Jonathan Todd

Donald Macintyre wrote yesterday:

“Assuming that (Benjamin) Netanyahu does not take the world by surprise tomorrow, confront his nationalists head on, pledge a total settlement freeze, and commit himself to a Palestinian state during his premiership, then the American response will be all-important. Tomorrow night will be a crucial test for the Israeli Prime Minister. The day after, an almost as crucial one for the President of the United States”.

As much as the Guardian reports that “Netanyahu (tonight) said for the first time he would accept an independent Palestinian state”, he cannot really be said to have confronted his nationalists head on. This is because, as the Guardian report, ”Netanyahu’s conditions were strict. He said the Palestinians could not form an army or sign military agreements with any other state”. Moreover, he “also praised the Jewish settlers who live in east Jerusalem and on the occupied West Bank and refused US calls for a halt to all settlement growth”.

Macintyre defined tonight’s speech as “Netanyahu’s moment of decision” but the way in which he faced it means that tomorrow is one of President Obama’s moments of decision. He will have to decide whether to maintain his pressure on Israel in respect of settlements against the backdrop of Iran’s disputed election - which creates another moment of decision for Obama.  

This disturbing context might suggest that Obama will tone down his rhetoric but Peter Beinart explains why the opposite may be the case:

“He’s taking on Netanyahu where the Israeli Prime Minister is weakest. Israelis may not be thrilled about freezing settlement growth, but it’s not an issue like Iran’s nuclear program, which they consider important enough to risk their relationship with the U.S. over. A poll published in Israel’s largest newspaper, Yediot Aharonot, on June 5 found that 56% of Israelis would rather cave on the settlements issue than face sanctions by the U.S”.

Beinart goes on to say:

“Netanyahu has bigger fish to fry. He knows that sometime in the next year or two, he could well end up paying a visit to the White House to ask for U.S. support for a military strike against Iran’s nuclear program. For an Israeli Prime Minister, alienating a U.S. President is almost always bad politics, but it’s particularly bad politics when you need his help to stop what you’ve called an existential threat. If Israelis decide Netanyahu can’t negotiate with the U.S. effectively over Iran, they may demand that he be replaced with someone who can”.

Obama has been right to tackle Israel over settlement growth and, oddly enough, events in Iran may make it easier for him to push back against Netanyahu. What is happening in Iran makes it even more important to Israel to retain American support, which, under Obama, they are more likely to get by changing their line on settlements. This is to say nothing of how America responds directly to events in Iran. That is another moment of decision. They do come thick and fast in the White House.

30 years since Margaret Thatcher’s election as PM. I enjoyed BBC Parliament’s coverage. But David Willetts is a Thatcherite no more. Boris Johnson is. Maybe, if he is to find the ambition for London that Philip Stephens says he still lacks, it will be a Thatcherite ambition. This at a time when The Spectator, the magazine that Johnson used to edit, of course, is urging David Cameron to live up to what they see as Thatcher’s legacy:

“The challenge for David Cameron is huge. If, as seems likely, he becomes Prime Minister next year, it will be his task to ensure that future generations do not look back on the years 1979-2009 as a blip — an aberrant resurgence — in the otherwise steady decay of a once great nation”.

Johnson seems more eager to embrace Thatcher than Cameron. Perhaps, the differing attitudes of these two rivals for the leadership of the Tory Party, reflect a deeper fault line in the Tories – or, maybe, Cameron is simply more sensitive to the national mood than Johnson. Cameron may remain loath to reveal himself as a Thatcherite while public opinion continues to be as starkly divided over Thatcher as Tim Adams recently observed in The Guardian:

“It’s exactly 30 years since she came to power, nearly 20 since she was unseated and still none of us can rationalise, quite, what we feel about her – either our loathing or our adoration. Even as her era and her “-ism” abruptly ends – in the bail-out and humbling of her market economy, the smashing up of the banks – no one can get to us as a nation quite like she can”.

There is no Thatcher myth. There never was. There is a massively polarising figure and fierce debate about her policies. In contrast, a book has recently been published with the title Tear Down This Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future. Amazon tells us of Will Bunch’s book:

“Nearly two decades after leaving office and four years after his death, the legend of Ronald Reagan looms larger than ever over America’s political life. Nowhere has that been more evident than in the 2008 presidential campaign, with Republicans – especially presumptive nominee John McCain – appearing to run more aggressively for the Reagan mantle than for the White House itself, and with even Democrats debating how to add some Reagan lustre to their progressive platform”.

I know that Gordon Brown had Thatcher round for tea but no Labour person seriously wants to add some Thatcher “lustre to their progressive platform”. That would be absurd. Philip Collins has done a good job of explaining why this is so.

