America and Britain: The Firm, Old Alliance

By Roger Rosenblatt

Ever since the Falkland Islands became the center of the world, several British politicians and journalists have wondered aloud, if politely, whether the U.S. is really on England's side in this matter. It is. Let it be said plainly, before the warships panic the sheep, that the ties between Britain and the U.S. are as strong as ever, and are not about to be impaired by the geopolitical stratagems of any particular Administration.

There is no nation in the world that the American people value more highly than Britain; none to which they feel deeper personal and moral kinship; none for which they would sacrifice more, including their lives; and none on which they so depend for precisely the same attitude. Many Irish Americans understandably don't feel this way, of course, and Hispanics and other minorities may regard the sceptered isle with vast indifference. But on the whole, affection for the Crown is intense here. This may seem odd, given America's origins, but it is so nonetheless, and the reasons for it go way beyond the sharing of language, history and customs. For all the occasional yipping that has occurred between the two countries, the truth is that they like each other. And although this scrap of embarrassing sentimentality has been vigorously contested by both sides ("I am willing to love all mankind, except an American," said Samuel Johnson), it is the main reason that Britain ought never to doubt where America's heart lies, especially in a crisis.

Indeed, the main reason such doubt exists at all these days is that the two nations have exchanged places in the hierarchy of world power since World War II, and Britain has replaced the bemused hauteur with which it peered across the Atlantic in the 19th and early 20th centuries with a current admixture of dread and regret. What many Englishmen said after the war (and still say, to some degree) is that savage, sprawling America was amusing enough when it was a bulky, sleeping animal, but now that it has grown to a global monster, civilization will go to the hogs. This is the dark side of the days when Oscar Wilde pranced about the States making a show of bemoaning cowboys and bad manners. It was all very funny, in its time.

The trouble is that while Americans could be as tickled with Oscar Wilde as he was with them, they were not nearly so amused to be told where to get off--particularly when it was crass and vulgar America that saved England's neck in two world conflicts. England, for her part, has suffered a special kind of embitterment in the loss of world stature and of the control of her economic destiny. No matter. For the past 40 years (except for a momentary glower over Suez) we have remained each other's strongest and closest friend.

In fact, "friend" is the wrong word, since the British and the Americans are essentially the same people. What they have in common is fundamental characteristics, not merely the results of mutual influence. For one thing, both countries are exuberantly naive. Each wholeheartedly believes that meaning well excuses everything, including empire building, and each is usually dumbfounded to discover that not everyone else in the world agrees.

Then, too, both peoples are grossly sentimental, deeply unsophisticated and dangerously stubborn--the English pride being narrow-nosed, the American blustery; but the effect is equally irritating to anyone who deals with them. The English are famous for not adjusting to foreign places, but Americans don't do this either. Both countries are inventive. The English like to demean American know-how, but they are just as dazzled by ingenuity. They simply have an older world to cherish along with the new; thus they make an elaborate point of doing so. Both countries are class-ridden, though the U.S. says that this accusation applies only to Britain. Both are run by their middle class, though the English have better tailors.

What camouflages these similarities is the style in which they are framed. The English imply everything, including their constitution; Americans feel compelled to be explicit. This is why an Englishman can make a lie sound like the truth, while an American will do the opposite; it's all in the vowels. Stylistically the difference between the two countries is the difference between Rex Harrison and Gary Cooper--a difference that is generally played to the hilt by both sides so that they may simultaneously find each other quaint and horrifying, each regarding his counterpart as if he had never seen such a specimen before. Put crudely, one is a nation of shopkeepers and the other a nation of shopping malls; different size, different look, but the same goods.

Not that any of these things forms the real basis of their alliance, of course. That depends on one matter only: the rather slippery and rarely mentioned principle of the rights of the individual. Both countries have violated that principle too often in the past, but the principle prevails. Add the rights of property, free speech, freedom of religion, and a few other advantages that Britain and Amer ica have developed over the years, and you have the central reasons that if these two nations continue to blunder through history, at least they will do so together.

Argentina is a place where the rights of the individual are barely visible, if they exist at all. The Reagan Administration's rationale for smiling in that nation's direction in the past few weeks is an effort to keep the peace. Insofar as that effort protects America's true and worthy friends, more power to it. But the American public does not base its affections on anything quite so delicate. And the English should know this now. In the Wall Street Journal, Geoffrey Smith, a columnist with the Times of London, asked not plaintively but properly: "What use is an alliance if your friends will not support you on the merits of the issue when you are in the right?" The answer is: None. If the American Government does not realize this, the people will soon remind it. The fate of Britain is this nation's own, and we would be worse than fools to think otherwise.

--By Roger Rosenblatt

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