UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 114-i

HOUSE OF COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE THE

FOREIGN AFFAIRS COMMITTEE

 

GLOBAL SECURITY: UK/US RELATIONS

 

WEDNESDAY 2 DECEMBER 2009

NICK WITNEY

STRYKER McGUIRE and JUSTIN WEBB

SIR JEREMY GREENSTOCK GCMG and SIR DAVID MANNING GCMG CVO

 

Evidence heard in Public

Questions 46 - 146

 

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Foreign Affairs Committee

on Wednesday 2 December 2009

Members present:

Mr. Mike Gapes (Chairman)

Sir Menzies Campbell

Mr. Fabian Hamilton

Mr. David Heathcoat-Amory

Mr. John Horam

Mr. Eric Illsley

Andrew Mackinlay

Mr. Malcolm Moss

Sandra Osborne

Mr. Ken Purchase

Sir John Stanley

Ms Gisela Stuart

 

Examination of Witness

Witness: Nick Witney, European Council on Foreign Relations, gave evidence.

Q46 Chairman: May I ask members of the public to ensure their mobile phones are turned off or set on silent?

We will begin. Mr. Witney, thank you for coming today. As you know, we are conducting an inquiry on UK-US relations as part of our general thematic global security inquiries. You have co-authored a very interesting publication on a power audit of EU-US relations. I would be grateful if you could begin by introducing yourself for the record.

Nick Witney: Thank you, Chairman, and thank you for the invitation to attend this afternoon.

I am Nick Witney and I am a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, which is a think tank. In previous lives, I have worked in the UK's Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence, and in Brussels, establishing the European Defence Agency.

 

Q47 Chairman: Thank you very much.

The documents that you have written and other things that I have seen refer to the shift in the US approach towards Europe. Do you think that the current focus of the Obama Administration is specific to the Obama Administration, or is it part of a longer-term trend whereby US relations will, for the foreseeable future, focus on areas outside Europe?

Nick Witney: I think it is a longer-term trend, simply because it reflects the diffusion of global power. I think we are entering a multi-polar world where increasingly the Chinese will matter more and more and, after them, the Indians and the Brazilians. I think that that is a function of globalisation. In our report, we certainly identify the idea that the Obama Administration have latched on to this and adopted what they call a multi-partner strategy to try to ensure the maintenance of US power. Assuming that globalisation continues and global power continues to diffuse in the way that it seems to be diffusing at the moment, I think that America will go where it needs to go to get the partners it wants.

 

Q48 Chairman: If there had been a McCain presidency, would there have been any significant shifts or differences from where we are with the Obama presidency?

Nick Witney: If one thinks of what McCain had to say about the league of democracies and so forth, I think that perhaps there would have been a stronger interest in a McCain Administration in reaching out, particularly to like-minded democracies around the globe. That is something that the Obama Administration do not seem too concerned about. They seem to be prepared to deal with China as China without necessarily scoring them down on the grounds that they are, rather obviously, not a democracy.

 

Q49 Chairman: In your document, you argue that the United States is in favour of a more co-ordinated and cohesive European approach, but is that actually always in European interests? Would it not sometimes be better for joint initiatives by some European countries, as opposed to some kind of lowest-common-denominator approach?

Nick Witney: Well, this can certainly never be an either/or situation. As I think we have seen with the recent appointments following the Lisbon treaty, none of the countries of Europe are remotely interested in giving up their independent foreign policies or their networks of bilateral relations, and Washington is probably the last capital in the world where individual European member states would be prepared to shut up their embassies and leave the work to a joint EU embassy.

So, yes, there is always the risk with Europe that, if you are dealing with combined policies, you get to a lowest common denominator and I think that one of the interesting developments that may come out of Lisbon is the sense of more multi-speed activity in the defence sphere, for example, and no doubt in relation to foreign policy too. We see it already, for example in the recognised role of the big three in Iran and that may indeed be a way-a rather variable geometry way-in which Europe chooses to execute more common foreign policies in future.

 

Q50 Chairman: Why should the US favour a more co-ordinated European approach? Is it not actually sometimes in the interests of the US to be able to play a divide-and-rule game? If the European Union is always united and cohesive, presumably it has more power and influence. Is that always in the US interest?

Nick Witney: Certainly, the present rather unco-ordinated and often cacophonous approach of European member states has its advantages for the Americans. In the report that you referred to, we catalogue various instances of how America finds it useful either to divide and rule the Europeans, work around them or ignore them, if they are not presenting a coherent, strong posture. But at the same time it has been a pretty consistent thread of American thinking since the second world war, certainly with J.F. Kennedy and beyond, that on the whole that short-term advantage would, in theory, be outweighed by the opportunity to engage with a more coherent and, hopefully therefore, more effective and united partner on the other side of the Atlantic. I think that has been, with the possible exception of the first Bush presidency, a pretty consistent American view. What is depressing at the moment is that although we believe there is an Obama Administration preference for a united Europe, they frankly do not care too much. They do not see that they will get much out of Europe disunited or Europe united. They are not prepared to do anything very much to encourage the united Europe that they would in principle like to see.

Chairman: We will explore that a little bit further later.

 

Q51 Ms Stuart: May I probe you a little bit more on EU3 and how that is a kind of European policy? We noticed when we went to the United Nations that the language was developing, and occasionally there was talk of P5 plus 1, and then they would talk about P3 plus EU3. That struck me more as a way of making sure that Germany did not feel too left out-they are not on the permanent council-and felt included, rather than as a reflection of a European foreign policy. Do you think the Americans see EU3 as a foreign policy unit? What is your perception?

Nick Witney: I think the Americans have been pretty largely content to leave the running to the European side which has meant Solana, and Solana with the backing of the three big European states.

 

Q52 Ms Stuart: But that is not a European foreign policy. That is very old-fashioned: three big countries who happen to be European doing one thing.

Nick Witney: Yes, but the presence of the high representative in the pack, and as the sort of point man for this, ties him into the other 27. Often European foreign policy has to work on the basis, if you are to avoid lowest-common-denominator outcomes, of acquiescence round the table. It may be that 22 out of the 27 do not much care but are content to be told what is going on by a high representative, although he is more nearly involved in an issue, and to lend their name to it and let the business go ahead as an "EU policy". I think that is a pragmatic way of proceeding.

 

Q53Ms Stuart: May I quickly reverse the question? We have so far looked at what is in it for Obama or the American Administration if Europe is more united. What are the circumstances where the current Obama foreign policy would be to the advantage of the United Kingdom? When would there be something in it for us the way he is going?

Nick Witney: Most of the Obama instincts and the Obama Administration substantive policies are ones which the United Kingdom would in principle be in favour of. Obama has succeeded in changing dramatically the terms of the internal debate in the US about climate change. Alas, there is still the US Congress, but he has done the things that I think we would have all wanted to see him do in terms of extending a hand to Iran. We have seen him looking for a constructive financial relationship with China. Most of the initiatives he has taken-Russia, his moves on the Israel-Palestine dispute-are the things that make Obama instinctively so popular in Europe and, indeed, in the UK. So, in a sense, more power to his elbow, issue by issue, not on everything, but generally speaking. The question that is increasingly being asked now is when is he going to deliver on these specific aspirations.

 

Q54Chairman: Can I take you back to what the US Administration wants from Europe? What does it want from its relationship with the UK?

Nick Witney: It looks, as it does from other European countries, for legitimisation of its interventions overseas. In terms of the role that the UK provided for Iraq and the role that the UK provided for Afghanistan, the demonstration that these were not simply American adventures was, of course, powerful and important to the US.

The US has a particular intelligence relationship with the UK, obviously. It has a particular intelligence relationship with a great many people, but probably with the UK more closely than with any other power in the world. It understands, I think, that the UK is generally free-trading and non-protectionist in its instincts and, as a powerful international financial centre, has many of the same preoccupations and instincts as North America. It will want help, in the same way that Obama came to Strasbourg and looked for Europeans to help him close Guantanamo.

 

Q55 Chairman: But is there something specific that we can provide that other Europeans cannot provide?

Nick Witney: Less and less. Of course, what we would like to think is that we would provide a mediatory role with Europe: that the Americans would come to us in order to understand Europe better, or to have us act as a bridge between the US and Europe, but this, I'm afraid, is an illusion. If it ever worked, it is an historical fantasy now. I think we would also like to think that the Americans came to us to benefit from our wisdom, but again, that is a very widespread European illusion, it turns out.

All our research suggests to us that actually, the Americans, on the whole, think that they understand the world pretty well and that they don't stand in need of a lot of wise advice from their European partners, not even from the British. There are advantages in literally speaking the same language. It makes it easier to converse, exchange ideas and act as a sounding board, which is something that the Americans would occasionally want, but I don't think we have any longer the particular advantage that we have liked to believe we have.

Chairman: I think some of my colleagues will come in on that later.

 

Q56Sir Menzies Campbell: May I read something to you with which I am sure you will be familiar? It says of the Europeans: "They fail to take responsibility where they should (for example, on Russia); they fail to get what they want out of the US (for example, visa-free travel); they acquiesce when America chooses to strong-arm them (except in the economic relationship); they adopt courses of action not out of conviction but in order to propitiate their patron (for example, Afghanistan); and they suffer from US policies not specifically directed against them but which nonetheless have adverse consequences for them (for example, Israel/Palestine). Americans, meanwhile, find European pretensions to play Athens to their Rome both patronising and frustrating...They do not want lectures from Europeans; they want practical help." You will recognise that, because you wrote it.

Nick Witney: It's not under-written, is it? But I recognise it.

 

57 Sir Menzies Campbell: That was the point I was going to make. It's pretty strong meat, isn't it?

Nick Witney: Yes, but I think it's true.

 

58 Sir Menzies Campbell: You feel it's justified?

Nick Witney: Yes.

 

Q59 Sir Menzies Campbell: That suggests a relationship rather keener to subservience than one of a subordinate nature.

Nick Witney: Yes. I think so. Again, I guess this is an accusation if I direct it into the UK, but it's an accusation I generalise surprisingly widely across other European countries: we have fallen into the habit of treating the Americans with a very excessive degree of deference. It all goes back to the sense that without Uncle Sam, we're all doomed, and that NATO is the bedrock of our security and the US are the ultimate guarantors of our security, as indeed was the case during the cold war.

 

Q60 Sir Menzies Campbell: So this is a post-cold war attitude, or one which pre-dated or was to be found current during the cold war?

Nick Witney: It is an attitude from a set of circumstances that existed in the cold war, that have not now existed for 20 years and that we are finding it difficult to shake off in a world that has changed out of all recognition over the past two decades.

Q61 Sir Menzies Campbell: How should we adapt our relationship to fit this new reality?

Nick Witney: By being readier to assert ourselves where necessary. In particular, by working harder with other Europeans to arrive at consolidated European approaches, because that is what America will take notice of, rather than the individual approaches of individual European states, which are, like it or not, rather rapidly sliding down the scale of global power.

 

Q62 Sir Menzies Campbell: Supposing, in an ideal world as you conceive it, Europe were to find that integrated approach, do you think that that would preclude the Americans from making bilateral forays into Europe if and when it suited them? You mentioned the first Bush presidency. That was characterised at one stage by a willingness to put Bonn ahead of London, but all of that rather blew up in their faces-forgive the metaphor-as soon as the first Gulf war came along.

Nick Witney: You are right, but there is never going to be a switch thrown-there will not be a situation where yesterday, we had 27 European foreign policies, and tomorrow Lady Ashton will dictate things from Brussels. This is going to be a long journey of approximation, and that is because, even under Lisbon, what we are dealing with is the voluntary co-operation of sovereign member states. There will always be differences, and there will always be individual member states that cannot resist an eye for a main chance of making particular runs into Washington to try to secure their interests. Conversely, the Americans will naturally, on occasion, look to exploit differences between Europeans. If you are dealing with something that is not a confederacy or a federal arrangement, but a co-operation of individual states, that is going to happen.

It is a question of a gradual shifting of weight from this very fragmented, atomised view, particularly of the relationship across the Atlantic. At least if you are talking about China or Russia, there is a dawning awareness that we would do better if we could be more unified as Europeans in dealing with those powers. I do not think that we are even up to that first base in our transatlantic dealings. Most people think that there is something rather indecent about the idea of Europeans dealing collectively with the Americans, except in trade. Trade competition policy has become well accepted and has been seen to work well, but we are still very much at the stage of wanting to hang on to those bilateral lines at Washington.

Q63 Sir Menzies Campbell: An expression attributed to you is that European Governments "fetishise transatlantic relations". What did you mean to convey by that? Am I right that that is one of your expressions?

Nick Witney: It is.

Sir Menzies Campbell: What did you mean to convey by it?

Nick Witney: We meant to convey that we Europeans-a big generalisation but I think that it applies-regard the transatlantic relationship as something to be venerated in and of itself as opposed to thinking what it might be used to deliver.

 

Q64 Sir Menzies Campbell: Intrinsically rather than what it produces?

Nick Witney: Yes. That leads you to value enormously closeness, harmony and the act of having a summit and being consulted, rather than thinking, "Do we like American policy? Do we not like American policy?" Would we like to be able to shift it. If we would like to shift it, what strategies might achieve that? How can we make ourselves useful to the Americans or obstructive to them in order to achieve whatever it is that we might want to achieve in the way of change in American policy?

 

Q65 Sir Menzies Campbell: What can we out get of the deal-is that what you are saying?

Nick Witney: What can we get out of the deal, yes.

 

Q66 Sir Menzies Campbell: One last question from me. Is there a distinction, as you observe it, between the attitude of the British foreign service and of British politicians towards the transatlantic relationship? Is one group more hard-headed than the other, or are they equally infected?

Nick Witney: Would you forgive me for saying that I think sometimes politicians are quite keen on the photo opportunity?

Sir Menzies Campbell: You have been observing us very closely.

Nick Witney: There isn't a better photo-op than in the Rose Garden or the White House.