So, why does the UK attitude towards Thatcher seem so different from the US attitude to Reagan? Was Reagan less divisive? Only fighting Communists without, rather than “enemies within”? “Enemies” which never existed on the same scale in the US as they did in the UK, suggesting the less ambiguous US attitude towards Reagan may find its historical origin in the weaker socialist traditions in the US. This is the right nation, after all.    

Garry Cook is executive chairman of Manchester City. In spite of the support of the Gallagher brothers, this is a football club whose claims to be “massive” are often joked about by their more successful neighbours, Manchester United. City’s argument was given somewhat more substance when Thaksin Shinawatra, the former Thai Prime Minister, bought the club a few years ago and started pumping his millions into it. This did not stop Human Rights Watch describing him as a “human-rights abuser of the worst kind”. Obviously, this charge related to his time as Thai Prime Minister, rather than an excessive application of the “hairdryer treatment” so beloved of footballing changing rooms. When asked about this alleged abuse, Cook responded:

“Is he a nice guy? Yes. Is he a great guy to play golf with? Yes. Does he have plenty of money to run a football club? Yes. I really care only about those three things. Whether he is guilty of something over in Thailand, I can’t worry … I worked for Nike who were accused of child-labour issues and I managed to have a career there for 15 years. I believed we were innocent of most of the issues. Morally, I felt comfortable in that environment”.

Last year Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan, crown prince of Abu Dhabi, bought the club from Frank Sinatra, as Ricky Hatton, another famous fan, refers to Shinawatra. Even more money was thrown at the club. Robinho, for one, arrived in a blaze of madness.

History has not, however, recorded whether the crown prince of Abu Dhabi is “a great guy to play golf with”. Nonetheless, there is now reason to believe that his half-brother may not be entirely “a nice guy”.  This is because a video has recently emerged in which Sheikh Issa bin Zayed al-Nahyan is seen shooting at, setting fire to and running over a helpless Afghan he had accused of cheating him in a business deal. “The tape”, reports The Guardian, ”is a terrible blow to the human rights image of the UAE, which for decades has been portraying itself as a western-friendly country ripe for trade and investment”. It also makes me wonder what Cook has got to say for himself now.

He’ll probably say that the crown prince shouldn’t have to answer for the alleged crimes of his half-brother. But Manchester City fans might begin to wonder whether their club is about to be used as a PR vehicle to re-build the damaged image of the UAE. World politics seems increasingly played out in the English Premiership. The disintegration of Iceland’s banking system explains much of what is happening at West Ham. The massive debts that Liverpool and Manchester United have taken on are now serviced by banks that are owned to varying degrees by the taxpayers of the UK and the US, respectively. As western governments consider the extent to which human rights feature in their diplomatic and foreign policy strategies, be they strategies that deploy hard power, soft power or smart power, Manchester City fans are left to contemplate what role their club now has in these great games. Though, they may just be wondering why Robinho can’t play as well as he did at Everton on Saturday in all away games. Certainly, such considerations are likely to be closer to the front of Cook’s mind than any concerns about skeletons beneath his office’s floor.

“After twenty per cent of conservatives voted for Obama”, wrote Oliver Burkeman in the Guardian yesterday, “the Republican party was left in tatters”. But it really isn’t so long ago – not quite five years – since John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge in The Right Nation, a book described as having a “Tocquevillian quality of informed impartiality”, chronicled the structural reasons in American society and politics for the conservative ascendency.

These reasons, argued these writers for The Economist in 2004, explained ”why the Republican Party has won six of the past nine presidential elections and controls both houses of Congress, why every serious Democratic candidate for president supports mandatory sentencing and welfare reform, why the cultural capitals of Hollywood and Manhattan remain the exception and why the much disdained “flyover” land that lies between them is the rule”. The cultural capitals are Democratic citadels and this is the America which European visitors are most familiar with. The explanation for the conservative ascendency exists in the “disdained “flyover” land”, however.

It was to this land that Karl Rove looked – the land that Europeans all too often either look away from or disparage - when he cultivated his strategy of building out from and maximising the size of the Republican base. Rove only saw red and blue when he looked at America. Obama, famously, rejected this; seeing not red and blue states, but only the United States of America. In contrast, as Andrew Sullivan notes, Rove’s strategy has always been to divide “the country into red and blue, and working wedge issues such as abortion, gay rights, torture and national security to expand the red”.

Karl Rove sees evidence in recent polling that, far from being “in tatters”; the Republican Party is well placed to advance, given the “divisive” nature of President Obama. It turns out, argues Rove, that far from being a President for the whole of the United States of America, as he promised, that this is the President of the Blue States of America. Once again, Rove seems to point towards a red-blue split and be reaching towards wedge issues as the key to growing the red.

