It wasn’t supposed to be like this. In the future, according to fashionable opinion, Britain’s trans-Atlantic relationship was going to count for less.
Those exceptionally close political, diplomatic, cultural, economic, and military ties between Britain and the United States were not so much going to fray, as be supplanted. New bonds with a new Europe were going to make us less Atlanticist, and less reliant on American military muscle. Washington was going to look to Bonn, then Berlin—or even Brussels—for diplomatic intimacy.
The European Union, Samuel Huntington assured us in 1999, would coalesce into a single, powerful whole. Its emergence as a global power was to be “the single most important move” in a worldwide reaction against U.S. hegemony. Not merely a diplomatic and military counterweight to America, Europe—they announced at the beginning of the twenty-first century—was to be “the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based economy in the world.” And we Brits were going to be part of it.
Pundits might have predicted it, and many even willed it. But none of it has come to pass.
Britain’s relationship with America has rarely been more important. Close relations with a strong, confident United States are more vital for Britain now than at any time since Ronald Reagan was in the White House and Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister.
The idea that Britain might realign herself with a powerful Euro-alternative—indeed, the very notion of a viable Euro-alternative—looks increasingly ridiculous.
Europe
