Conference leaders during Church services on the after deck of HMS Prince of Wales, in Placentia Bay, Newfoundland, during the Atlantic Charter Conference. President Franklin D. Roosevelt (left) and Prime Minister Winston Churchill are seated in the foreground. Standing directly behind them are Admiral Ernest J. King, USN; General George C. Marshall, U.S. Army; General Sir John Dill, British Army; Admiral Harold R. Stark, USN; and Admiral Sir Dudley Pound, RN. At far left is Harry Hopkins, talking with W. Averell Harriman.
I kind of go back and forth on the whole “Should Britain exit the E.U.?” thing:
- I’m generally not for nations or federations splitting up, especially not for nationalistic (in the racial or cultural sense) reasons. Balkanization is bad. I’m against secession whether practiced by the Confederacy or Quebec separatists. I make an exception for the USSR.
- On the other hand, British culture is so awesome! From Shakespeare to the Beatles, Jane Austen to Nick Hornby, Monty Python to Douglas Adams, King Arthur to QEII, the guy who wrote “Greensleeves” to Elvis Costello, Beau Brummel to Carnaby Street, Jack Aubrey to Arthur Dent, James Bond to George Smiley, I want to see Britain hang onto everything that makes it special and unique, and I don’t want a bit of it to be watered down.
- The E.U. makes for a strong trading partner for the United States, when it’s not having eruptions in Greece and such.
No coin is sounder than a pound.
- I’m deeply gratified that the Brits didn’t go to the Euro. I’m still not thrilled that they decimalised the pound. It was disappointing, when I was there, not to hear people refer to shillings and crowns and such. But every time I held a pound or two-pound coin, I fully understood the phrase “sound as a…” That is some seriously solid, dependable-feeling money.
And so forth.
I found myself swinging back and forth today, with President Obama visiting London and backing up David Cameron’s position of maintaining the union.
For instance, I find the idea that maybe we could deepen the Special Relationship by having special bilateral trade deals, just between us and our Mum Country.
But Obama threw cold water on that:
The UK would be at the back of the queue for a trade deal with the US if Britain voted to leave the EU, Barack Obama has said.
The US president said a trade agreement would not happen any time soon in the event of Britain leaving because it was better to strike a transatlantic deal with Europe as a whole….
Which made me think, it’s great you’re helping the PM out and all. As you say, that’s what friends do. But really? We wouldn’t negotiate favorable trade terms with our closest friend in the world if she stood alone?
It’s almost enough to make you think Boris Johnson is onto something when he suggests that Obama’s Kenyan heritage makes him a less-than-enthusiastic ally of the colonial power. I mean, really — American presidents don’t stiff-arm Great Britain (by doing such thing as sending Churchill’s bust back).
Almost.
In the end, I suppose, I think it’s best for our friends to hold France close, and Germany closer. After all, Europe hasn’t launched another World War since this alliance came together. Yet.
But my Anglophilia still causes me to go wobbly sometimes…
President Barack Obama and Prime Minister David Cameron of the United Kingdom talk during the G8 Summit at the Lough Erne Resort in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, June 17, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
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1. The question is not whether the US ultimately would or would not “negotiate favorable trade terms” with a post-Brexit UK. The question is whether voters pondering a vote to exit the EU believe the US would do so. If Obama really believes Brexit is against UK and US interests, why would he offer any kind of reassurances to potential pro-exit voters as they weigh the pros and cons of leaving the EU?
2. Yeah, British culture IS awesome. But so is French culture, German culture, Italian culture, Spanish culture. Are they being “watered down” by membership in the EU? Are those nations able to hang onto what makes them “special and unique”? If anything, I would think it is the smaller nations of the EU, the ones whose particular cultural characteristics have not perhaps played as big a role as the big European nations in the development of what we think of as “Western culture,” that might feel their identity is more vulnerable within the EU orbit. Of course, there are other tradeoffs of membership.