Making Obama into the President for Liberal America is central to this strategy, which is why Rove is delighted to note that the gap – known as the partisan gap - between Obama’s approval rating among Democrats (88%) and Republicans (27%) is 61 points. Sullivan concedes that “this is 10 points larger than George W Bush’s partisan gap after the brutal polarising period of the 2000 election recount” but argues that Rove overstates the significance of Obama’s partisan gap for various reasons.

One of these is that “self-identifying Republicans now form only 24% of the American electorate, their lowest showing in recent memory, and far lower than at the start of Bush’s term … When the Republican party is much smaller, more ideological, and more radical than the Democrats, of course a Democratic president will prompt more angry and motivated opposition than a Republican”. So, Sullivan’s argument goes, Rove can keep working the Republican base but this will achieve little while this base is so diminished, particularly when “Obama has won the battle for the centre”. This is because “a whopping 70% of independents in the poll cited by Rove have confidence in Obama to address the deep problems the US faces”.

If Rove is right, and Sullivan wrong, then the Republicans might look to a presidential candidate like Sarah Palin in 2012, who Sullivan derides as the “reductio ad absurdum” of the kind of American conservatism he opposes. Bobby Jindal might be a better bet if the party decides to move on from the kind of politics that Rove advocates. Meghan McCain, whose father has been lukewarm about a presidential bid from his former running mate, has spoken of ”a war brewing in the Republican Party. But it is not between us and Democrats. It is not between us and liberals. It is between the future and the past”.

She associates “partisan and divisive Republicans”, like Rove and Palin, with the past. She sees the future of the party as being about moving away from that kind of politics and, perhaps, a candidate like Jindal, sometimes said to be “the Republican Obama”, may better enable the Republicans to take their fight to the political centre.

In essence, on one side of the debate within the Republican Party are those, like Meghan McCain, who recognise the significance of Obama’s victory and want American to understand that they have this recognition. They see his election as evidence of changes in American society that the Republicans will have to adapt to. It is the Republican Party that is wrong, not the American electorate. Those who oppose McCain do not see anything quite so fundamental in Obama’s victory. Consequently, the Republican Party can expect to prosper by sticking to Rove’s classic wedge-issues strategy. The Republican Party doesn’t need fundamental change. No Clause 4 moment or Cameronite revisionism is necessary.

How this debate plays out will depend more on the prose of Obama’s government than the poetry of his campaigning. If Obama turns out to be more Jimmy Carter than F.D.R, then the position of those arguing from Rove’s perspective becomes much stronger. It doesn’t take much imagination, given the scale of the challenges facing Obama, to move from Gideon Rachman’s dystopian dream of November 2012 to seeing a President Palin as a realistic, though very scary, prospect. It is scary because we can be certain that anything which might even approximate to Cameronite revisionism would be utterly beyond the pale for Palin. The pit-bull is not for turning.     

Thus, Obama’s performance in office is an important factor in whether the “right nation” turns back to the right. Undoubtedly, while economic and demographic shifts in the past decade in old Confederate states like North Carolina and Virginia may have favoured Democrats, many of the forces that Micklethwait and Wooldridge pointed towards in their 2004 analysis remain in place. They have recently, for example, argued in favour of the enduring strength of religiosity in America.

This religiosity has tended to favour the Republican right. But this doesn’t have to be so. Democrats need to do a better job than they have previously done in convincing Christian America that they share their values. As long as the national conversation about these values remains fixated on wedge issues like abortion and gay rights, however, this will be difficult for Democrats. They need to move this conversation on.

The hidden genius of having Rick Warren deliver Obama’s inaugural prayer may be an understanding of the importance of this. He sees divorce as a greater threat to the American family than gay marriage. He accepts that global warming is happening as a consequence of human actions. He cares deeply about poverty in America and in the developing world. Democrats may continue to disagree with Warren on issues like abortion and gay rights but there is plenty of scope for them to find common ground on many other issues. Identifying and re-trenching common ground of this sort is the key to Democrats ensuring that the enduring religiosity of America is not necessarily to the political advantage of the Republican right.

Another factor seems to be moving in the Democrats favour. ”Hispanic voters – the fastest-growing demographic – give Obama a 73% approval rating”, Sullivan notes. I have a distant memory of seeing Micklethwait speaking at a think-tank event in 2004 and saying that this demographic group, due to their fast-growing nature, will be important to the strength of the conservative ascendency. I hope this isn’t false memory and unquestionably the notion that Hispanics are a key demographic seems obviously correct even if Micklethwait didn’t actually say this.

