Diplomacy or Bust?
Posted on February 24th, 2009
by Freddy Gray |
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Like all peoples who have ruled the world only to lose it, Brits tend to be sensitive about their nation’s prestige–downright touchy, even.
The news last week that Barack Obama had returned a British bust of Winston Churchill - a monument that occupied pride of place in the Oval Office of George W. Bush - prompted snorts of indignation among snotty Anglo-Atlanticists.
Nile Gardiner, head of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, wrote on the Corner that Obama’s decision was “wrong-headed and crassly insensitive towards America’s closest ally….. With good reason, there are growing doubts in the UK over the new President’s commitment to the Special Relationship.”
Codswallop. For a country that once prided itself on emotional continence, Britons seem to be embarrassingly thin-skinned about the new U.S. President. After Obama’s inauguration, one prickly UK blogger asked: “did you notice how the British were the only nation disparaged in the speech (we were the enemy America was defending itself against…)?”
Aw, diddums. Did Poor Britannia feel left out at Obama’s world party? Other Brit hacks have pointed out, somewhat feebly, that Obama has thus far shunned the British Press–which means he has not yet given an interview to the BBC.
The truth, of course, is that the Obama administration has shown absolutely no indication that Anglo-American friendship is under threat. The UK’s exceptionally dynamic diplomatic team in Washington has made sure of it.
Hillary Clinton and Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Miliband recently waxed lyrical to each other about the “Special Relationship” –something Clinton didn’t repeat as warmly in a later meeting with Germany’s diplomatic envoys. And next week, Gordon Brown is scheduled to be the first European leader to meet President Obama–beating the energetic French leader, Prez. Sarko, to the PR punch.
But in the warped fantasy of Transatlantic Neoconomia, the world in which every diplomatic challenge is another 1938 and all peaceful negotiation is “appeasement”, any snub of St Winston is sacrilege, a sign that the Atlantic bridge is crumbling.
It’s too early to judge the tenor of Obama’s foreign policy. His taste in Oval Office decor bodes well, however, especially given Bush II’s disastrous tendency to view the world in Churchillian terms of good and evil.
The question now on all those wobbling British upper lips is this: what should Brown give President Obama to replace the Churchill bust when they meet next Tuesday? A golden statuette of David Beckham? Suggestions please…
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Again, another article from the TAC that parrots Buchanan’s book. ( and yes I read it ) Where Hitler was forced into the war and Churchill was the evil figure. I just don’t get it.
Obama might find the statuette a painful reminder that David has shunned LA soccer to return to Spain.
The millenium dome? Perhaps a little too big.
Kate Winslet’s oscar?
Or a framed check for a few hundred billion bob - with a hammer and a sign saying break in case of emergency
at any rate he should certainly bring a large supply of PG tips and some of Prince Charles’ Duchy biscuits
how about Edmund Burke? Oh, well, forget about it. Obama will not accept it either.
So I go with Charlie Chaplin. He is the perfect one: he was British, but lived and worked in the USA almost all his life. And we can have plenty of laugh at the transatlantic bridge, that is Charles Spence Chaplin.
It’s obvious Bill Pearlman missed TAC’s critical review of Buchanan’s book, written by historian, John Lukacs…
Bill, get a grip. Freddy didn’t say anything about the war, or speak at all about its causes.
Do you really take a comment on the over-sensitivity of some Brits about a statue to be a substantive comment about WWII?
You are obsessed. And to your comments on another post, we printed a vigorous defense of Zionism from Peter Hitchens a few years ago.
[...] I swear to FSM that I did not see this until someone linked it in the comments: [...]
Bill is just just trying to disrupt and bait.
PJB never said Churchhill was evil, he was just a poor leader for his countryman in the end. Churchill might well have been able to avoid the war and saved lots of lives all around.
Kind of like Bush could have avoided the Iraq war.
Doesn’t mean Saddam or Hitler were good guys.
How about a portrait of Neville Chamberlain. That would certainly fit Obama. I’m sorry, Churchill lead England in holding off the Germans for almost a full year before operation Barbarossa. If Halifax had been in charge England would probably have made a deal and then every last jew in Europe would have been ground up for fertilizer. So, yes, I’m glad Churchill was there. Obviously among the TAC readership. That’s a minority opinion.
I think a portrait of Lord Acton would probably be a good replacement.
If the White House doesn’t have one, maybe they can rescue one from across the pond before the Brits melt it down to make steel surveillance-camera posts.
A bust of Sidney Poitier would be appropriate. Like Obama he was raised in a foreign environment, has a commonwealth connection and loves to play the race grievance card despite having little connection to American slavery. And well, he’s a star, right?
Those of you whining about Obama giving the bust back clearly have no idea what the symbolism is all about. The GOP and Bush spent the past 8 years making amazingly stupid and ignorant comments comparing themselves to Churchill. The truth was they were the Chamberlin-figures. They led the way to a disasterous war and, like Chamberlin, worked hard to surround themselves with cronies who only ever told them what they wanted to hear instead of what they needed to hear, all the while vilifying the dissenters.
Giving back the bust is Obama’s symbolic gesture that he realizes that the world isn’t the childishly black-and-white, good-or-evil place Bush liked to pretend it is.