Sir Menzies Campbell: Not all members of the Committee get there, but we understand what you are saying. Thank you very much.

 

Q67 Chairman: We have received written evidence from Lord Hurd, who told us that the UK, under Tony Blair, our previous Prime Minister, was confusing being a junior partner with subservience. Do you agree?

Nick Witney: I have already dished out the excessive deference charge pretty widely. I don't know what Mr. Blair was doing, but I sense that there was a strategy. If you think back to the turn of the millennium, it was a rather millenarian time. The cold war was finished with the triumph of liberal democracies. This was the year of liberal interventionism and the responsibility to protect: the west was going to put the world right. It is a missionary and noble instinct, and I think that Mr. Blair saw the chance to get up there on the elephant's neck and direct the big beast in this joint project of making the world a better place.

You can certainly see that in the last major defence White Paper. In 2003, we are saying that the job of the British armed forces is to be sized and shaped so that we can make a chunky contribution to an American-led operation. That will get us to the table, so that we can be there when the decisions are taken, and they will suppress the premise that they will be better decisions. I am afraid that we have seen that theory, which is quite logical, being tested to destruction, first through Iraq and now through Afghanistan. We cannot afford it. Even if we could, the Americans are not that interested, because they are so big and have so much power to bring to the table.

 

Q68Sir Menzies Campbell: What about political cover? Going back to your illustration of Iraq, the opinion polls in the United States by and large showed support for what George W. Bush was proposing, but when the United Kingdom was added as a partner, the opinion polls were more favourable. Is there a sense in which the political dimension of cover is important to the United States, rather than the kind of bottle that we could bring to the party?

Nick Witney: Absolutely. Yes, the role of coalitions-the allies-in legitimating US military action overseas is very important. I think that it probably carries a bit more kudos, even in middle America, if the United Kingdom rather than some other less well-known smaller partner is coming in from another part of the globe. It is definitely a card to play but it is indeed the case that, in many ways, that is what matters to the Americans, not the fact that we have X thousand troops on the ground.

 

Q69 Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: May I ask you a little more about the likely effect of the Lisbon treaty? Occasionally, America does want something from Europe-over Iraq and now over Afghanistan. Do you think that the likely effect of Lisbon will be to deliver a more pro-American policy in those two areas?

Nick Witney: Not necessarily a more pro-American policy, just a more considered policy, and a more pro-European policy. I know that I risk sounding anti-American, which I am not; and my co-author of this study, who-being an American and working in the Administration-has now become a cog in that machine, is not anti-American either. We are still these great liberal democracies and we do share values. The relationship between the peoples is very close-there is the cultural relationship, and all those things. So, a European policy is likely to coincide with an American policy much more often than not. Lisbon will, I hope, produce more coherent, conscious pro-European policies, not necessarily pro-American ones.

 

Q70 Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: Leaving aside the fact that there was no European policy on Iraq-despite all the institution building, European opinion vanished and disintegrated into two or three camps-is there not a danger to the Americans, in that, in so far as there will be greater opportunities for unity, it may not take the American position? The Americans could therefore find themselves not being able to deal bilaterally with, say, the United Kingdom, which would probably, and which normally, supports America militarily. That could be inhibited, and there could be a very uncomfortable European policy that the Americans would have to accept.

Nick Witney: At the risk of controversy, have we really served the Americans terribly well in Afghanistan? Europeans quite deliberately and irresponsibly ignored Afghanistan; European councils have never debated it seriously. Schuman in Brussels would have been very happy to send this thing up the road to NATO and operate under American direction. Has that approach, at the end of the day, really served American interests? It seems to me that the campaign has bumbled along, with most Europeans contributing the minimum they could get away with, without any real conviction about what they are doing there, but all running their Afghan policies with reference to how to avoid excessive pressure from Washington, or, indeed, how to present themselves to Washington as the loyal first lieutenant.

Whether all that, after eight years, has got us into a position which the Americans can really regard as satisfactory, I doubt. It might have been a lot better if Europeans had taken a grip on it themselves. Would they have been wiser than the Americans? Not necessarily, but they could have decided either that they really wanted to be in and to go for it with some conviction, or that it was all going to be too difficult, and could have suggested that we did not get quite so deeply into the hole.

 

Q71 Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: Do you think that the advent of Lady Ashton and Mr. Van Rompuy will make it more likely that there will be a European position?

Nick Witney: It is the institutions that tend to matter in Europe. There has been a lot of comment about the personalities in these appointments. I know there were initial reactions of surprise in the United States. People have, rightly I think, looked at how the French and the Germans have rather conspicuously ignored the foreign policy jobs and gone for the economic portfolios as an indication that Europe isn't really ready for a conjoined foreign policy. All that is true to an extent.

Over the next five months, when Lady Ashton is designing her foreign ministry, she might produce a machine, not to take the decisions-because we all know that the decisions will remain with the 27 by consensus-but to collate information; generate shared analyses and understandings of positions; prioritise agendas; come up with policy options; put issues in front of member states in a way that they cannot duck; and put Russia in front of them and force Germans and Poles to discuss why there are such extraordinarily divergent views about whether Russia is a threat and what kind of neighbour it is. I am an optimist in these matters. I think the existence of that machine, providing that service, will help a more thoughtful, considered and responsible European set of joint positions to emerge.

 

Q72 Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: So you've described a kind of consensus-building exercise, but of course we've had the Foreign Affairs Council in the European Union for many years, often chaired by a very considerable figure from a big state. It has tried to do exactly what you've described, but over Iraq it didn't work. We noted or were advised that these appointments didn't cause a flutter of any kind in Russia, China or India. They're not only not impressed; they're not even interested, so quite how is the weather going to change?

Nick Witney: To be honest, I think the traffic-stopping metaphor was a bit inappropriate. I don't think we were going to have-or that the system could have found a useful role for-a sort of foreign policy tsar in Brussels, because the authority is not there. The Lisbon treaty does not create a foreign policy tsar; the Lisbon treaty creates a representative and a chairman, and that's the way the thing has to work. We will get continuity. We will now, hopefully, have a machine that will think strategically and not according to a six-month presidency. We've had some six-month presidencies that have been well organised and dynamic, and we've had some recently which have been pretty catastrophically awful. We will now get a chance to have a coherent, stable approach to developing sensible foreign policies where common ground can be found.

 

Q73 Ms Stuart: I was rather intrigued when you said that it's institutions that matter, not the personalities. Can I take you back to your previous job, at the European Defence Agency? You know it was set up to provide greater capability within Europe. The reason why it failed to do that was not that the institution was wrong; it was that the personalities weren't there and the political will wasn't there. Am I wrong?

Nick Witney: You need both. You can have the most wonderful machine, but if it has no petrol in it, it's not going to move or go anywhere.

 

Q74 Ms Stuart: But it's the political will represented by the personalities that drives the thing, and the institutions that follow.

Nick Witney: I don't think it has to be represented by the personalities. I don't for a moment doubt the political will of the two new appointees to make the best possible job of pulling Europeans together, but if President Sarkozy and Chancellor Merkel won't play ball, Baroness Ashton will have a thin time over the coming years. But we travel hopefully.

 

Q75 Ms Stuart: But Tony Blair would have had an easier time if Mrs. Merkel and President Sarkozy wouldn't play ball, and he had picked up the phone and said, "You get your act together," so it's the political will of the personality.

Nick Witney: Sometimes big personalities can induce unwelcome reactions. You're probably right.

Ms Stuart: Thank you.

 

Q76 Mr. Moss: To what extent has the UK become less important to the US, given the shift in opinion on European integration from the US? Will that accelerate as a result of what you referred to in your comments on the Lisbon treaty and recent developments?

Nick Witney: I think the UK has become less important over the last decade. This is my perception, which is probably overdone, but it seems to me that at the time of St. Malo, the UK was ready to get into Europe and start leveraging its defence capabilities around Europe. It assumed a sort of leadership role with the French and invested very heavily and very successfully in building up the militaries of the central and eastern Europeans. We made a lot of friends in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic at that time.

Since then-I think it's partly the distraction of two major wars-we've rather taken the foot off the pedal and detached ourselves from the European mainstream of defence thinking. People may rightly say that it's the continent that's cut off in that case, because so many of the capabilities of European defence players are inadequate. Meanwhile, in America, what is very clear is that they've got over their sensitivity about European defence. The prevailing mood now is "European defence? Yes, we'd like to see some of that." They're very clearly in favour of however the Europeans choose to organise themselves if they can be more effective. So I think that we have, in a strange sort of way, drifted into the position of being more royalist than the King; there's a US Administration that would be content to breathe on and smile benignly at European defence efforts, and we're still very active as the brakeman on the process.

 

Q77 Mr. Moss: How is the UK's approach to Europe viewed in the US, and would that change with a change in Government?

Nick Witney: I think they do wish-I know they wish; at least, some of them wish-that the UK were in there, particularly in the defence and foreign policy fields, waking up some of those Europeans. A lot of European countries don't have a foreign policy at all. Probably the majority of European nations have no experience or no understanding of global engagement. For most of them, their historical experience of warfare has been depressing, to say the least, and they would rather just go for the big Switzerland option; the idea is shorthand for staying at home. Generally speaking, Americans would like to see the UK more active in trying to inject some yeast into this lump of global engagement, and more active in defence and foreign policies.

 

Q78 Mr. Moss: We've received written evidence that indicates that in several areas, France is now the preferred partner in Europe for the US. Do you agree with that?

Nick Witney: If Mr. Sarkozy says no again to more troops for Afghanistan, that could change. I think it's Mr. Sarkozy's clear intention. There was a belief that he had rejoined NATO in order to be able to promote European defence, whereas I think it was probably the other way around: he put his shoulder to the wheel of European defence to give himself coverage for rejoining NATO. I think he's very conscious of where France sits, on the Mediterranean and at the crossroads of many areas of strategic interest to the US, and I think he probably does aspire to be the favoured ally. I doubt he's achieved that status, but-

 

Q79 Mr. Horam: This is a hypothetical question; it follows on from the sort of answers you've been giving just now. Suppose Tony Blair had taken a different decision over Iraq and been more like the "cheese-eating surrender monkeys" of Bush nomenclature. There were obviously two or three different attitudes to Iraq in Europe, but suppose that Paris, Berlin and London had been of the same mind and had taken a firm view about it. In your view, would things have been very different?

Nick Witney: I don't know. We have to wait for Chilcot, really.

 

Q80 Mr. Horam: What would it have done to the UK's reputation, or the UK's hand? We've just been saying that France may have a stronger hand than we think, because it's played it very differently. If the UK had adopted the French approach, what I'm saying is, do you think-it's implicit in much of what you're saying-the UK would have been more powerful and more influential in relation to the US?

Nick Witney: If the UK had been positively against the Iraq invasion, it would have given the Americans very serious pause. Their operation would have lacked the legitimacy that we and many others gave it. Would it have stopped Bush? I don't know.

 

Q81 Mr. Horam: Probably not. None the less, I am thinking of the effect on the UK in relation to the US, and our influence in Washington.

Nick Witney: I don't think today it would have cost us influence.

 

Q82 Mr. Horam: You do not think that it would have cost us influence?

Nick Witney: I don't think it would.

 

Q83 Mr. Horam: I'm just trying to locate what you really think is the right posture for Britain. Dean Acheson's famous phrase was that Britain had "lost an empire and not yet found a role". You seem to be saying that, if there's a foreign policy and defence role, it is more in an integrated Europe-a stronger British presence and influence in Europe and much less deference to America. Is that correct?

Nick Witney: Yes.

 

Q84 Mr. Horam: So if we have a role, it is a role in Europe, formulating a more consensus approach.

Nick Witney: Yes. We, like any other European state, no longer have the military power or the money to make an impact, properly to promote our values and properly to defend our interests in the wider world unless we combine our weights with those whom we work with in Europe.

 

Q85 Mr. Horam: You made the point that it seemed as though the Government at the time were about to make a serious effort to get involved in redeploying defence assets, and foreign policy as a consequence, but they didn't follow that up because of Iraq and Afghanistan and so forth; and if they had done so, that would have made a difference and Britain might have a stronger posture in the world than it does now. And Europe might have a stronger posture in the world, too.

Nick Witney: Yes, I accept all that, I think.

 

Q86 Mr. Horam: You also finally made a point about Russia, which I think is interesting. Russia is after all a European country-at least, mainly a European country. You said that there was an opportunity for a more coherent approach if we got our foreign policy act together. You think that's important, do you?

Nick Witney: Russia is probably as important as any issue for Europe. Geography still matters. We have Russia as a very difficult, belligerent neighbour. The Middle East is the other area that is of huge importance to us where we are on the globe. As far as the Russians are concerned, we have extraordinary diverse views in Europe. We have the Balts and the Poles, who believe-in ways that I think are quite unjustified-that the Russians represent a continuing military threat. I think the facts simply disprove that, but that scarcely matters-what I think on the subject does not matter at all. What does matter is what the Poles and the Balts think about it.

The Germans, of course, take an entirely different approach to how we should deal with the Russians-tying them in and increasing the gas dependency rather than diminishing it. The argument we advanced in this paper is not necessarily to say that one approach is right and the other is wrong-although we do say that we shouldn't be worried about the Russians militarily: be worried about them in all sorts of other ways, but not militarily. Europeans need to debate these things and come to some shared understanding of what they think about them.

 

Q87 Sir John Stanley: On our defence relationship with the US, we obviously cannot begin to match the US in terms of defence capabilities. Given that, what do you consider should be the British Government's objectives in establishing a viable, satisfactory and mutually supportive defence relationship with the US?

Nick Witney: Well, there are some things, obviously, that the UK benefits from in its particular relationship with the US. If you want a nuclear deterrent, the current arrangement we have with the Trident missiles is a highly cost-effective way of doing it, so that's clearly something to preserve. These relationships don't always work-sometimes there are costs associated with them. I would take the case of nuclear propulsion. Things may have changed in the six years since I was in the Ministry of Defence, but up to that point we'd actually had nothing out of the Americans of any use on nuclear propulsion since the original technical help back in the 1950s. What we had had, because of this technical debt, was an inhibition on being able to co-operate with the French in these areas. In a similar way, some aspects of the intelligence relationship-satellite imagery and so on-have encouraged us to stand off Europe in ways that may be outliving their usefulness now.