So, if the Democrats can win more Christians over, while maintaining the support of the good majority of Hispanics, then the “right nation” may continue to turn left. Nonetheless, the strength of the structural forces identified by Micklethwait and Wooldridge should not be underestimated. Obama may yet find that they come back to haunt him in 2012 if he performs poorly in office between now and then.

The Foreign Office is worried about David Cameron, apparently. It is “most concerned about the effects Cameron’s anti-EU European policy will have on the UK’s chances of effecting outcomes”, the Guardian claims. Labour Councillor Bob Piper has also spotted this claim reported on the Sky News website.

We should all share the concerns of the Foreign Office. It is only in and through the EU that the UK can best serve our national interests and values. Bizarrely, Tory MEP Roger Helmer describes it as “indefensible, humiliating and wrong” that David Cameron has not yet fulfilled a promise to form a new grouping in the European Parliament with other parties that have been described as ”openly and unashamedly racist and homophobic”. This promise suggests an inability to understand modern British values, let alone take them forward within the EU.

Cameron’s stance has also infuriated key allies, like Angela Merkel and Nicholas Sarkozy, at a time when EU policy co-ordination is imperative. We have been rightly much warned of late of the dangers of beggar-thy-neighbour economic policies. But most people would have less regard for their neighbours if they were racists and homophobes. Indeed, many would have to be really desperate just to pop round to borrow some coffee; never might discuss the right balance between protection for workers, which globalisation requires if it is not to collapse amid charges of unfairness, and protectionism, which retards globalisation but which forms of protection can amount to.

Beggar-thy-neighbour outcomes are dangers in spheres other than the narrowly economic. For example, we are often told that without extra capacity at Heathrow the UK’s competitiveness will erode as compared with other European countries that are expanding their major airports. So, EU countries currently face a choice between the “unpalatable and the disastrous” – J. K. Galbraith’s definition of politics: either they seek to control a major source of carbon or they become less competitive. The only real decision, therefore, is over which of these outcomes they consider unpalatable and which disastrous.

This is rather a zero sum game. You either take a hit to your competitiveness in the short-term or you suffer climate change over the long-term. But all countries will experience climate change, whether they now seek to control airline emissions or not. Thus, countries face an incentive to free ride, expand their airports and bite the bullet of climate change along with everyone else when it comes. After all, “in the long run, we are all dead”. Climate change gives this famous line from J. M. Keynes an even darker twist.

But couldn’t a pan-EU agreement on airport expansion allow us to escape this? The devil would be in the detail of such an agreement, as ever, though there must, at least, be potential for EU policy co-ordination on airport expansion to achieve superior outcomes to those which the present zero sum game is producing. However, it is doubtful that such topics are discussed at the National Front Disco or wherever it is that David Cameron hangs out. Nor is the need for improved European leadership likely to be a hot subject in this bastion of little Englanderism.

The Economist well illustrates the need for this leadership. “Consider the three big requests that Mr Obama made during his European tour: for more help in Afghanistan; for more fiscal stimulus; and for Europe to become more serious about energy security (ie, buy more non-Russian gas). Almost nothing was offered on the first and third, and the G20 conclusions papered over lingering transatlantic differences on stimulus plans and financial regulation. And Mr Obama also earned a public rebuke from Mr Sarkozy for strongly backing Turkish membership of the EU, which the French president opposes”.

Three things are clear. First, while Obama may have been the President that all of Europe wanted, his requests to Europe are closer to British agendas than to those of our EU partners. Our commitment to Afghanistan is witnessed in the troops we have deployed to Helmand – a commitment which George Robertson is right to chide other EU countries for not matching. We recognise the geo-strategic importance of Turkey in a way that other EU countries seem to struggle to. We see the unhealthy grip which Russian gas has upon the continent and want to avoid this fate for ourselves. And we, unlike others in the EU, are up for as much fiscal stimulus as we can afford.

Second, under Obama, the weight that Washington attaches to London will be positively correlated with the weight that London carries in Brussels. It shouldn’t be too hard for us to argue in Brussels for causes favoured by Obama because we too favour these causes; the more effectively that we do so, the stronger our relations with Obama’s America. The transatlantic relationship remains a key component of British influence on the global stage, but this relationship is now more bound up with our European relations than ever before at a time when the main fault line in global politics is to be found in the Pacific, not the Atlantic. This is the way of this Chinese century.

Third, in this context, Cameron threatens British marginalisation on the global, as well as the European stage. This is the exact opposite of what we now need. In fact, it is indefensible, humiliating and wrong. We shouldn’t forget this when we vote in June’s EU elections.