How will Brexit and Chilcot report affect US and Britain's special relationship?

The lopsided reality of Britain’s relationship with the United States was underlined at the White House this week when it was asked to react to findings from the official UK report into the Iraq war.

“I will be with you, whatever,” Tony Blair was revealed to have promised George W Bush in a secret letter sent eight months before the joint invasion. Subsequent British attempts to influence the conduct of the war, and crucially its disastrous aftermath, were nonetheless ignored, according to the report by Sir John Chilcot.

Faced with a slew of such embarrassing disclosures, US reporters wanted to know if their government had a response to a report that took seven years to produce.

No American official had read it yet, replied spokesman Josh Earnest. Instead he reacted with a phrase that is obligatory on the rare occasions when the subject of the UK comes up in the White House briefing room.

“The United States and the United Kingdom have a special relationship,” he said. “I would expect that that relationship will remain special and strong.”

For British diplomats – worried more than ever about their access to power after Barack Obama’s dire warnings over Brexit – such platitudes might sound reassuring.

Obama had threatened that Britain would go the “back of the queue” in trade negotiations with the US if it left the European Union.

At an embassy drinks reception held at the UK ambassador’s grand Lutyens-designed residence in Washington a week after the referendum, the feared loss of influence was on everybody’s lips.

While Britain may have chosen to cut loose from Europe in search of a new identity in the Anglosphere, the phrase “special relationship” has rarely sounded more hackneyed on the other side of the Atlantic.

In part, Obama’s polite froideur reflects competing demands for his affection. He calls France the “oldest ally” – a pointed reminder that Britain and America have not always been on the same side of the battlefield. Germany’s Angela Merkel is the “trusted partner” and Canada the “closest of friends”.

Among the dozens of world leaders he speaks to every month, it is the Chinese and Russians who tend to attract most media interest; the awkward Israelis the most political attention.

On Friday in Poland, during a Nato summit in which Britain remains a key player, Obama met the presidents of the European council and the European commission to discuss how Europe can maintain political cohesion after the UK exit.

Before arriving at the summit in Warsaw, Obama described the combined challenges facing Europe as “the most important moment for our transatlantic alliance since the end of the cold war”.

“The special relationship between the US and the UK will endure,” he wrote in the Financial Times.” [And] ... given the current threats facing Europe, I fully expect that Britain will continue to be a major contributor to European security.”

“The days ahead will continue to be difficult,” he added. “But, if the past seven decades teach us anything, it is that we will prevail if we stay united, strong and true to our democratic values. I am confident we will.”

Though outgoing UK prime minister David Cameron was there too, to announce the deployment of extra troops to Nato’s eastern flank, the White House had scheduled no private meeting with his beleaguered counterpart – spending time instead with Nato secretary general Jens Stoltenberg and Polish president Andrzej Duda, before flying on to Spain.

The Nato summit is, of course, a timely reminder of the enduring importance of the Atlantic alliance and Britain’s role as a pivotal military partner for Washington.

But, as Chilcot’s revelations of the Blair/Bush correspondence demonstrate, the offer of British troops is no longer the guarantee of either military success or reciprocal political influence that it was when the special relationship was first forged during the second world war.

For American scholars of the evolving ties between London and Washington, the relationship was never as clear-cut or special as politicians would like to claim it was, but it has definitely seen better days.

Lynne Olson is author of Citizens of London, which revealed the extraordinary lengths Winston Churchill went to persuade a reluctant US president to join a war.

“There is a still a closeness on both sides – within government and within the military – but the relationship seems to have eroded quite a bit,” she says. “The memory of why there was a special relationship, the memory of the war, this has mostly gone. There has been a loosening. It is not what is once was.”

Olson also believes the personal chemistry between politicians and the leadership they provide – or don’t – often plays a more significant role than the underlying relations between governments.

“People say that personalities don’t count, or question the ‘great man theory’ of history, but a few people can really change things – as we’ve just seen with Brexit, for example,” adds Olson.

But others believe the depth of shared history and culture mean both countries will continue to mean a lot to each other whatever the state of letter-writing and summit-making is between the leaders.

“For the American public, neither Brexit nor Chilcot mean very much,” says international relations professor Philip Seib, author of Taken for Granted: The Future of US-British Relations. “From a public standpoint nothing much changes: the primary interest is in other things, like the royal family.”

“When you get to the policymakers, it gets more complicated, particularly after Brexit,” he adds. “But there is a residual feeling that the special relationship is still special: there are so many things that tie the US and UK together. There aren’t that many countries that are real friends, especially among major powers.”

Yet even relatively sympathetic US observers of Britain question the logic of Blair’s gamble during the Iraq war.

According to both the Chilcot report and recent comments by the former prime minister himself, a major factor in his decision to offer such unequivocal support to Bush was a fear that Britain would lose influence and respect in Washington if it stood on the sidelines after the 9/11 attacks.

Countries such as France and Germany that were more cautious did indeed receive US opprobrium at the time – famously leading to French fries being renamed “Freedom Fries” and the only half-in-jest insult “cheese-eating surrender monkey”.

But critics of Blair have pointed out that it did little to damage long-term relations with other European powers. Some Democrats in Washington grumble that Blair actually did great harm by facilitating and encouraging the disastrous intervention in Iraq – privately holding him more accountable because he gave the spurious justifications a more articulate veneer.

Had Blair done the opposite, the short-term consequences for the special relationship might have been negative, but respect and sympathy for the UK in the long term may have, with hindsight, been improved.

Above all, it seems that Blair once again proved the increasingly one-way nature of this unrequited love affair.

“There would have been a certain cooling in the relationship with the Bush administration if Blair had refused to go along with the invasion,” concludes Seib. “But Bush would probably have done it any way, even if no one had stood with him.”