 

Q88 Sir John Stanley: Right. I wanted to get your response on what our objectives should be. You referred to the benefit that we still derive from the SSBN relationship, but what about the conventional area? What should the present Secretary of State for Defence and the Prime Minister be saying to themselves? What are we seeking from our defence relationship with the US?

Nick Witney: I don't think you can start there. I think you have to start further back, as all strategic defence reviews are meant to, by asking where we think we stand in the world. You need to get rid of the illusion that we can act as a loyal first lieutenant, which will be admitted to the inner councils of the American defence establishment and will be able to guide and steer them, because the experience of recent years has demonstrated that we can't do that. So we have to think about our position in the world and what sort of operations we think we'll be taking part in.

Clearly, interoperability with the Americans as far as possible is an important aim, and we have NATO for that. Parenthetically, I would say that it is an important role for NATO to get back to its last of working for interoperability among the allies, which it has rather lost sight of of late.

The Ministry of Defence needs to get off this concept of the gold standard of being able to do everything, even on a small scale, as well as the Americans, because we simply can't afford to. It has been a bit of a will-o'-the-wisp, which has landed the defence budget in its current sorry condition through this natural tendency to look across the Atlantic and to always want to be up there playing with the premiership side, when we, alas, can't afford that any longer.

 

Q89 Sir John Stanley: Do you think there are any defence opportunities in our relationship with the US that we are currently missing?

Nick Witney: It is of course unsatisfactory, five years on from seeking to extract from the Americans a reward for Iraq in terms of better access to American technology and American classified information, that, as far as I am aware, that treaty is still stuck in the Congress and showing no signs of coming out of it. If we can't do it by ourselves, we perhaps need to think again in a pan-European way as to whether there are ways of getting the Americans to improve market access to their defence market and to operate technology exchange across the Atlantic on a more equable basis.

Chairman: Thank you very much, Mr. Witney, for coming along today and giving us a lot of useful information and food for thought. We are grateful to you.

 

Examination of witnesses

 

Witnesses: Stryker McGuire, Contributing Editor, Newsweek, and Justin Webb, Journalist, BBC, gave evidence.

 

Q90 Chairman: We will resume with our second panel of witnesses. Gentlemen, you were listening in on the previous session, so you can see roughly where we are going in our questioning. Can I begin by asking you to introduce yourselves for the record?

Justin Webb: I am Justin Webb. I spent eight years reporting for the BBC from the United States, most of those years as the radio correspondent and then latterly as what we call the North America editor, so I was doing radio, television and a blog. I covered two presidencies-I got there soon after 9/11, so I saw the atmosphere that there was then-right the way through to the end of the Bush years, through the '04 election and then obviously Obama and his coming to power.

Stryker McGuire: I am Stryker McGuire. I have been here since 1996-sort of a mirror image of Justin's experience. I came here with a wife and a young boy-you went over there with your children, Justin-we have now become citizens of this country as well as America. I came here on the eve of Tony Blair and lived through all of that, and I presume I will be here for your next election. I am a contributing editor to Newsweek now, having run the bureau in London for 12 years. I actually retired in 2008.

Chairman: You are obviously active in your retirement.

Stryker McGuire: Yes.

 

Q91 Chairman: Can I begin with a quote? You referred to British Prime Ministers having a "slavish obeisance to a relationship that is almost always lopsided". To what extent are the political relations between the United Kingdom and the US based on sentiment rather than realism?

Stryker McGuire: I think it is obviously a mix of the two. The relationship is bound to be off-kilter, as it were, simply because of the relative size of the two countries and their geopolitical weight, but I think there is a great deal of sentiment, most of it justified. The two countries have been close through history. They have been close in many ways, including language and culture-high culture and also pop culture. The military and intelligence ties, which you have been hearing a lot about from people who know much more about those links than I do, are extremely important. There are 12,000 to 15,000 US officials who come to London on official trips, or pass through London at least, every year. That is a huge number, and I am sure that the number going in the other direction is also very large, albeit maybe not that large.

I think that what has changed is the reality. If you go back to World War II and before that time, it is remarkable to think that, even in those days, Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met in person-over the course of their lifetimes; not always when they were Head of State-more than 40 times. That was an amazingly close relationship. Since that time, we've gone through an era in which there were two great blocs, and the US and the UK were in one of them. Then, we've gone through everything from the G5 to the G6 to the G7 to the G8, and now it is the G20. The story of the changing relationship between the two countries is the fact that many other countries have risen in importance, and the United States, for all kinds of reasons, has to establish extraordinary relationships with a number of different countries, including this one.

 

Q92 Chairman: Mr. Webb, do you wish to add anything to that?

Justin Webb: I agree, and I think it's helpful sometimes to take a big step, almost a leap back, away from the day-to-day Brown and Obama, Blair and Bush, us and them right now, and to look at how America is positioning itself in the future; what kind of a country it is.

Within the United States, there is an open debate about whether or not the Mayflower link-that sense of being, in essence, European and all the things that go with it in terms of the Protestant work ethic and the sense of what the nation is-is gradually disappearing, as waves of immigrants come from all sorts of exciting and interesting places from right around the world, and that is certainly true; or is the United States a nation in which all those people who come from Vietnam, Afghanistan and wherever else, when they arrive, have to sign up for a kind of set of Americanness that is, essentially, still the Mayflower myth? That is a live debate in American academic circles. You get people such as Samuel Huntington on the right who are very keen to say that America is a nation of settlers, not of immigrants, and that when you come here, you sign up for something, and it already exists, and that is what then links them back to us. Or is there a sense that America is in flux?

The Obama generation, or those who regard themselves as Obama people, probably subscribe to the second view that America is just an incredible melting pot, and that the Mayflower is a long time ago. You can read about it, but it does not have any relevance today.

 

Q93 Chairman: What about the UK approach to the US? Is there a difference between those thousands of officials to whom you referred travelling backwards and forwards, and the politicians?

Stryker McGuire: Yes, I think that the officials, including some elected officials, going back and forth speak more to the long-standing and almost permanent strands between the two countries, and have to deal with institutions ranging from academic institutions, through military intelligence, right to the City of London. The link between New York and London is, I think, a phenomenally important one.

Politicians here sometimes try to use the special relationship for their own ends in a way that US politicians do not need to. Tony Blair saw the special relationship as a way of perpetuating Britain's greatness at a time when it was an important military power, but not a great one, and when it had geopolitical importance but had even more by attaching itself to the United States.

Justin Webb: It's not so easy when you live there to overestimate the importance of the United Kingdom and its policy in a way that you can when you visit occasionally. Officials on the ground do that. In moments of great American decision making, and during the election, they come face to face with the fact that what matters most to Americans is America, and America is so huge and so all-consuming that it does not leave much room for anything else. So when I lived there, in the first few years, I used to scan the American papers, incredibly naively, looking for snippets of British news-this was slightly before the Google aggregator-and as you will know there isn't any, really. An occasional snippet about the royal family, possibly the odd election, if there is one, but that might be on page 2 and there isn't this sort of sense. I think the officials get it, because they are there for some time. They live among Americans and if they are good, they travel around and get a feel for the place and for the size of the place. They go to Kansas and look around and realise they cannot see Europe, either literally or metaphorically. That is a really important part of being an official there, and I think it is terribly easy then. Your Committee visits reasonably regularly, but for those who do not come regularly and come expecting to be a big deal, then it can be a shock.

 

Q94 Ms Stuart: Justin Webb, congratulations on your job with Radio 4. Most of us wake up to your voice, so be gentle between 6 and 7.30.

Justin Webb: If I keel over, it's nothing to do with-

Ms Stuart: We know why.

Following up the Chairman's notion of the civil and political relationship, there is a President, there is a Prime Minister, but there is a second tier of the relationship and that is between the Foreign Secretary and the Secretary of State. How important is that second tier? Or is the President-Prime Minister relationship all persuasive and persuading?

Stryker McGuire: It can be very important. Obviously, it was important during and after the Iraq war, and during and after the invasion. It is not as important as the Heads of State, but I think it is very important. When you hear stories about Hillary Clinton and David Miliband getting along very well, that obviously does not hurt. I also think that to the point of the officials, at least one of your ambassadors to Washington in recent years used to ban the use of the words, "special relationship". Here at the US embassy, they are careful with that phrase. However, ambassadors to this country from the US tend to love it because it gives them something to talk about, basically, 365 days of the year. Just adding to that, to your question about personalities, what is also interesting is that the links between London and Washington tend to be above the ambassadorial level-they tend to be President to Prime Minister, Foreign Secretary to Secretary of State. They tend to be on that level rather than embassy to embassy.

Justin Webb: I think it is important. It is a way in which Britain can still punch above its weight if there are relationships that work, as there have been on both sides of the political spectrum here and there, and were during my time. That can open doors in a city in which-and Washington does very much work in this way-people who know one another and understand the cut of their jib tend to get better access than people who do not. Americans can be terribly closed when it comes to access if they do not trust and like the people.

I agree with what you are suggesting-it is a crucial thing, not just at Secretary of State-Foreign Secretary level, but right across the board, but it is an odd paradox. I think I am right in saying-it was certainly the case at the beginning of the Obama Administration-that the London School of Economics had the greatest number of students from any university represented in the higher echelons of the Administration, more than any other US establishment as well. That might not be the case any more as they have appointed more people, but it certainly was right at the beginning. Peter Orszag, the Budget director, and other really key people were educated here. That was plainly the case in the past-Bill Clinton, of course, went to Oxford-and it hasn't gone under the Obama Administration.

However-and we might get on to this later-I think there genuinely is a sort of carelessness in the Administration about this special relationship, indeed almost a neuralgia about the term, which co-exists with the fact that a lot of them are Brit-educated and very knowledgeable about the UK. Phil Gordon, the Assistant Secretary for Europe at the State Department, couldn't be more knowledgeable or linked into the UK, so these things can coincide.

 

Q95 Ms Stuart: I am not sure whether you were in the room when we quoted to the previous witness something from the evidence that Douglas Hurd gave us: "Tony Blair never learnt the art of being a junior partner to the US and confused it with subservience." What is your view of that statement? Did Tony Blair understand?

Justin Webb: Without speaking specifically about Tony Blair, I think that, as a reporter based there watching people come and go and watching the relationships they have built up and the relationships that went wrong, I agree with what that witness then went on to say to you, which was that there is a way to speak to America and Americans and that one cardinal area to avoid is the Greeks and Romans stuff, particularly with this Administration, which prides itself on its intellectual wherewithal-probably quite rightly. There is an incredible sense of annoyance if we, as the junior partner-or any European, because it applies across Europe-see it as our role to give wise counsel to a bull in a china shop. It has to be more subtle than that if it is to work. They are wise to that ploy.

 

Q96 Ms Stuart: Isn't it counter-intuitive to have to be more subtle with Americans? But I take your word for it.

Justin Webb: I don't think they see it as counterintuitive.

Stryker McGuire: On Tony Blair, it is worth noting that because of Iraq he did end up looking subservient. However, it is also worth noting that not only was Britain shoved aside in the run-up to the Iraq war and in the aftermath, but so was the State Department. It was the Defence Department and the White House that were basically running the show.

 

Q97 Chairman: On that point, it was quite often argued that the British Government were weighing in on the side of one faction or another within an inter-agency or inter-departmental battle in the US. How is that perceived? Do the American Administration accept that that is a fact of life or do they find that difficult as well?

Stryker McGuire: I think that during that era they were weighing in. However, I do not know how often Tony Blair would have had the opportunity to weigh in in a really serious way. It would have been done at other levels and I do not think it got very far.

 

Q98 Sandra Osborne: I know it's rewriting history, but what do you think would have been the implications if the UK hadn't supported the Iraq war?

Stryker McGuire: Your previous witness talked about this. First of all, I have a hard time thinking that it could have been any different. In other words, although I know that it is a hypothetical, it is one that is very hard to imagine. Had Tony Blair played Harold Wilson, I think that Bush would have been furious and taken it as personally as he did when Chirac supposedly said in telephone calls to people that Bush was stupid. I think that that would have infuriated the White House. In the end, if that had happened and we were now talking about it five or six years later-much of the relationship is, under water, solid for all the turbulence at the top of the sea-it would not have destroyed the relationship, but it would have made things extremely difficult in the short term.

 

Q99 Mr. Purchase: I just want to deal with something that you said, Mr. McGuire, in trying to deal with the conundrum of whether we are subservient, or junior partners. It is about the national psyche. You say that you're not really concerned about that particular part of the problem, of subservience to Presidents. You say, "I may...be slightly embarrassed by the political investment" of Blair or Brown. You go on to say, "my real concern with the ritual debate that greets any meeting of British and American leaders is that it reflects a deeper unease on the part of Britons about their identity."

You have dual nationality. I find that the wrong way around; I always find that it is Americans who have no idea what they are. We are certainly concerned in Britain, because we know what we are and that there are certain readily identifiable threats to our identity, but I have always found in my relationship with Americans that they are the opposite. They seem to think that Britons have a deep sense of who they are compared with Americans, who seem not to.

Stryker McGuire: Certainly, if you were to talk to Americans living in America about what they normally call England rather than Britain, they have a sense that people here have a strong sense of identity, but that is because they haven't lived through what has gone on in this country over the past 10 or 15 years. I think that immigration has rocked the boat a bit here, has made people think more about questions of identity-and, as an extension of that, made people in this country, and certainly officials, think more about their relationship with the United States.

That is how some people in this country identity themselves as a country; it is vis-à-vis their relationship with the United States, which is why you would hold a hearing like this. Here, it is quite logical, but it is hard for me to imagine the Committee on Foreign Affairs in the House of Representatives holding a hearing to talk about their relationship with the UK.

