President Obama’s speech today at Westminster Hall to British Parliament praised the relationship between USA and UK as “one of the oldest and strongest alliances the world has ever known”. Both leaders have refrained from calling this alliance a special relationship, as their predecessors have, but an “essential” one. A relationship based on co-dependence where both leaders have come of age and are seeing eye to eye on foreign policies, especially The Middle East.
As I watched Cameron and Obama playing table tennis yesterday, I wondered whether their relationship was of the same calibre of JK Kennedy and MacMillan, Thatcher and Reagan, Bush and Blair.
In a joint article published for this visit, Cameron and Obama, have likened their relationship to the solidarity on the Cold War shared by Thatcher and Reagan. Whilst I do believe that the Thatcher and Reagan relationship was one of the most strongest, I am surprised that either leader would want to be so closely associated with them. Thatcher and Reagan feared a united Germany, and in 1986 deregulated the financial markets, removing many of the restrictions put in place to prevent a repeat of the 1920’s stock market bubble and opening the door to unethical trading and accounting practices.
Here we are today, a quarter of a century later, recovering from the financial global mess that that special relationship left behind and this essential relationship is picking up.
Bunty
