OPINION:
It’s hardly “racist” to notice that Barack Obama’s two least-favorite nations are Israel and Great Britain, although anyone who makes that observation risks being denounced as a bigot. From the day he occupied the Oval Office the president has made it abundantly clear that he has no particular affection for the “special relationship” that has tied the United States and Britain together in a bond through winning two world wars.
The president has lately been in Old Blighty fraying the special relationship, though it’s also clear that he doesn’t quite understand what that relationship is, what it actually means, or how it came to be.
He famously returned to London a bust of Winston Churchill, which previous presidents kept in the Oval Office as a tribute to an old friend, and he has said in many ways that he does not share the respect and affection that so many of his countrymen feel for “the old country.” Indeed, it’s probably the fact that Britain is “the old country” that irritates him so. He astonished everyone on his brief visit to London last week when he warned that Britain would go “to the back of the queue” seeking American trade agreements if it votes to withdraw from the European Union in a June referendum.
This intervention infuriated many Britons, as it embarrassed many Americans. Past presidents, both Democrats and Republicans, have always been careful to avoid butting into foreign disputes, or trying to intervene in political arguments at home while traveling abroad. Mr. Obama feels free to do both; the man lives to lecture others and share his wonderfulness. But how did he get off butting into an important internal dispute that Britain would soon settle by ballot? Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, suggests that Mr. Obama’s disdain for Britain was inherited from his father, a Kenyan, and the president is still angry that Mr. Churchill, as prime minister, dispatched British troops to Kenya to quell an uprising against Britain, then the colonial power. The mayor speculated that Mr. Obama, “a half-Kenyan,” was motivated to return the Churchill bust because of “an ancestral dislike of the British Empire.”
Mr. Obama’s attempt at damage control over the weekend made things worse by professing to “love” Queen Elizabeth II — “truly one of my favorite people” — and to “admire” Sir Winston. The British are not easily patronized, and resent it when someone tries. (We inherited that trait from the old country, too.) The human heart is often fickle, of course, and authentic “love” for the queen and the prime minister may have arrived late to replace disdain and indifference. Who can say?
But Mr. Obama, though a one-time instructor in the law, seems not to understand that the special relationship is based on far more than fashion and infatuation. The United States inherited its common law from Britain, and fundamental religious faith, literature and appreciation for democracy and the rule of the people, by the people and for the people. Without that inheritance, America might be no better today than the satraps of the Islamic world, or even Kenya.
The good news is that the special relationship is alive and well, protecting the ties that bind, and the special relationship can endure through this presidency, now beginning its long-anticipated slow fade into history, and through the presidencies that follow.
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