Mr. Purchase: I understand that completely. There is a certain feeling about this sitting, and about how important our relationship is, that I know is not reflected in American minds.

Justin Webb: May I add to that? If you look inside the current Administration, there is a level of real frustration and eye-raising at what they perceive as the obsession of the Brits with their relationship with the Americans. It is not about Prime Ministers and Leaders of the Opposition, or indeed Members of Parliament; it is about the press.

In preparation for coming to see you, I asked someone in the White House to take a minute or so with a senior Administration official the other day and have a quick word on the current feeling. He said that he had 30 seconds: the Administration official said, "Get out of my room. I'm sick of that subject. You're all mad." There is a sense in the Obama press office that we obsess about this. I was speaking to another Administration official about the bust of Churchill and the way in which it was rather unceremoniously taken in a taxi to the British embassy, and the fallout, particularly in the British press. He said, "We thought it was Eisenhower. They all look the same to us." They like and admire us in many ways, but they don't want to be dealing with this kind of moaning-not from you and certainly not from Downing street or from the Leader of the Opposition's office, but from the press.

Chairman: We will come on to our media in a moment.

Stryker McGuire: May I add one thing to that? I realise we are going back and forth in a probably inappropriate way. What America sometimes does want from this country speaks to how Americans see Britain. Sometimes they want your-our-moral authority. That was terribly important in the run-up to Iraq, the invasion and the aftermath and so forth. Had that moral authority been stripped from that whole process everything would look quite a bit different.

 

Q100 Mr. Horam: I was fascinated, as Ken Purchase obviously was, by this comment of yours: "my real concern with the ritual debate that greets any meeting of British and American leaders is that it reflects a deeper unease on the part of Britons about their identity." I thought that you were referring to the sort of Dean Acheson comment that we Brits have "lost an empire and not yet found a role". We have some sort of foothold to some extent, but we have not found a real role. I thought that is what you were getting at there.

Stryker McGuire: That is another part of it. It is multi-dimensional. I think it is clear that this country is trying to figure out where it is in the geopolitical world, not necessarily who you are-that is another issue-

Mr. Horam: But where we are.

Stryker McGuire: Where you are. You have this hearing. Chatham House is just embarking on a long, nine-month study to talk about where Britain should be in the world. Britain's relationship with Europe is always an issue. Your relationship with the United States is always an issue.

 

Q101 Mr. Horam: You probably heard some of the comments by a previous witness, who was talking about Europe and saying that he felt, as far as I could see, that a more integrated approach with Europe would pay dividends for this country, not only in itself for the UK and for Europe, but also in relation to America. Would that be so?

Stryker McGuire: Having mentioned moral authority in terms of what America has wanted from this country, another thing that Washington wants from London is for London to play a role in Europe. America feels that that is in America's interests because Americans prefer the British vision of Europe to the Franco-German vision of Europe, which they see as much more federal.

 

Q102 Mr. Horam: It may be, of course, that if we were to move in that direction, the British version of Europe would become more like the Franco-German version.

Stryker McGuire: True, but I think that when David Cameron pulled out of the mainstream centre right grouping, it was not appreciated in the United States. They would rather have the British Prime Minister, if the Government change next time around, active in the way in which Tony Blair and Gordon Brown have been active than the way in which David Cameron has suggested he might act in Europe.

 

Q103 Mr. Horam: Mr. Webb, do you agree with that general point about Europe?

Justin Webb: Yes. I think there is a sort of ambivalence about what they want in Europe that goes right across the political spectrum. You saw it in the Bush Administration. I went on a tour of Europe with President Bush quite a few years ago where we went to Brussels and he saw all the office holders. There were jokes about the number of presidents he was seeing, most of them not elected and all this sort of thing, but at the same time there was an appreciation at that stage in the Bush Administration that they could go to Brussels and see everyone. They could see the convenience of that. Yet at the same time they had a view, and there is generally a view on the right in American politics, that nation states are important and that individual European nation states-Britain, yes, but also the eastern European nations in a sense even more than Britain-need to play their own, individual distinctive roles.

From the Obama team, there is a similar sense. What really struck me is that there are one or two strategic policy aims that cut across the Administrations and which they want from Europe-it's a very different perspective from ours. The one that really sticks in my mind is Turkey. I remember sitting down with Paul Wolfowitz many years ago to interview him about the European Union, and all he wanted to talk about was getting Turkey into the EU-that was his central focus at that time. Fast-forwarding to this Administration, you have Phil Gordon-I haven't talked to him about this, but he's an expert on Turkey and its relationship with Armenia and the rest of it-and I think he would also say that the relationship between Europe and Turkey is hugely important. In a way, it probably wouldn't be the first thing that would occur to any of us-to most Europeans. However, when the Americans view Europe strategically from that distance-when they look at Europe as a bloc, as they sometimes do-they see it as useful in terms of attracting people in and solidifying their friendship or doing other tasks around the world.

 

Q104 Mr. Horam: Therefore, is talk of the special relationship just window dressing? As you said, Mr. McGuire, the last thing Britain needs is more talk about the special relationship. Has this just reached a point where everyone is bored stiff by this nonsense?

Stryker McGuire: I think that the phrase, or the words, are the problem, in effect, because they are so freighted. There is certainly nothing wrong with looking at the relationship, which is a very important one. It is just that the phrase and the way it's used by politicians, and even more so by the media, has caused more of a problem than anything else. The relationship is what it is and it has been what it is for some quite some time.

 

Q105 Sir Menzies Campbell: There's a kind of Lewis Carroll feeling about all this, isn't there? "Words mean what I want them to mean, and 'special relationship' means what I want it to mean at a particular time and in a particular context." Both of you have had the responsibility of representing one country to the other-Mr. McGuire, you have represented Britain to America, and, Mr. Webb, you have done the same in the other direction-so were you guilty of using this expression? If so, were you aware that it conveyed different meanings when you did so? Actually, "guilty" is a bit hard. Were you inclined to use this expression?

Stryker McGuire: That's an interesting point. In my case, you're absolutely right, in a sense, about what part of my role was. Interestingly-Justin will have noticed this-the flagship edition of Newsweek magazine is in the United States, and then there are international editions, so 85% of what I did would not have appeared in the United States.

 

Q106 Sir Menzies Campbell: So you were representing Britain to the United States, but for a British readership?

Stryker McGuire: Yes, or for an American readership that doesn't really want to hear about it and for editors who don't want to hear about it. For a while, the words "Tony Blair" were as magical in some ways as the words "special relationship". If there was a story about Tony Blair during a certain period, you could get it into the United States, but for the most part, although I wished what I was writing was being read more in the United States, it was really being read in Europe, Singapore and around the world.

Justin Webb: I had the opposite problem in a way: everyone here thinks they know America, because lots of them have been on holiday to Orlando and New York. I went there not knowing much about it, frankly, and part of the value of being a foreign correspondent is that you grow into the role, get to know a place, learn about it and then pass that on-that is the great tradition of foreign reporting. That is a) slightly difficult in this age, where people can have one-to-one conversations and b) particularly difficult in America, because people feel that they know it and own it. But on your point, I don't think I ever knowingly used the words "special relationship", except when quoting other people.

What interested and fascinated me during my time there was not the "special relationship" but the opposite-the incredible cultural divide that exists between us and them. You can be as friendly as you like with Americans and feel that you know them, and yet they come from a very different place. That always struck me as the more interesting aspect of reporting America-not the closeness and all that, but the incredible difference.

 

Q107 Sir Menzies Campbell: But that is a divide, is it not, that is reflected internally in America? It is as far from Boise, Idaho, to Washington as it is from Boise, Idaho, to London.

Justin Webb: Yes, but Boise and Washington are much, much closer than anywhere in America is with London. That is the point that I was trying to make. Even Obama, when you think of him and his background-I remember saying this during the election-is still closer to Sarah Palin or John McCain than he is to any Brit, because there are just those wellsprings of culture that are so hugely different. They do not mean that we dislike each other necessarily, or that we cannot be close, or that we do not have a political relationship that is important in various ways. But it means that, from a reporter's perspective, when you go to America-I do not think that I was in any way unique in this-what really interests reporters who go there and enjoy being there is the differences rather than the similarities.

 

Q108 Sir Menzies Campbell: But is there a ready market for explaining those differences to the producer of the 10 o'clock news back here at the BBC in London? I mean, to what extent does what we see on our news bulletins reflect a conventional view-perhaps a historical view-rather than the more variegated view that you have just described?

Justin Webb: I think we have got to be careful, as time passes, that we begin to reflect an America that is not only the sort of America that we can imagine in our mind's eye. Obviously, that means the east and west coasts, but it also means someone in Kansas who has not got a passport and who is not very interested in the outside world etc., and people who have not had any link with the outside world for many generations.

We need to understand and report the newer America-the influx of people, but also the crossover of people, where you have Koreans married to Afghan-Americans, and you have Chinese married to Latvian-Americans. You have this sort of incredible melting-pot atmosphere. We need to reflect on how they live their lives, how they see themselves as Americans-because they do very much see themselves as Americans-and that is part of the American story. By contrast, I think that there is always a tendency in Britain, and sometimes in British reporting, to go to sort of default positions, which are that Americans are all either crazy evangelicals or have guns and are shooting each other all the time, and not to report the ways in which American life is much more interesting and culturally diverse than that. That is a challenge for the future.

 

Q109 Sir Menzies Campbell: Now you are back living and working in Britain, do you have any sense that perceptions of the United States here in Britain are inaccurate by virtue of the fact that there is insufficient reporting coverage of the distinctions that you have just described?

Justin Webb: I think there is an overall perception of the United States that does not always do justice to the degree of outward-looking openness that exists there. Having come back here, one of the things that always strikes me when talking to people here about the US is that people here assume that Americans are much more introverted and isolated than they actually are. Going back to something that was said earlier, I think that one of the things about the Obama Administration-it was said with reference to Bush and whether or not it mattered whether Britain went along with Iraq; it improved his poll ratings when it became obvious that Britain would do so-is that there is a hunger in America not only for outside approbation but for contact with and interest in the outside world. After all, it set up-in a large part-the institutions of global governance.

Sir Menzies Campbell: The post second world war institutions-NATO, the United Nations, the World Bank.

Justin Webb: Yes, and given the right persuasion it could probably do it again. To many Brits, that is a bit of a surprise, because their assumption is that Americans are naturally isolationist, but I don't think they are.

Sir Menzies Campbell: Do you have any reflections on that, Mr. McGuire?

Stryker McGuire: A couple of things: on the question of identity that Justin mentioned, one of your former colleagues, Rageh Omaar, who was at the BBC and now works at al-Jazeera, went over and did a series of documentaries on Islam in America. It was fascinating. He actually could not find a single Muslim in America who identified himself or herself as a Muslim first and an American second. They all identified themselves as Americans, but he said-he is British and, I think, of Somali descent-that to him that is simply not always true in this country.

Sir Menzies Campbell: We got into that argument about the cricket test. I don't think there is a baseball test yet. Thank you.

 

Q110 Mr. Illsley: To take up the point that Justin made, he said that the Americans are more outward-looking than we give them credit for, but before George Bush was elected, he had only visited Mexico-it was the only country that he had ever visited. Only 7% of Americans hold a passport. I appreciate what you are saying about formulating a lot of our world institutions-

Justin Webb: Is it 7%? I think it is more.

Mr. Illsley: Only 7% of Americans hold a passport.

Stryker McGuire: I think that's changed.

Justin Webb: Can I just address that passport issue before we go on to something else? This is not to cavil at the 7%, but until recently-it is no longer the case now, I think-you did not need a passport in America to go to Canada, the Caribbean or Mexico. I wonder how many Brits have passports only to go to France or Spain. Think of the country's size and the cultural diversity that there is on America's doorstep.

 

Q111 Mr. Illsley: I don't disagree with that. Americans have no need for a passport to go on holiday. They can visit the Caribbean and Canada on their ID cards, as you point out. A small proportion of them would travel long distances abroad and engage abroad. When you talked about the Americans being involved in the creation of some of our great world institutions, do you mean at a level of government, or do you mean that there is a view that the people of America embrace world events? My experience is that America is inward-looking and insular. Their TV and news bulletins are very much localised.

Justin Webb: That's certainly true. There is an odd ambivalence at the level of ordinary people and their interests when you think that so many of them, so recently, came from somewhere else. There is still an openness, too. You can go to parts of America and meet people who are quite recent immigrants and who have a lot of financial or familial links with, or just an interest in, areas of the world that you do not normally associate with Americans being interested in them. So, there are some pockets of America where there is enormous knowledge of, interest in and often financial support for parts of the outside world. What I am suggesting is that that is part of the foundation of America that we do not often think about. There is knowledge there, and interest in the outside world, and it is certainly not reflected in the mainstream media at all now, really, which many Americans regret. They are not quite as cut off as we think they are.

 

Q112Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: Mr. Webb, you've commented about the anti-Americanism in the British press and described attitudes towards America of "scorn and derision". I understand what you mean about the British press, actually. [Interruption.] I am not talking personally, here. The press take the same view about Germany. Successive German ambassadors used to say to me that they just despaired at the way cartoons always show Germans with helmets on, even though Germany has been virtually a pacifist country for 60 years. Does this matter?

Justin Webb: That's an interesting point. It may be that we treat too many parts of the world with scorn and derision. My particular issue about America was that I felt that we were missing out. It wasn't an altruistic thing. I just feel that in our reporting of America-I include myself in this; it wasn't a criticism of other journalists-there is a trap when you go to America. For instance, on evangelical Protestantism, which is a fascinating side of American life, there is a tendency-a terribly easy and slightly lazy one-just to find the kind of "craziest" people and suggest or insinuate that they somehow represent America. A more rounded and interesting view of that group of people would show the extraordinary way in which, although they do have some pretty outlandish views on all sorts of topics, evangelical Protestantism drives people's lives, causes them to go to prisons to help combat recidivism, and causes all sorts of aspects of American life, such as its aid programme under Bush in Africa.

