The special relationship that squandered a noble cause

The fear of intervention brought about by the Iraq episode may prove disastrous for the world's most powerless people
 

by Martin Kettle in Washington Saturday May 27, 2006 The Guardian

The long arc of Tony Blair's rise and decline has been punctuated by journeys to Washington. He went there first with Gordon Brown in January 1993 - how long ago that now seems - to embrace Bill Clinton's Democrats.

Five years later, now prime minister, he returned to captivate le tout Washington. Since then there have been tense Blair visits over Kosovo and Iraq, more relaxed third-way chinwags with American and European leaders, the ice-breaking first meeting with George Bush up at Camp David and the dramatic emotional solidarities in the traumatic weeks after 9/11. Yet through all this there was at least one potent constant - that Blair mattered. But is that true any longer?

The irresistible ebbs and flows of political fortune are written into Washington's DNA. It is an unsentimental city, populated by people who pass through. Washington has seen them arrive in triumph and depart in decline too often. Bush, his popularity palpably draining away to a degree not fully grasped on our side of the Atlantic, is neither the first nor the last against whom the whirligig of time has brought its revenges.

So this week Washington recognises what it has seen in Blair's eighth visit to the American capital since 9/11 - a prime minister in gradual eclipse, still holding close to a failing and unpopular president. Two men with their backs to the wall and time running out.

This may not be Blair's last visit to Washington as prime minister, but the sense that these visits still shape our times is dying. Blair still retains all the dignities of office. His command on his feet continues to impress Americans embarrassed by Bush's lack of fluency.

And he was genuinely impressive at Thursday's White House press conference and again in his foreign-policy lecture yesterday morning.

His talents will look more impressive in retrospect than they do at the moment. This week's Washington moments seemed more like occasions for the biographers than for the news reporters. Perhaps that's why the White House press conference on Thursday was scheduled for half past midnight in the UK.

Blair no longer sets the agenda as before. He can propose but he cannot dispose. It was not just the British media that framed this week's visit as a meeting of two weakened leaders. The Americans saw it that way too.

Blair's support for American foreign policy guarantees him a large tranche of White House time, and Bush was headline-grabbingly generous in his tributes to Blair, as well he might be. But when the Bush administration looks to the future and seeks a bridge to Europe it now naturally turns to Angela Merkel, not Blair.

All of which is deeply ironic in the light of the defiantly optimistic speech that Blair delivered at Georgetown University yesterday morning. You have to hand it to the prime minister for his cool.