3. Enough already about the Churchill bust. This has been gone over and over—there were two Churchill busts by the same sculptor in the White House—one is still there. The relationship between the US and the UK has nothing to do with a given President’s choice of which sculptures to display in the White House. And Boris Johnson’s comment just shows that he is up-to-date on his Newt Gingrich and Dinesh D’Souza.
Sorry, but one cannot dismiss the Churchill bust thing with an “enough already.”
The latest reference to it, Boris Johnson, had an informative effect — Obama directly addressed it for the first time. He acknowledged that HE was involved in the decision to send it back. He protested that “I love Winston Churchill, love the guy.” But he must not have loved him much to order his removal on the grounds that it constituted “clutter”…
Just how cluttered does one’s office need to be before you decide that the bust of Churchill, sent as a gesture of the deep friendship between our country and the U.K, needs to go?
How many such things, aside from the MLK bust, stayed? And what were they? What were the things that had higher priority than the Churchill bust?
And we can talk all day about the wonderful aspects of “French culture, German culture, Italian culture, Spanish culture” and of our friendships with those nations. But it’s not the same. Our alliance with Britain stands first and foremost. And it should.
Also — while you didn’t mention those with regard to the Churchill bust — I found myself just now trying to imagine what symbol we might have received from those nations that would compare. There isn’t one. No figure I can think of embodies our relationships with those nations the way Churchill does.
De Gaulle? I don’t think so, not by a long shot. A bust of de Gaulle would be about as popular in this country (among those Americans with a clue of who he was) as one of Montgomery…
Yet more vapid, sentimental twaddle from this Walthen person.
No, it didn’t add anything constructive to the conversation, but I just had to approve that comment on the basis of the pseudonym, so fitting to our topic.
Not sure what the misspelling of my name meant. Something clever, no doubt. Surely not anything so trite as “this person is so inconsequential that I can’t be bothered to spell his name correctly.” That would be disappointing…
Returning gifts is tacky; not the done thing.
Well, in the president’s defense, this was a loan, not a gift. But the social implications are similar. It comes across as ungracious. Like thanks, but no thanks…
I agree with you Kathleen 🙂
“Also — while you didn’t mention those with regard to the Churchill bust — I found myself just now trying to imagine what symbol we might have received from those nations that would compare. There isn’t one. No figure I can think of embodies our relationships with those nations the way Churchill does.”
There’s a certain statue sitting on an island in New York Harbor that I would say is a little bit more significant.
Nice one.
I meant, of course, a bust of an actual person, although I didn’t word it that way. If the president tried to put THAT in the Oval Office, it would be more than cluttered…
Quite frankly, I think Mayor Johnson sounds more like a birther. His remark was snarky. And I don’t think it was a big deal that one of the busts was returned. The President was probably just handling leftover duties from the previous administration, but the DeMint crowd looks for every opportunity to make a mountain out of a molehill where President Obama is concerned.
With all of the problems we face, what is the big deal over a bust of Winston Churchill being returned especially if it was the one “loaned” to GWB during his administration? I am not an Obama fan but this is juvenile and childish to make it an issue by either side. Obama is the first African-American to occupy the White House. Deciding what objects, statues, busts, etc. to decorate the Oval Office is his decision. If he preferred Martin Luther King’s bust, what is wrong with his choice?
We obsess over trivial things and by making a trivial decision into a potential problem between Britain and the US is ridiculous. Just my opinion for what it is worth.
Agreed. If we’re going to talk about busts, then maybe we should talk about ones that matter.
I saw Busts That Matter at the drive-in in 1976. I forget what the movie was.
Sounds like those testosterone ads I keep getting for reasons that elude me (“I guarantee you there’s no problem,” said the short-fingered vulgarian…
Nice. I missed that. Well-played.
As an Anglophile, and one that values the relationship above all others in the world, it matters to ME. And I think it should to others, as pragmatically important as that relationship is.