Obama Turns a Cold Shoulder to Britain
President Barack Obama hosted his first foreign leader when he met in early March with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown — and it was a “diplomatic disaster.”
That’s the view of historian Arthur Herman, whose latest book is “Gandhi and Churchill: The Epic Rivalry That Destroyed an Empire and Forged Our Age.”
In an opinion piece published in the New York Post, Herman points to several examples of Obama apparently seeking to downplay the traditionally close U.S.-Britain ties:
Obama did not hold a joint Rose Garden press conference with Brown, the “usual protocol” when a president and British prime minister first meet.
Instead of citing the decades-old “special relationship” between the two countries, a White House spokesperson referred to a “special partnership.”
In the traditional gift exchange between the two leaders, Brown gave Obama a pen holder made from the timber of the first British ship to fight the slave trade, and a signed first edition of the classic 8-volume biography of Winston Churchill by Randolph Churchill and Sir Martin Gilbert.
Obama’s gift to Brown was a collection of DVDs of classic American films, including “Psycho,” which are all available in British stores.
But Obama had earlier demonstrated his disdain for Churchill, ordering that the bust of Churchill that Prime Minister Tony Blair had presented to the U.S. after 9/11 be returned to the British Embassy.
In fact, another Churchill expert, “Churchill: Speaker of the Century” author James Humes, cited a report that when Obama first entered the Oval Office and saw the Churchill bust, he said, “Get that goddam thing out of here.”
Herman wrote in the Post: “This was a stunning posthumous attack on the memory of a man who was not only the living embodiment of the Anglo-American special relationship (Churchill was half American), but of its ideological foundations.”
That special relationship has seen American and British forces fight together in two World Wars, Korea, the first Gulf War, Bosnia and most recently in Iraq.
But the eight volumes of Churchill’s biography “will plainly sit unread on the White House bookshelf — because Barack Obama clearly considers that legacy, like the Anglo-American alliance itself, to be outdated,” Herman observed.
The London Daily Telegraph succinctly stated: “Obama has been rudeness personified toward Britain.” |
