Dwight Eisenhower pulled the plug on sterling to scupper Anthony Eden's Suez adventure in 1956, or when Ronald Reagan ordered US forces into the Commonwealth state of Grenada before telling his soulmate Margaret Thatcher.

INTIMATE CONNECTIONS

This is not to say Washington does not value the relationship. Mr Trump's belligerent unilateralism apart, US presidents have understood that even the world's most powerful nation needs allies, and that Britain is about as loyal as they come. A web of intimate connections - intelligence, military and nuclear - woven during the war has made London a natural first stop when the US wants help.

Mr Johnson, though, will have to bid for attention. The US has been stepping back from Europe since the end of the cold war. Americans have turned inwards in response to the costly conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and China has replaced Russia as the main focus of Washington's geopolitical interest. Britain after Brexit is also a less valuable ally. Britain was never quite the Trojan Horse of fevered French imagination but it did carry Washington's message into the inner councils of the EU.

At home, the special relationship will have to bear the political and media scrutiny once reserved for Britain's EU membership. The government will not win any plaudits for trying too hard. Tony Blair never shook off the "poodle" charge after supporting George W Bush in the Iraq war. The line between special and servile is a thin one. And the British can be sensitive about being seen as America's 51st state. It will not be long before the media is urging the government to "stand up" to Washington.

For the moment, the argument about Huawei and transatlantic differences over Iran and the Middle East peace process have inoculated Mr Johnson against that risk. But he badly needs a trade deal with Washington, and cannot afford to allow the Atlantic to become even wider than the Channel.

He could do worse, though, than recall the warning of the US statesman Dean Acheson. Acheson is best remembered for his reproach about Britain's post-imperial search for its place in the world - it had "lost an empire and not yet found a role". He went on to say, however, that a role based on a special relationship with Washington was "about played out". That was in 1962. FT