What I was suggesting is that there is a tendency-you are absolutely right that we do this in every country, but I have only noticed this about America-to deal in headlines that give a less interesting picture than could be got by delving a little bit under the surface.

 

Q113 Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: Doesn't this partly arise out of a kind of familiarity-almost affection? We talked earlier about the fact that you can't found a foreign policy on sentiment, but at a popular level, there is a colossal trade in popular music, films, television, internet contacts and travel, which arguably has gotten stronger. Just to take the pop music industry, when I was growing up, there was a sort of vestigial French and even German attempt to break into the British charts. I am told by my children that that doesn't exist now. I am told that this magnetic pole-maybe the issue is simply one of language-is creating an "Anglosphere", or a global culture, which is incredibly strong here. Maybe it doesn't resonate so much in America.

Justin Webb: There is also a problem there in terms of perceptions. In a sense perhaps it doesn't matter, but in terms of our relationship with America, whatever that is-whether it's special or not-it is interesting. For instance, it always struck me that when I met British people who came to holiday in the States-we would be talking somewhere-that one of the things that really surprised them, and shocked them in some cases, was how peaceful it was. They would say, "It's amazing, isn't it? You don't have to carry a gun. You can go about your business." In many ways, parts of suburban America are more peaceful than some parts of suburban Britain. It was interesting to discuss with them why that might be. I felt that too often, they got their views of America from the odd visit to Manhattan and popular culture writ large, which gives you a sense of a huge and slightly dangerous-almost deranged-place.

Actually, if you go to most of small-town America-to Iowa, for example, where the presidential process begins-it is small, peaceful and home-loving in a kind of almost schmaltzy way that we would associate with the 1950s, and yet it actually exists right now, in 2009, in the most powerful country on earth. That is an interesting thing that I don't think people get.

Stryker McGuire: It's funny, because I see it slightly differently; I mean, I agree with almost all of what you say, but what I'm struck by when I go back is the amazing encroachment of religion on American life. Even within families that I know, I've seen the situation change so dramatically. You mentioned the suburbs; in suburban New York and suburban Pittsburgh, there are school boards arguing over evolution versus intelligent design/creationism. I find that to be quite remarkable. I remember that in the late '70s, I think, I did one of the first stories for Newsweek-it was on the cover-about the rise of the religious right, which was really quite new at that time; it certainly took place in my lifetime. To see how that has affected the political world in the United States since the late '70s-between then and now-is, I think, quite remarkable.

 

Q114 Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: Can I follow up the point about language, though? Do the Americans in any sense see themselves as part of a global English language community? The rise of India, which the Americans have latched on to very much recently, must be helped by the fact that it is in large part an English-speaking continent, and that, of course, is partly because of us-or, indeed, mainly because of us. Getting away from pure sentiment, it must have some influence on world outlook and foreign policy-or not?

Justin Webb: On the question of language it goes back to this really interesting issue about whether America regards itself in 10, 20 or 30 years time as an English-speaking country. You go to parts of America now and there are little stickers on cars saying, "This is America. Speak English." It is a real source of hot controversy and it's something that's terribly difficult for politicians on both sides of the spectrum, because of Latino voters-and the "Speak English" things are talking about Spanish, of course, and specifically about Mexicans. The issue is whether in the race to get those all-important votes, the parties, both Republican and Democrat, slightly lose, in years to come, the attachment that at the moment, generally, America has to the idea that it is an English-speaking country. That then obviously plays into whether or not, in worldwide terms, it sees itself as part of an association of English-speaking nations. You could postulate that in, say, 50 years, America won't regard itself as simply an English-speaking nation, but as something more.

 

Q115 Mr. Hamilton: I bow to your superior experience here, but I wouldn't have thought they'd ever let that happen in America-that they'd ever let English become a second language in the United States, whatever the demographic changes.

Justin Webb: Well, I think it's an open question, to be honest. I'm not sure about a second language, but if you go to parts of the United States, to Miami-

Stryker McGuire: It's sort of a co-language.

Justin Webb: Yes, it's a co-language already, and the issue is whether, at some stage in the future, that is something that they would address. There are certainly many Americans who feel that the English language is under threat. I simply throw that in.

Stryker McGuire: I think these things take a long, long time, sometimes. I think that still in the United States the largest national group, if I'm expressing that right, is German. That's the largest in terms of where people have come from-it's huge.

Chairman: That would be going back three or four generations.

Stryker McGuire: Absolutely, but that's why it's so big.

Chairman: And you've got a big Irish group as well.

Stryker McGuire: Yes.

Sir Menzies Campbell: Northern Europeans, in fact.

 

Q116 Mr. Hamilton: Can I just move us on a bit-or back, to an extent-to the special relationship, but on the defence level. Mr. McGuire, at one point you said, I think, you believe that the UK's role in the world will shrink with its budget-of course, it is pretty inevitable that our budget will shrink-and that in a transfer from using hard power to soft power, the main instrument of soft power would be the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and we're obviously diminishing its budget as well, so a cash-starved British Army would have important implications for the future of NATO. I just want to come back to this perception of the United States and how it sees the United Kingdom. Does it see the UK as increasingly part of an integrated Europe, given what's happened in recent weeks with the Lisbon treaty, and how are its political perceptions changing with the increased importance of, and the increasing importance that the US gives to, China and India-the emerging giant economic countries, the emerging economies?

Stryker McGuire: I think that it's because of precisely what you're talking about that America has quite different relationships with different countries. If you speak in terms of the defence relationship, I think that the relationship that the United States has with the UK is still very, very important. As I think one of your witnesses said before, there are only two real armies in Europe and only one of those armies has been an incredibly loyal ally to the United States. I think that that is very important.

On the other hand, China and Japan now own 47 per cent. of US Treasury securities. They basically have their hand around the neck of the dollar, as it were, so with them you have to have a different kind of relationship. Mexico is now the largest source of immigration to the United States, so that relationship is very important. There's the relationship between the United States and Israel, which certainly might be called a special relationship. But all those relationships are quite different in nature, and I think that that's really the lesson of what has happened in the past several decades-how those relationships have had to morph to adapt to changing global conditions.

Justin Webb: I think it's worth mentioning that at the level of people-to-people contacts, it is still a fact, particularly among Americans of a certain age, that there is something special about Britain-or England, as Stryker rightly said they always call it. If you go to Billings, Montana, or Virgin, Utah, or Wichita, Kansas, and you get off the plane and go to a Starbucks and say, "Could I have a cappuccino and a muffin?" there'll be a ruffle of interest: "Oh my God, could you just say that again?" There is that extraordinary affinity that they feel with something about us. It's partly the accent, but it's partly something more. You can look at the adverts on late-night cable TV. If people want to advertise things as trustworthy and solid, they will still use, as often as not, an English accent. There is this hard-wiring, almost, in Americans of that generation to regard Britain as special when they look across at Europe, but as we've already discussed, in all sorts of other ways, we don't really think the relationship is that special at all.

I'll just mention one thing, though. We've talked quite a bit about defence, relative size and power and all the rest of it. There is-I always felt this in the time I was there-a genuine respect. Of course, they would say this, wouldn't they? But there is a real respect among senior American military people for their British counterparts. I spent a bit of time in Fort Leavenworth-I don't know if you've been there; it's a fascinating place. It's where they educate their brightest soldiers and they think about the past war and the lessons that can be learned and think about future wars as well. The guy who ran Fort Leavenworth, General Caldwell, has, I think, just gone to Afghanistan to be in charge of training the Afghan army for McChrystal, so it's a really important key role. When you go to Fort Leavenworth and talk to them-there are British officers there-you get a sense of a closeness. I'm sure they are close to the French in all sorts of military ways, and all the more so since France came back into the full ambit of NATO, but I think the real closeness, respect and friendship that exists is something that you shouldn't ignore.

 

Q117 Mr. Hamilton: That leads me neatly into my second question, which is: do we in Britain pay too much heed to what the President says? Are we too interested in the US Government's view and the relationship between Government and Government, and not enough in other sections of US society? As you say, the military has a close relationship, but there must be other sections of US society-media, the arts and cultural areas-

Justin Webb: Well, television.

Mr. Hamilton: -where there is a very different and perhaps closer relationship.

Justin Webb: We have a natural tendency to think of ourselves as being swamped by American television, but actually I think that, in many respects, it is almost the opposite. Think of the success of things such as "The Office". Many formats go over there and are-with various tweaks-hugely successful. There are all sorts of ways and areas of life where we do influence America. If we want to satisfy ourselves, maybe we should obsess more about those and less about the relationship and which door in the White House we get into. We might have more joy that way. You certainly get an impression when you live in the States of all sorts of ways in which things that you recognise as once being British still have a role.

Stryker McGuire: Ambassador Simon Cowell.

 

Q118 Mr. Moss: My first question is to Mr. McGuire. I read with great interest the article that appeared in the August edition of Newsweek. I see it is the international edition, and bearing mind what you said earlier about Americans not necessarily reading what you were writing in Newsweek, it is a very strong indictment of-to coin a phrase from the States-the state of the nation of this country. I am recommending it to David Cameron as a basis for attacking the Labour Government over the last 12 years. Would you say that opinion is shared by movers and shakers in the United States, or is it a very personal view?

Stryker McGuire: I don't think it is an indictment, really. Some of the language on the cover and in the headlines is, as usual, stronger than the story itself. I think the story just says that the relationship has changed, that there is nothing wrong with that and that the UK should basically move on, rethink its position in the world and not always view itself in terms of senior partner and junior partner. I don't think that's really an indictment.

Mr. Moss: What you are saying is that the current state of our finances, the current position of the City of London and the current position vis-à-vis our armed forces and the need to perhaps row back in defence spending-all these diminish our role; and your title, of course, is "Forget The Great in Britain". That is not an indictment?

Stryker McGuire: I don't think so. I really think that it is more descriptive. In fact, you could write a similar story about the United States, which is itself in decline-Wall Street has had the same problems as the City, and budget cuts will be dramatic. There is health-care reform, too: if you take federal taxes, for people making, I think, more than $500,000, the health-care tax will be added to city tax, state tax and so on, so there will be some people-admittedly, quite wealthy people-in the United States paying 60% taxes. I think it is really a description of what I think is going on in this country, but frankly you could write the same thing about indebtedness in the United States.

 

Q119 Mr. Moss: I would like to move on to the UK's diplomatic operation and ask your views on how well or otherwise you think it is doing in the States. In particular, did we use everything to the full during the change of Administration? What effect, if any, would a diminution of our diplomatic operation in the States have on our relationship?

Stryker McGuire: To the extent that the relationship would be affected, it would take some time. I personally have tremendous respect for your foreign service. It has always been my experience while travelling around the world and covering stories that you are often far better off in many countries going to the British embassy than to the American embassy. They are simply better informed. The professionalism in your foreign service obviously goes straight through the ambassadorial ranks. You have very few, if any-I guess you have a few-high commissioners and ambassadors who are in effect political appointees, whereas in the United States these days almost all of them are. I guess I have a sort of nostalgia for the Foreign Office that pushes me in the direction of not wanting to see it get smaller than it is, but it already has gotten quite a bit smaller and, given the budgetary constraints that everybody will be facing over the next decade in the United States and the UK, I think that that is bound to be affected.

 

Q120 Mr. Moss: Would you say that we punch above our weight with our diplomatic operation in the UN-in the Security Council?

Stryker McGuire: In the UN?

Mr. Moss: In the Security Council particularly.

Stryker McGuire: I'm here and not there, so I can't speak with that much authority about the UN.

Justin Webb: I'm afraid I can't either; I know very little about our UN operation. In my day-to-day working life, I tend to go directly to people and not through the embassy. It is interesting that the British ambassador, whoever it is, is still a big figure in Washington, and obviously a decision that this country will make in years to come is the extent to which it wants to maintain and pay for that size of presence. I have always felt that all the ambassadors who have been there when I was, finishing up with Nigel Sheinwald who is still there now, can command attention in Washington, and not all ambassadors from all countries can. They are all there.

 

Q121 Sir John Stanley: Mr. McGuire, I think that we owe it to you for pointing out that President Obama in his inaugural address managed to make only one reference to Britain, that being the defeat of British forces by George Washington. Given the fact that Britain may not be registering too strongly on President Obama's radar, and holding to one side the intelligence relationship and the nuclear deterrent relationship, may I ask you both whether there are particular areas where you feel that for the future the British Government should be trying to construct a new and better relationship with the United States?

Stryker McGuire: I am not so sure that there are any areas in which the UK has failed to take advantage of historical ties with the United States. I was wondering whether there might be a way of strengthening the relationship between the City of London and Wall Street, but they are so closely connected as it is. Viewed from Wall Street, I think that the one thing that they would want the British Government to keep an eye on would be any sort of attempt by Europe-the EU and the new whoever is going to be handling banking regulations, whether that is the internal markets commissioner or whoever-to ensure that that does not adversely affect the flow of business and money between the City and Wall Street.

Justin Webb: On the importance of education, we talked a little about the LSE and others earlier. American universities are such an incredible magnet for talent from around the world-and ours to them. That flow can only work to everyone's favour on both sides of the Atlantic in the future, if it can be maintained.

 

Q122 Sir John Stanley: One final question: we have not referred at all to the economic and commercial relationship between the two countries. Obviously, as far as our external tariffs are concerned, those are an EU responsibility. I would like to ask you both, given that we have these two enormous economic blocs-the US, possibly coupled with Canada, and the EU-and the fact that within both blocs there are still some quite strong protectionist interests in commercial terms, do you think that it is within the realm of possibility, and desirable for the UK's interests, to seek a free trade agreement between the US and the EU to bring down the tariff barriers?

Stryker McGuire: It might be desirable. In the foreseeable future, though, I think it feels like things will be moving in a different direction.

 

Q123 Sir John Stanley: A reverse direction you mean?

