AP News, July 14th, 2007
Britain's "special relationship" with the United States could be cooling, as a senior government official said that new Prime Minister Gordon Brown and President Bush would not be "joined at the hip."
But Britain's new foreign secretary dismissed talk that the relationship had changed.
Lord Malloch Brown _ a Foreign Office minister and former deputy secretary-general of the United Nations _ said in a Daily Telegraph interview published Saturday that Britain needs a more "impartial" foreign policy.
"You need to build coalitions which are lateral, which go beyond the bilateral blinkers of the normal partners," Malloch Brown told the Telegraph. "My hope is that foreign policy will become much more impartial."
Former Prime Minister Tony Blair's close relationship with Bush caused tension across the United Kingdom. Blair was sharply criticized for eagerly joining the U.S.-led Iraq war.
However, Foreign Secretary David Miliband stressed in a commentary published Sunday that the U.S. remains Britain's strongest ally despite a change in leadership.
"With a new Brown government, some people are looking for evidence that our alliance is breaking up," Miliband wrote in the News of the World. "There isn't any and there won't be any.
"Nothing has changed. Our strongest bilateral relationship is with the U.S.A."
Though Malloch Brown issued a statement Saturday morning which said he supported "the emphasis (Brown) places on the importance of the United States as our single most important bilateral relationship," his earlier comments added to the recent scrutiny of British-U.S. relations.
On Friday, British newspapers suggested a speech in Washington by International Development Secretary Douglas Alexander subtly critiqued Bush's policies.
Alexander said that while Britain stood beside the U.S. in fighting terrorism, isolation does not work in an interdependent world.
The Times described Alexander's speech to the Council on Foreign Relations as "a series of coded criticisms of American foreign policy." The Guardian detected "the first clear signs" that Brown, who became prime minister June 27, would reorder Britain's foreign policy.
But on Friday morning, Brown told British Broadcasting Corp. radio that the relationship between the two countries "is strong and will become stronger in the years to come."
In his interview with the Telegraph, Malloch Brown said the close relationship between Britain and the U.S. _ and between Bush and Blair _ grew out of unique circumstances.
He suggested that Brown could take more distance.
"It is very unlikely that the Bush-Brown relationship is going to go through the baptism of fire and therefore be joined at the hip like the Bush-Blair relationship was," Malloch Brown said. "That was a relationship born of being war leaders together. There was an emotional intensity of being war leaders with much of the world against them.
"That is enough to put you on your knees and get you praying together."
Robert McGeehan, a trans-Atlantic relations expert at London's Chatham House think tank, said more distance could appease critics in Britain, but a cooled relationship was unlikely.
