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This Report is a follow-up to the major Report on UK-US relations that our predecessor Committee published in March 2010, just before the UK General Election and only a year into President Obama's first term of office. A year into Mr Obama's second term, and three years into the life of the Coalition Government, we are pleased to have been able to reach the view that the UK-US relationship is in good health. In particular, we are not aware of any evidence that the House of Commons vote at the end of August 2013 against opening the way to potential UK military action in Syria has damaged the UK's relationship with the US.
In its 2010 Report, our predecessor Committee recommended that the UK Government should adopt a more hard-headed, less deferential attitude to the US. We are pleased to have been able to conclude that the Coalition Government seems to have taken up such an approach, and that, whilst there has been no fundamental change in the UK-US relationship, the Coalition Government seems to have developed in public a more mature and measured relationship with the US. There is little historical evidence that taking a different stance to the US, or declining to comply with US preferences on specific issues, damages the UK Government's relationship with Washington in any long-term way. Moreover, having an independent perspective is often a valuable and valued part of what the UK brings to the relationship with the US. The UK has assets, capabilities and characteristics that US policy-makers value. The Government should continue to base its approach to the US on the confidence that should flow from this and from the historically proven capacity of the UK-US alliance to endure despite differences on specific policy questions.
We believe that the August 2013 episode surrounding potential Western military intervention in Syria demonstrated important general features of the UK-US relationship, namely that developments in the UK can and do influence US policy, and that the two countries' positions can diverge in a particular case without harming the underlying tie. The UK-US relationship is resilient because of the deep-seated historical, economic and cultural connections between the two countries, and because of the extent to which ongoing contact and cooperation between the two states' foreign and security policy-makers is normalised at all levels.
The UK should expect US interests and policy positions sometimes to differ from its own, given the differences between the two states' histories, geographic positions, sizes, demography, domestic political structures and international power. However, in consequence of the United States' continued pre-eminent position in international affairs, it continues to be in the UK's interest for the UK Government to stay close to the development of US policy and to work to exert influence in the US to win US support for UK international objectives.
With respect to the machinery of Government, we agree with the apparent rationale for the Government's creation of the UK-US Joint Strategy Board (JSB) with the US in May 2011—namely, that there would be potential value in the two Governments jointly examining key strategic issues and developing coordinated responses in a more structured way. However, the lack of subsequent public information about the JSB makes it difficult to assess the extent to which the operation of the JSB so far is realising this potential. If the JSB has effectively been downgraded to an umbrella framework for ad hoc contacts, dominated by immediate rather than strategic issues, the missed opportunity would be a matter for regret. On the evidence available to us, we conclude that the creation of the JSB appears to have been announced over-hastily during President Obama's State Visit to the UK in May 2011, without adequate preparation, and that the Government has been reluctant to acknowledge to us the gap between the impression of the JSB conveyed by the May 2011 announcement of the Board's creation and the reality three years on.
With respect to the strategic issues for the UK and US that we considered, in the run-up to the production of the UK's next National Security Strategy in 2015, we doubt that the US 'pivot' to Asia is likely to involve as great a shift in US foreign and security policy attention and resources as has sometimes been suggested; we agree with the Government that the proposed EU-US Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) could have significant positive strategic impact for the UK and the Transatlantic relationship; and the evidence we have received and discussions we have had have left us in little doubt that US policy-makers would prefer to see the UK remain an EU Member.
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