Brown and Obama: How Much Will the 'Special Relationship' Cost?
by John Gizzi
03/05/2009
The first meeting between President Obama and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown -- this week in Washington -- signals a change in America’s relationship with its closest ally. Where the first foreign head of government to call on Obama spent just under 24 hours in the nation’s capital (Japanese Prime Minister Taro Aso, a week ago), Brown is getting a lot more attention and press in two days of events.
But the warm relationship between Britain and the U.S. has clearly chilled. It appears that Obama’s effort to change the way the world looks at America includes reducing our former close ties with the U.K. Brown -- as the British press is commenting -- seems chagrined at the arm's-length treatment he is receiving.
In discussions with the president, and along with addressing a joint session of Congress Wednesday, the 58-year-old Brown is discussing some meaty subjects with Obama and other leaders in his administration: the severe ailments that have wracked the banking industry and the resultant recapitalization process in both of their countries, climate change and global warming, the G-20 summit of industrial nations in April that Obama will attend and Brown will chair.
The most significant news to come out of Brown’s visit was his call in his address to Congress for a “Global New Deal” to bring the world economy out of its slump. In his words, “. . .we should seize the moment -- because never have I seen a world so willing to come together. . .Never before has that been more needed.”
Swell. But the question that no one has yet answered -- not White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs or any British officials -- is just what is it going to cost us?
In public statements leading up to this week’s conclave, there were repeated references from both Washington and London to the “special relationship” between the two English-speaking peoples. For the most part, conservatives across the pond feel that it will be quite costly to keep that relationship going, especially if Obama agrees to Brown’s costly-sounding “New Deal.”
"Write The Communiqué and Press Release Without Bothering To Go"
“The Prime Minister is looking for endorsement of his high-borrowing strategy, pumping money into weak financial institutions and ‘reflating’ the economy by extra public spending,” opposition Conservative Party Member of Parliament John Redwood told me. “He wants to say he has influenced the president, and that together they will ‘save the world’, now and at the G20 he will host.”
One of his party’s most vigorous proponents of capitalism and the free market, Redwood went on to warn that the U.S. would pay dearly if Obama continued the policy of taxpayer-funded rescues of insolvent banks that Brown has done in his country. In his words, “Governments need to stop shoving cash down bankers’ throats as a reward for bad conduct. The banks that did the worst jobs get the most cash from taxpayers. No wonder nothing works. The bad banks have to slim down and sober up quickly. Taxpayer cash delays them doing that.”
Redwood noted that Obama and Brown are sitting down at a time when a further injection of U.S. tax dollars is going to ailing insurance titan AIG and HSBC, Europe’s largest bank, has announced a 70% drop over the past year and is seeking to raise more money from shareholders to buttress its capital position.
“You can write the communiqué and press release now without bothering to go,” said Redwood.
"Meeting of Two Very Extreme Socialist Minds"
Reached at his home in the United Kingdom, Lord Monckton, once a top advisor to former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher from 1982-86, also weighed in critically on the Obama-Brown summit.
“A meeting of two very extreme socialist minds,” is how he characterized the meeting between the leaders of the U.S. and the U.K.
“There are three things they will both get wrong at the meeting,” Lord Monckton told me. “First, both are reflating their economies by printing more money, and this will increase public spending and borrowing. Any fool can borrow so long as someone is there to lend the money. Ask [Zimbabwe President ] Robert Mugabe.
“Second, both will jointly embrace the specious notion of saving the planet, and will support drastic measures. This will lead to major manufacturing jobs from both countries being transferred to India and China and to industries falling silent.
“And third, either at the meeting now going on or at the G-20 summit, [Obama] will begin dealing with the Treaty of Copenhagen [the United Nations treaty with strict climate control regulations]. The Treaty’s proponents didn’t push it in the United States when President Bush was in office -- they knew better. But now it is different with Barack Obama as President.”
Monckton, once a press officer in the Conservative Party in the late 1970s when Thatcher was opposition leader and much-loved conservative Peter Thorneycroft was party chairman, said he “would like to see Republicans in the U.S. saying more of this.”
When His Lordship finished analyzing the Obama-Brown summit, I asked him just what the meeting and the maintenance of the “special relationship” would cost. If people in the U.S. aren’t careful, he replied without hesitation, “it will cost America its leadership of the free world.”
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John Gizzi is Political Editor of HUMAN EVENTS.
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