Stryker McGuire: A reverse direction. If you look at what's about to happen in Copenhagen on climate change, what appears to be developing is not so much a global policy, but a series of national policies. You get the sense that, under the economic circumstances that we are all facing, countries are looking out for themselves and for their own economies, and that, it seems to me, will last for a few years.

Justin Webb: On the broader point of whether the Obama Administration is genuinely signed up to free trade, I think that it is in many ways similar to the way that the Bush Administration was. There is a sense of wanting to do it, but there are also enormous pressures, particularly in these times, that Obama will come under at key moments; assuming he manages to get a second term, there will be pressures that he might find very difficult to overcome. There have already been one or two cases where they have sort of bent the rules slightly.

It is a constant work in progress for Administrations across the board in the US-the extent of their professed desire to see free trade rules throughout the world adhered to and their willingness to do it all the time at home. I agree with Stryker, I think that the fallout from Copenhagen and the pressures that there are only add to a sense of, "Well if we're going to sign up for these things, we need to make sure that everyone else is transparent and that everyone else is following the rules and paying their people properly and has proper labour regulations, etcetera."-all the things that cause the pressure that there is on occasions in America for free trade not to be at the top of the agenda. It is going to be interesting to see how he copes with it over the course of the Administration.

 

Q124 Sir John Stanley: The US is negotiating and has negotiated significant FTAs with a number of the major Asian countries. Why is it not possible to go for the big one and do one with the EU?

Justin Webb: I have no answer to that.

Stryker McGuire: I suspect that it has something to do with the fact that the EU is an economic power and the sorts of things that countries in the EU do well and what the US does well. They are too competitive with one another and therefore there is an inclination to hold them off.

Chairman: Thank you, gentlemen. That was a very useful session, and we are grateful for you coming along today. Mr. Webb, we look forward to hearing you early tomorrow morning.

Justin Webb: Do come on. I don't think I am empowered to ask you all on, but if I had my way, you would all be on.

Chairman: We are going to break for two minutes while we change our witnesses.

 

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Sir Jeremy Greenstock, GCMG, former British Ambassador to the UN, and Sir David Manning, GCMG, CVO, former British Ambassador to the United States, gave evidence.

 

Q125 Chairman: May I ask members of the public who have recently come in to make sure that their mobile phones are either switched off or on silent?

Gentlemen, thank you for coming along this afternoon. Apologies for the slight delay. This is our third session this afternoon, and we have gone from academics to journalists, and now we are coming to diplomats. We are very grateful to you, and we know that both of you have been very busy in the past few days, and we may, in passing, touch on those issues, but the purpose of the inquiry is to look at UK-US relations in the context of global security.

How would you describe the current approach of our Government on transatlantic issues? For the record, will you introduce yourselves as you begin your remarks?

Sir David Manning: I'm David Manning. I was ambassador in Washington between 2003 and 2007.

Sir Jeremy Greenstock: Jeremy Greenstock. I was political director in the Foreign Office from 1996 to 1998, ambassador in New York from 1998 to 2003, and special representative for Iraq from 2003 to 2004. Since then, I have been director of the Ditchley Foundation.

Chairman: Who would like to begin?

Sir David Manning: With the caveat that I am no longer privy to the relationship on a day-by-day basis, it seems to me that the fundamentals of the relationship have not changed. The present Government see the relationship as the most important bilateral relationship in their terms, and want to work as closely as possible with the United States on the major international issues. I think that there is a recognition that the United States is and remains the only superpower, that it is indispensable in dealing with most of the international problems we face, if not all of them, and that it is important to try and work with the United States on those issues where our interests coincide. So I don't think I've detected any great shift in the approach of our Government to the Obama Administration. I think those fundamentals remain unchanged.

Sir Jeremy Greenstock: I would agree with that. I think it's worth recalling, Chairman, that over the last several years, going back into the last decade, the closeness of exchange between the US and the UK Governments has been, in historical terms, extraordinary. Obviously, there was the subject of Iraq, which needed managing, particularly at the beginning of this decade, but I don't think, in my diplomatic career, I have witnessed from a distance such a constant flurry of communication at the top, at the level below the top and down into the senior reaches of officialdom, between Washington and London-there is far more than, say, the 1970s, when I was first in Washington, or the 1990s, when I was back in Washington again.

What makes up the US-UK relationship is, at this moment, in good repair. The two Governments, as a whole-including, on the American side, the legislature with the British Parliament-the two economies as the biggest cross-investors of all in the world in a bilateral relationship, and the two civil societies, have as much exchange in correspondence as they have ever had and as much business to do together between them as they have ever done. While the media concentrate on the chemistry at the political level-the high political level-it is just not right to assume that what happens at that level characterises the relationship as a whole. It is much more than that. However, I am sure that this Committee will want to examine how that works in practice, to what extent we have in mind real hard-headed UK interests in our communication and business with the United States and whether there are circumstances, as the world develops, in which we may have to husband this great resource in a different way. But the business that we do across the Atlantic bilaterally is in very good repair.

 

Q126 Chairman: You referred to media hype. Is there a tendency for politicians to play to that by exaggerating talk about the special relationship? References were made in previous evidence sessions to photo opportunities and competition with other countries to try to be the first the see the incoming President, and so on. Do we exaggerate the form for the substance?

Sir Jeremy Greenstock: This Committee will know as well as anybody that there are various levels at which politics works and one of them is the public level-the demonstrative, presentational level, which gets milked-but what happens underneath that in terms of substance is very real in this relationship. I think that Sir David and I will both agree that British officials do not use the term "special relationship". We might have to respond to it in public if it is thrown at us by Americans, but we don't regard it as special: we regard it as an asset that has to be nurtured and worked at, and the access to the United States in terms of politicians, officials and Members of Congress has to be earned because we're bringing something to the table. That is the way we think and work. We do not think it is special unless we are introducing substance to make it special.

Sir David Manning: I would very much agree with Sir Jeremy on that. There is sometimes a tendency to over-hype the emotional relationship, probably for the reasons Jeremy gave. I think it is natural to some extent, but underneath it is only special if it is actually doing the business. One of the difficulties about the term "special relationship" is that it can be overused. It can give a sense that we can deliver more than is actually going to emerge from this relationship. It is important to stay focused on the business.

As Sir Jeremy said, it is not necessarily a good thing to refer constantly to the emotional content of these labels but one should get on and do the business underneath, not least because if the special relationship is hyped too much, expectations are exaggerated about what it can deliver and what to expect from it. As Sir Jeremy said, we have to bring something to the table. The Americans are hard-headed; they want us to participate in certain things. If we want to do that, we have to bring something practical. Sentiment can be used from time to time in support of a policy. I don't think one should disguise the fact that warmth between the two countries can help us, but it is certainly not a policy in its own right.

 

Q127 Chairman: You were both right at the centre of relations between the UK and the US throughout the period of Tony Blair's premiership. Lord Hurd said in his written submission to us that the former Prime Minister confused being a junior partner with subservience. Would you agree with that?

Sir David Manning: May I say two things? First, we should not be subservient. I am quite clear about that, but I don't like the idea of junior partnership, either, because it sounds as though we are tied to something in a junior role. The key is to work in partnership with the United States when our interests dictate-and they will in many areas although not necessarily on every occasion. I think we need to approach it from that perspective. I was often asked whether this relationship delivered anything. It comes back to your point about subservience and partnership. I always took the view that essentially the relationship wasn't about quid pro quos. If we wanted to do something, we should do it because it was in the national interest. The key for us is to try to be part of the debate in Washington, in the American system, on the key issues that matter to us, so that at least our voice is heard and we try to influence. I certainly did not feel, as ambassador there, that we were subservient but neither am I keen on the idea of being anybody's junior partner.

Sir Jeremy Greenstock: Let's tease this out a bit more because I think there is a poor understanding in public in this country-particularly perhaps after the saga of Iraq-about what the relationship really is and what it means to us. First, if we have disagreements with the United States in official business, we play out those disagreements, we argue with the United States in private. We tend not to argue in public unless public explanation is necessary or we are having a great row about something that cannot be kept out of the public domain.

One of the most difficult periods of my diplomatic career, as far as the United States was concerned, was when I was No. 2 in Washington in 1994-95 and had to deal with the question of Bosnia and the Balkans when there was severe disagreement-perhaps the greatest disagreement since Suez between the United Kingdom, with some European involvement, and the United States. Some of that was quite bitter; we had some hard arguments. At the same time, under Ambassador Robin Renwick, we were arguing quite hard with the United States over the American treatment of Gerry Adams, Sinn Fein, the whole IRA question and American backing. There were some bitter elements to that, most of which will remain private for a few more years. But I do not remember great headlines about the opposite sentiment, as it were; about our failing to realise that we had to keep the United States on our side and that we had to remember our place. We had arguments.

I can give you another example. At the United Nations, where we often worked hand in glove with the United States because we had exactly the same interests, there were plenty of areas where we had quite severe disagreements with the United States. It was quite important for the United Kingdom at the United Nations, which was my area of experience, to make it clear to other members of the United Nations that we were not agreeing with the United State for the sake of it, that we had arguments and that we would sometimes expose the feebleness of the US argument in the Security Council before anybody else did, because we disagreed with the US.

That sometimes got a blowback. Indeed, in the period of the Bush Administration in Washington, I got a bit of a name from time to time with the harder right-wing elements of being much too soft a collectivist and a multilateralist for their liking. That did not mean to say that I could not do business with them on Iraq, the Middle East and the hard issues. These things do not come out in public, but in your inquiry, Chairman, I think that it is important that the public see a rather greater range of what makes up the US-UK relationship than what normally comes out in rather superficial media comment.

Chairman: Thank you. That is very helpful.

 

Q128 Mr. Horam: I'm very interested in what you say, Sir Jeremy. However, one of the things that was put to us when we were in Washington was that the US is not very co-operative with the UK on certain crucial things-for example, the defence procurement treaty, discussion of which has been going on for about eight years. That treaty is still stuck in Congress. Whichever Administration you have in Washington, they do not seem able to make any progress: we cannot get joint use of software for the joint strike fighter, the extradition thing still remains unbalanced and all of these things go on and on.

In addition to that hard stuff, where the US quite clearly considers its own interests and does not pay much regard to us, there is now what has been described as a "casual" attitude towards Britain, which might not always have been there. Professor Clarke, one of our witnesses, pointed out that at the UN General Assembly meeting in September, it was clear that Gordon Brown was not favoured by the Obama Administration. Indeed, people at the Brookings Institution made the point to us that there was nothing more embarrassing than the scramble to get to be first to see the American President. And then there was the photo-opportunity that our Prime Minister was finally given as he went for a walk-and-talk through the kitchens. All that betokens a casualness towards us and a hard-headed ignorance of our position, given that we have spilt blood and money in Iraq. Isn't this really totally unbalanced?

Sir David Manning: On the defence treaty, you are of course right. Throughout my time in Washington, we were struggling first of all with the whole question of the international traffic in arms regulations waiver, which I am sure the Committee has discussed. We were unable to get that revoked, or changed in our case. In the end, we decided to try to go for a different option, which was a defence trade treaty; I believe that that is still stuck, but there are hopes that it may be ratified in the new year.

I think that that is quite an interesting example of the problem that we have in the UK in dealing with the United States, because of course the problem was not with the Administration; the problem was on the hill. I think that one of the things that we have to understand when we are operating in America is what a very different Government structure it has and what a different society it is. I have said this before-forgive me if I repeat it-but I think that there is a tendency sometimes for people to think that the United States is the UK on steroids, that it is just like us and that if you go across there and you talk to the White House and they say yes, that is the end of it.

Mr. Horam: I think we appreciate that.

Sir David Manning: The difficulty on the trade issue, and indeed on other issues, was the White House. I dare say this might be true in the Obama White House-I don't know; I haven't been working with it-but we often have a problem in the UK in that we get a yes from the Administration, but we then have to work the hill extraordinarily hard to try to get what we want. In the case of the ITA treaty-ITA waiver-it was one individual who blocked it. There is a structural thing that we need to bear in mind. When I was there, I felt that if the Administration said that they wanted to help us with something, they meant it, but very often they could not deliver. I think we have to beware, therefore, of assuming that when we hear yes, it is going to be yes all round.

On the other issue that you mentioned-this question of feeling embarrassed about whether you are first through the door, to which Sir Jeremy alluded-I think a lot of this is the way in which it is seen, if you like, through the media. If we are not seen to be privileged in some way, the special relationship is in crisis. I think it is important for us to relax. I get worried if I think that we are obsessing about this-the sort of "he loves me, he loves me not" school of diplomacy.

 

Q129 Mr. Horam: But do you detect a greater sense of casualness about the way that the Obama-

Sir David Manning: Again, I have to be careful, because I have not been on the ground. I suspect that you have a President who, first of all, is new to foreign relations, and it is important for us to understand that his background is completely different from that of his predecessors. He is a very quick study, so there is no doubt that he will master these issues, but he does not come with a knowledge of Europe and of Britain that his predecessors would have had-indeed, had McCain won, he would have gone back a long way.

The President also comes with a very different perspective. He is an American who grew up in Hawaii, whose foreign experience was of Indonesia and who had a Kenyan father. The sentimental reflexes, if you like, are not there. As Sir Jeremy said, if you want President Obama's attention at the moment, particularly when the agenda is so cluttered, it has to be relevant. You have to bring something important-it has to be something he is struggling with-so I do not think that we should look for slights or imagine that because we were only the second people, or you only got the meeting in the kitchen, that this somehow indicates that we have a President who is casual about the relationship and does not care about it. I think, however, it means that it is going to be less sentimental. Having said that, the advantage for us, it seems to me from the outside now, is that you have a multilateralist. You do not have a sentimentalist but a multilateralist. This is an opportunity for us, actually.

 

Q130 Mr. Horam: What is the opportunity?

Sir David Manning: It is an opportunity for us, because if the United States wishes to work through multilateral institutions such as the United Nations, it is much easier for us than it was when we had a unilateralist sentiment, and we have to find ways of capitalising on that. I am sorry-it is a long answer.

Sir Jeremy Greenstock: Let me take up this point of opportunity, if I may, to which Sir David referred. I think that it is thoroughly healthy that we should have a President in the White House whose respect we have to earn. This is at the public level as well as at the level of confidential Government business, because that is the reality, and it always has been the reality. If it makes us sharper in a competitive sense, because we are not relying on sentiment and a playing field that is tilted slightly our way by history, values, sentiment and all the rest of it, we will perform better.

 

Q131 Mr. Horam: Do we have to change our attitude? That is what I am getting at.

Sir Jeremy Greenstock: No, because that is the way the system works already. You have rightly questioned us over some of the things that might have gone better in the relationship, but I think it is worth bringing out in this session the enormous amount that we gain from a close relationship with the United States. The British public need to have it explained from time to time that you cannot just count on an abacus the deals that go in our favour from the United States because they like us. Why is BAE, one of the largest defence companies, operating in the United States? Why is the City of London an absolutely natural place for American finance houses, banks and insurance companies to do business? Why is it that there is $400 billion-worth of investment in the United Kingdom, which is more than in France and Germany put together? There are many other examples, but it is because in the American system and the British system, although the two systems are different and in the future may drift further apart-something that we might need to examine in this conversation-there is an enormous familiarity and confidence between the two peoples and the two Governments, the two corporate areas in which it is as good for Americans to do business in Britain and for the British to do business in the United States, whatever that business is, as in their own country.

We would not have in the world of global security the partnership that is necessary to defend our interests in an unpredictable world unless we and the United States worked very carefully at the analysis of what was going on in a changed security atmosphere, which brings us into partnership with the only power in the globe that can project military capability anywhere. It is an enormous advantage in an era when the United States is no longer-as it was in the cold war-a European power through NATO. That has changed. That, too, needs examination, but the sentiment at NATO-apart from the bilateral sentiment-is also something that has moved on and needs examining. We get tremendous advantages out of this relationship, and the figures speak for themselves in that respect.

 

Q132 Sir Menzies Campbell: I just wanted to explore with you in relation to the hill-Congress-and the Administration the extent to which British diplomats operate in a highly competitive arena in which another 190 countries would desperately like to have the ear of the Senator who is the Chairman of the Armed Services Committee or the senior official in the Administration. Sometimes you have to use your elbows to make sure that you enjoy the pre-eminent position that previously might have been for emotional or sentimental reasons, but is now much more to be earned than to be handed out.

Sir David Manning: Yes, that is absolutely right. You need sharp elbows. The Americanism is that you had better be in your face. Basically, Americans do not do self-deprecation, so you better get up there, make your case and say why it is a really good one. You are quite right. It is important. I always felt that the embassy was itself a lobby group. I described earlier my view that we had to be part of the argument in the United States. It goes much wider than Washington, as you know, but it is very important that your voice is heard. If you are going to get it heard, there is a lot of competition from within the American system itself, as well as certainly from other countries.

Having access to the hill, having access to the White House and having access to the media to make sure that you can get your message across to the whole of the United States through a network are all very important. It will not get any easier, particularly when the regime has changed in the United States. We now have a democrat who is not familiar with us, so making such arguments again is very important. If we going to be heard and use our sharp elbows, it comes back to the proposition that we have to have something important to say and something to offer on the big issues.

 

Q133 Sir Menzies Campbell: The slights do not matter if you close the deal. Do you agree? As for doing the deal in the kitchen, Lyndon Johnson had some interesting views about the venue where Senate business was conducted. None of that matters if you actually do the deal at the end of the day.

Sir David Manning: It is the substance, and as Sir Jeremy said, the substance of the bilateral relationship is extraordinary-whether it is the investment relationship, the trade relationship or what we gain from intelligence and military relationships. There are all sorts of pay-offs, but they are so because we bring something important ourselves. It is objectively in our interest and their interest. If we can show the Obama Administration that we have things to offer, they will listen. But I am sure that we have to elbow our way in to make the case.

 

Q134 Sir Menzies Campbell: Can we do better at blowing our own trumpet about the achievements or would that operate against future success?

Sir Jeremy Greenstock: If the slights mattered, the two of us would not have lasted as diplomats for very long. You have to separate out the personal from the official. Diplomats don't normally slight each other in a personal sense, but if you're getting a blow in the face in terms of somebody else's national interests, which won't accord with yours, you take it, you move on, or you find some way round it.

From experience of the United Nations, one of the more interesting parts of the US-UK relationship in New York-in the Security Council, for instance-was in tactical handling. The United States would want something in the Security Council, but the United States tends to walk around with quite heavy boots, and there are sensitive flowers in the United Nations of other nations. The United Kingdom is a lot better at the tactical handling of other delegations and of language in drafting texts and tactical manoeuvring. We just happen to be tidier, more experienced and better at it, and not worried about getting our hands dirty in that respect. The United States, which has to conduct policy formation and implementation in an even more public environment than this country, tends to be very sensitive about short-term losses and presentational difficulties, whereas we get on with it.

When we agree with the United States, we can be very helpful to it in that kind of subterranean tactical handling, which doesn't come out in public. The Americans appreciate that, because it brings them something they don't normally have. We of course gain from being on the coat tails of the immense power operation of the United States, which brings us into places that we wouldn't reach if we were just on our own- and we wouldn't reach, frankly, if we were just with the European Union. The United Kingdom uses that, to some extent, quite shamelessly.

As Sir David said earlier, a quid pro quo is involved, and occasionally you run up against Americans who don't like the way we operate or think that we're slightly snotty-nosed about our experience in global affairs or our colonial past. At times, when it works for them-when we give them some tactical advice on how to handle Iraqis in Iraq, or whatever-they can quite appreciate it, because they haven't been there.

There are a number of facets to the relationship where these things really work, but they aren't visible, and if we blew our trumpet on them, we would spoil that relationship, because we're blowing a trumpet then about our use of their power, which it's better not to go on about-so I'll stop.

 

Q135 Chairman: So you wouldn't use the Greeks and Romans analogy that we heard earlier.

Sir David Manning: No, I absolutely would not use the Greeks and Romans analogy.

 

Q136 Mr. Purchase: Moving not very far from what we have been talking about, we have been gathering evidence about our ability to influence the United States and have got generally positive responses, but a bit of a mixed bag. To what extent-I shall ask both of you, if I may-and in what policy areas does the UK access US decision makers, and how does that translate into influence? If it does, in what way does it happen, and can you give us any concrete examples?

Sir David Manning: Perhaps I could begin. The truth is we can go and talk to the Administration about any issue that we want to, if it matters to us and we want to discuss it with the Administration or on the hill, we have access. We are very fortunate, and I think it is the case that we probably have as good access as anybody, and probably better than most.

Access doesn't necessarily mean that what you ask for you are going to get, of course, and I think we need to be realistic about that. This is an unequal relationship in the sense that the United States is a global power. We are not; and one of the things that I think we have to be conscious of is that, on a lot of these issues, there's not much we can do by ourselves. But if we are successful at getting access and influencing the Americans, it may have an effect.

I can only speak obviously about the time that I was in the States myself. I do not know what sort of access and influence we would have at the moment, but during the period that I was there, we had a major difference with the United States Administration over climate change, which was a very high priority for the Government here and something that got a pretty low priority within the Administration. We went and made the case, as forcefully as we could. When the then Prime Minister made it one of our G8 presidency objectives, this was not greeted with enormous enthusiasm in Washington, but it did not mean that we gave up because the Administration didn't necessarily like it. We, because of this network across the United States that I spoke about, were able to do quite a lot of work on climate change, for instance, in the states themselves. I think, probably, opinion changed pretty dramatically in the four years that I was there; and, increasingly, I felt, the White House was out on a limb, and big business in America and a lot of the key states were moving in the direction of accepting that something had to be done. I am not going to claim that that was because of the British embassy, but I am quite sure that making a big effort across America to influence these opinion formers on climate change was worth it, and I think we probably contributed.

If you take an issue that was very much more specifically Government to Government, the decision by the Americans to try and get Libya to give up its weapons of mass destruction, that was very much something advocated from London. Perhaps I should not go into great detail in public at the moment, but, as I am sure the Committee can find out, there were exchanges. That again is an example that I would give you of the impact on American thinking.

Something that happened before I was in the United States in which I was conscious that we affected American thinking was on the relationship with Russia. This is quite hard to remember now, because the relationship is so bad, but during the early period of President Putin's power, there was a real effort, particularly after 9/11, to try and reach out in a much more inclusive way. I can remember going with the Prime Minister to Moscow, and President Putin said that he would like a different relationship with NATO. We worked really quite hard on the Americans to think about a different relationship. The result of this was the NATO-Russia Council. So there are examples.

There are plenty of examples in which we try and don't get very far, and the Middle East peace process was a source of constant frustration to me. We wanted action, and we did not get it. We pressed; we got various promises and suggestions, but we all know where we are. But I come back to what I said: you have to be realistic. We have a certain weight in the system. We should not exaggerate that, but nor should we underestimate it. We should decide what it is that we want to try and do, and then become part of the debate. It will vary from issue to issue and from place to place, but if we have this network, we should try and use it to that end.

Sir Jeremy Greenstock: It is quite important to unpack your question, Mr. Purchase, about influence. It is not as though we are standing outside and we need something from the United States, so we go and lobby-like influencing a board to give your cause a donation. We are talking with them the whole time. Being a superpower is quite a lonely business-the Americans don't have many friends out there; they talk among themselves and, in fact, American decisions on hard issues are always finally made among Americans, in the Committee of Principals or between the White House and Congress, or whatever. Outsiders, even outsiders in Washington, are not involved in it-it is an American business.

However, in the process of getting there, they like to try ideas out on or seek the views of people who they can easily talk to. Many Europeans feature in that; the Japanese might feature, and, nowadays, they might talk to the Chinese, Indians or Brazilians as well, but they nearly always talk to the Brits, one way or another-"What do you think about this?" That gets into a habit of just checking that our perspective on things, which comes from a different national history and background, and gives them extra confidence that they are doing the right thing. Very often, when they don't check with us, they can do the wrong thing, as they find out, for their own interests. Good Americans, as it were, in the State Department, in the National Security Council and in Congress, who think about these things say, "What do the Brits think about this?"

Let me give you two examples, since you were asking for examples. In November 1998, President Clinton wanted to bomb the Iraqis, because they were defying the United Nations-November 1988. Prime Minister Blair said, "Okay, they are defying the United Nations." Then, at the last minute, the Iraqis sent a letter saying that they would accept the return of inspectors to Iraq. The Americans were inclined to think that this was just another fob-off from Iraq. The Prime Minister, in the middle of the night, said no to President Clinton-that if, at the UN, a letter has arrived accepting what the UN has asked for, the US and the UK cannot go and bomb them. The aircraft had already taken off. Those aircraft returned to base without taking any action because the Prime Minister had intervened. The next month, the Iraqis did go over the line and we bombed them.

In the Balkans issue, on Bosnia, we had this fight with them over "lift and strike" and their policy on Bosnia-a bitter division. In the end, the Americans decided that, actually, their policy was not going to produce peace in the Balkans and that the Europeans actually had a route through to a possible solution to the Balkans crisis, but the Europeans were implementing it rather weakly. So suddenly, in August 1995, they came over to London first, talked this through and said that they were going to take over aspects of our policy but they were going to implement it themselves, as the US, and that led to the Dayton agreement a few months later.

These are the ways in which the Americans go through the various stages of grappling with a problem, listen to others, go back into their own councils, decide on a new way forward. And lo and behold, it is rather closer to where the UK was than if they had not talked to us at all. That sort of thing is going on the whole time.

 

Q137 Mr. Purchase: Fascinating. If I can follow on just a little further. Being very specific, if we want to talk to the Americans about foreign policy-not necessarily at the level of Iraq-who do we contact? Who are the people? What are the organisations? Which are the channels we go through? Can you give us some insights into that?

Sir David Manning: I can certainly try and give you insights as far as I was concerned. You would go to the White House. You would go to the State Department. You would almost certainly go to the Pentagon. It would be very important to go on the hill and talk to the key foreign affairs committees, both of Congress and of the Senate. Depending on the urgency and the scale of the foreign policy problem, you would select individuals in at least those areas to go and talk to. In terms of foreign policy, though, it also worth talking about those who are not in government or on the hill, or in the Administration. There is a very powerful think-tank community in the US. It is important to be alongside; it is important to talk to them about your foreign policy proposals. It is a pretty wide panorama, but, as I say, we have good access, and if it is a serious enough issue, you can certainly talk to the National Security Council; you can talk to the State Department; you can talk to the agencies there; you can talk to the Department of Defence. So you have a wide range of interlocutors, and on the whole, the door is open.

 

Q138 Mr. Purchase: Is it ever worth while speaking to the Foreign Relations Committee and its Chairman?

Sir David Manning: Oh yes, absolutely. I think-we may have discussed this when your Committee came to Washington when I was there-it is important for the embassy to do that. It is important for visiting Ministers to do that and it is very important for this Committee to do that. One of the things that I was certainly keen on when I was there was thickening up the relationship, not just with your Committee and your counterparts, but with other committees. If we are concerned-we may get on to this-about a lessening focus among American politicians these days on us and on Europe, it is very important that they hear the arguments from their political counterparts, not just from officials.

Sir Jeremy Greenstock: If I can just add one other aspect to this, we need a very real understanding of American public opinion, because it has an effect on Congress and on the Administration. Therefore, it is actually rather important for the embassy to have a good feel for what is going on outside the beltway. Remember also that American Administrations come to Washington from governorships and other parts of the country-it's as often an ex-governor as an ex-Senator who takes on the presidency of the United States. In my time in Washington in the 1970s, I learned an early lesson in this. My ambassador cultivated the people in Atlanta well before Jimmy Carter became the lead candidate, and he got credit for that. We then had a very close relationship with President Carter in the White House because we were the people who got furthest with the Atlanta team before he ever made it to the White House. That doesn't mean to say you have to cover every single base in the United States, but the British embassy and its system have a huge reach in the United States. That is not just commercial or a service to British citizens in the United States, but a very real aspect of the British ability to do business in the United States in every way.

 

Q139 Mr. Purchase: With two very large missions-one in New York and one in Washington-how do we avoid being cherry-picked by the Americans? How we do avoid giving slightly different versions of the same story? Indeed, do the Americans even try to cherry-pick? Do they like to go to one particular city rather than another for particular purposes?

Sir David Manning: That is a very good question. On the whole, you do get different stories, but I don't think it's deliberate. You have a very complex process of government in Washington, and different Departments are often at odds with each other. A lot of the time, what you are trying to do in the mission is to find out how the argument is going internally. So it's absolutely likely that somebody will go and see the State Department and somebody else will go and talk to the Department of Defence, and you will get a different story. One of the things that the embassy has to do all the way through is to try to assess who's up, who's down and where this argument is actually going.

I may be naive, but I don't look back thinking that there was a tremendous campaign to deceive us and tell us all sorts of different things. I think it was much more a question, a lot of the time, of the Administration finding it quite hard to come to a conclusion themselves, because there is such a cacophony of voices. Even if the Administration do come to a conclusion-this comes back to the structural issue-that doesn't mean to say that the hill will follow.

Coming back to your earlier question, that is why it is so important to go and see the senior figures on the hill who run these great committees, because they are immensely powerful, and they certainly have the President's ear. As we have seen over the Afghanistan issue, it often takes a long time for an American Administration to reach consensus about what they will do. One of the roles that you have in Washington-I am sure this would have been true for Sir Jeremy in New York-is to see how the argument is changing and shifting, to try to make sure that our views are heard by those who we think will affect the decision, and then to monitor things as best you can.

Sir Jeremy Greenstock: To put it the other way round-if that was part of your question-there wouldn't have been different British answers in New York and Washington. The mission in New York doesn't get played off against the mission in Washington, because we read each other's telegrams and we know where we are.

Mr. Purchase: You're really tight.

Sir Jeremy Greenstock: The consulate general in New York is subject to the oversight of the ambassador in Washington. The ambassador runs his own system in Washington. The ambassador in New York usually has a good relationship with his colleague in Washington-it hasn't always happened.

Mr. Purchase: We read nothing into that at all.

Sir Jeremy Greenstock: Against the background that, in my view, all Governments are to some extent incompetent, the British system is less incompetent than most. The capacity of the British diplomatic system and Whitehall to say the same thing, whoever is asked, is quite refined.

Chairman: We won't pursue that line too far; unfortunately, we don't have time.

 

Q140 Ms Stuart: May I pursue the matter a little further? I would like to hear Sir David's observations on how opinions in the United States are formed. Because we talk so much to everybody, do the Administration sometimes use us as a messenger to other parts of the Administration?

Sir David Manning: Yes, I think they do. I think it may sometimes be quite deliberate, but it might sometimes be because certain individuals are hoping to influence another part of the Administration, or even plant a message with us. If that does happen, and it suits us, that's fine-let's use it. It certainly has happened on occasions, yes, and we have to be aware of that, and conscious of how far we want to be used in that way.

Sir Jeremy Greenstock: It is important to bring out an example of where the two systems do not fit together particularly well. That is on Iraq.

Vice-President Cheney and Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld were giving a particular view of what should happen in Iraq, in competition with the State Department under Secretary Colin Powell. Our Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, had an extremely good relationship with Secretary Powell; and the President had a good and constant relationship with the Prime Minister and vice versa. But it was quite difficult for the British system to get to what was, by historical comparison, quite a powerful vice-president, and to influence Vice-President Cheney, because there was no natural opposite number in the constitutional system. In the Pentagon, Secretary Rumsfeld was not inclined to listen, not only to non-Americans but to Americans of the wrong political character. So it was a narrow but powerful area that we found hard to influence in the lead-up to and the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq.

Chairman: Thank you. John Stanley is next.

 

Q141 Sir John Stanley: May I ask you both, following the ratification of the Lisbon treaty, whether you think that ratification will prove advantageous, neutral or detrimental to our bilateral relationship with the US?

Sir David Manning: Shall I hazard the first guess? I would be surprised if it were detrimental. Cynical or not, my view is that the big countries in the EU will continue to run very energetic bilateral policies with regard to the United States. I am doubtful that the EU and the Commission will find it possible to do much to dilute that.

The United States has quite high expectations of the EU. I am conscious that this is a minefield, but I think that it is important to say that the United States wants Europe to be an effective partner. It wants it to be an effective pole. It is looking to Europe to be more effective, more united. Certainly during my time in Washington it was clear that people on both sides of the aisle wanted us to be effective within a more effective Europe. America will look to see whether Lisbon delivers this.

From our side of the equation, I do not have great fears that Lisbon is suddenly going to undermine our role or the classic way in which we have dealt with the United States. Perhaps I shall be proved wrong. Instead, we should see whether there are new levers that we can bring to bear, because if the United States does want Europe to be more effective and if the European Union can do more, we want to influence the European Union to be a more effective partner for the United States.

I look back at my time there and think about the commercial policy. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that it was effectively through the EU that we managed to contain protectionist pressures and other pressures that it would have been much more difficult to contain individually. I do not think that we should see the EU as some threatening competitor. If we are astute, we should be using the EU as an additional lever for us in Washington, unafraid that somehow it will replace us in any way as a key interlocutor. At the same time, we should be conscious that the Americans want the EU to be an effective interlocutor.

Sir Jeremy Greenstock: I entirely agree with that. I would go so far as to say that if the relationship between the United Kingdom and Europe is weakened, the relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States is weakened.

It is quite important to have a good appreciation of the multifaceted transatlantic relationship, and if it would help, Mr. Chairman, I would like to leave for the Committee a copy of the record of a recent Ditchley conference on the transatlantic relationship-US-EU relations-which gives a very accurate description of the selective nature of contacts between the United States and Europe.

On first-pillar business, where the European Union has competence through the Commission-on economic trade, finance and other matters, but particularly trade as the lead issue-the United States will deal with Brussels and with the Brussels Commissioner in charge. It is a powerful presence that the EU brings to the table on economic, financial, trade, development, environmental and other issues. On security and defence-hard defence-issues, America will have very little to do with the European Union. It will want to deal with individual countries, but particularly with NATO. In previous decades that was always, and very strongly, done through NATO, but as I said earlier, the United States is no longer a European power because there is a Soviet threat. It has moved on from that. But NATO can't do everything. It does some of our security work but it doesn't do everything. So, the third area is the individual bilateral relationships, or ad hoc multinational relationships, as with the EU three-UK, France and Germany-over Iran. Those three countries act with the backing of the European Union, but do their own business.

There is an à la carte menu, particularly on the American side, which will respond to where the power is-where the action can get done. That is what the Americans are looking for, with a hard-headed approach. The United Kingdom needs to know how to place itself best in those three areas to get the best for the UK national interest, and that means being hard-headed ourselves about maintaining the channels and relationships within Europe with the United States in quite a complex way. I think our Government, civil service, military and intelligence systems do that very well.

 

Q142 Sir John Stanley: Thank you. May I just ask you a follow-up question on that, impinging directly on the British diplomatic service in the United States? The EU clearly has some pretty expansive plans as far as its External Action Service is concerned, both in numbers and in funding, and it is a safe bet that the External Action Service is going to be thickened substantially in Washington, and probably in New York as well. Where do you think that is going to leave the UK diplomatic presence? You're going to have the External Action Service; they are going to be thick on the ground on the hill, in the State Department, in the NSC and so on. Do you see that as affecting the quality, content and influence of our bilateral diplomatic activity with the US Administration?

Sir David Manning: Again, I am very sceptical that that would be the outcome, but that may be wishful thinking on my part. I think the key will be that the United States Administration and senators and congressmen on the hill are looking for us to provide effective partnership on key issues, and I don't think that will suddenly change. If the EU mission is built up over time, I think it will become more influential, but I really don't think that need be at our expense.

If I may just make this point, which is a bee in my own bonnet, I think that a much greater threat to our effectiveness in the United States is cutting back our own network. I am far more worried about that. I was the ambassador who had to preside over closing four posts in the United States and I was very unhappy about doing that. It is very easy to just look at crude numbers and say, "There are 470 or 500 people in the embassy-what on earth are they all doing?" But I think that a much greater threat to our impact is to cut back on key people, particularly those who are working in areas of real interest to the United States-not just the political and military areas, but science, crime and international terrorism. We have really got something to offer. If we are forced to continue closing our network across America, or cutting back in salami slices, so that it is almost a virtual network, we will find it very much harder to influence the Americans in the ways that we want. Then, if the European External Action Service is there building itself up, we will be leaving something of a vacuum.

I can see that we need to watch what happens with the European developments very closely, but I am pretty sanguine that if we maintain the sort of embassy and the quality of the people we have had-I had splendid people working for me-the access will stay and we will be able to make our case in successive Administrations. If we keep taking people away and if, by some chance, we find ourselves apparently deciding on the numbers of people we have according to the fluctuations of the exchange rate, we will certainly be in trouble. In my view, this is a much greater threat to our position in the United States than the European External Action Service.

Sir John Stanley: Sir David, we can assure you that we have been truly fully briefed by Sir Nigel Sheinwald and his team about the current very serious financial position that they are facing.

Sir Jeremy Greenstock: I agree entirely with what Sir David has said. I would add, Sir John, that the European Union's foreign policy outreach under the Lisbon Treaty has got to prove itself. Outside the first pillar, in my experience, the European Union has normally added up to less than the sum of its parts. When it is capable of punching at or above its weight, we should start investing in it and divesting from our own diplomatic service, but I think that is a long way away. I think that the French, the Germans and others with powerful diplomatic services will maintain their national approaches to these issues, and that the UK has a tremendous amount to add, both for European interests and for UK national interests, by maintaining a strong diplomatic presence.

 

Q143 Sir John Stanley: One final question, not in the EU context, but on the totality. With the huge experience that you both have in Washington and New York, do you see, looking ahead, new opportunities that we may be able to seize in Britain, as a British Government, to strengthen further our relationship with the US in new areas?

Sir Jeremy Greenstock: David will have his own ideas. I will mention just one thing that illustrates some of the things we have been talking about-climate change. The American states-five of them in particular-have started to take their own decisions on carbon emission reduction, which is very much along the lines that we in Europe and the United Kingdom are trying to go, with the federal Government some way behind. In having the capability to interact with those states beyond the federal Government, we are serving our own climate change interests by encouraging American public opinion to realise their global responsibility on carbon emissions. I think that is quite a good illustration of how the UK system can act beyond the immediate relationship with Washington.

Sir David Manning: I certainly agree about climate change. As I said, Sir John, I think it is something that changed quite profoundly in terms of public opinion even during the Bush Administration. If you accept my proposition that the new Administration are naturally much more multilateralist, I think that, where we believe there are real opportunities to move international issues forward through multilateral machinery, this is a new opportunity. Climate change is obviously one of them. I suppose the emergence of the G20 is another, although if I am candid we have to work out whether the G20 is good for us because when we were G8 we were one of eight and now we are one of 20. These sorts of evolutions may not necessarily enhance our power. In terms of our opportunities, yes you have an Administration who are thinking in a multilateral way much more like we do. The rider I might add to this, though, is that one should not have any illusions. An awful lot of Americans do not necessarily think that this is a philosophy that they much want to support. I am not suggesting that there has been a mass conversion, but it will give us opportunities on big issues if we want to use them and pursue issues through multilateral machinery.

 

Q144 Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: You have both stressed the importance of a British global reach in the diplomatic service and all the benefits this brings, and then you say that this is under no threat from the External Action Service, but from two hard-headed diplomats, I find that a little bit innocent. The plan is to build up an External Action Service with secondments from national services and staff from the Commission. Delegations will become embassies. How on earth can we maintain the number of embassies and the quality and number of our staff when that happens? It is bound to reduce our global influence. Are you in denial about this or do you seriously believe that we are going to run both in parallel?

Sir David Manning: I think it is much more likely to be both in parallel.

 

Q145 Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: Where is the money going to come from?

Sir David Manning: That is an interesting issue. As Sir Jeremy said, you are not going to find Paris or Berlin, in my view, or probably a lot of other European capitals outsourcing their key national and international interests to the External Action Service, certainly not in the short run. What you describe could develop over the long period, although I am sceptical, particularly in watching the way that the European Union has developed. But I think it is unlikely that we will find that our interests are undermined in any appreciable way by the emergence of the Action Service. I said earlier-I may prove to be wrong-that my own view would be that our approach should be to see whether we can use the post-Lisbon period to enhance, through the EU, our influence in the United States. The United States may be looking now to a Europe that it hopes will be more coherent and more of a player. That is how I see it. Maybe if we come back in 10 years' time I will have been proved to have been disastrously wrong.

 

Q146 Mr. Heathcoat-Amory: It is quite a risk you are running there.

Sir Jeremy Greenstock: I would argue also that you should not see this as a zero-sum game. I think that we will gain as the United Kingdom from having a continuing proficiency in diplomacy as a national organisation, and we will gain in having an effective and quite powerful EU External Action Service. If we are going to find recruits for both, if you look at the number of good graduates who are wanting to join the UK diplomatic service-about 10 or 20 times the number that the Foreign Office can take-there are plenty of people to recruit into both services. Obviously we will have to help them get going with some secondments of experienced diplomats, but let's not see this as a zero-sum game. There are real arguments for having effective services, both at the EU level and at the national level and that we are perfectly capable of working in both without losing power at our own diplomatic level.

Chairman: Gentlemen, we are not going to go on any longer-we've had a very long session this afternoon. I appreciate you both coming, it has been extremely valuable. Thank you very much.