Constitution Club

The romantic view of Great Britain sees her as Europe’s ballast, America’s wingman, and a leading world power in her own right. Indeed, Britain can fulfill all of these roles, but mostly only because that is how she has been cast, and those are her lines to recite. Should she ever seek to forge a strong identity separate from the United States, it is unclear whether the nation could muster influence beyond that of France or Japan.

Seen realistically, then, Britain’s past ten years have been a colossus of global influence. It is unlikely to be repeated again.

As late as his twenties, Anthony Charles Lynton Blair thought he might be a rock star. The guitarist for Ugly Rumours dreamed of a career as a musician, but prudently studied law as a fallback. After he married another talented lawyer, Cherie Booth, his ambitions began to move from the rock band’s stage, to the stage of public opinion.

When he became the youngest prime minister in history at the age of 43, Blair ran as someone with big dreams for British society, but what interested him most about the job seemed to be the world stage. While he was denied several of his signature domestic goals, his ten years in power became defined by foreign affairs and what can now be seen as a clear Blair doctrine.

He is one of the most misunderstood prime ministers in recent history, in no small part because the UK press is worse than they’ve ever been at cogent analysis. Indeed, in the ten year standoff between Blair and the press, while the media believes they exposed him as a deeply flawed leader, the reality is that their interaction with him revealed Fleet Street to be a shadow of its former self. Never forget that in the showdown between Downing Street and the BBC, it was the Corporation’s top brass who skulked away humiliated.

Whoever first penned the notion of Blair as Bush’s poodle must be euphoric today. His metaphor so enraptured Blair’s critics that it became the substitute for both serious press coverage and political debate. It will spoil all the fun, but I should probably point out that anyone who used the analogy should feel a fool, since the mere notion of it is comically absurd.

Tony Blair was a brilliant advocate, a smooth and articulate negotiator, and the possessor of a clearly defined foreign policy outlook. George Bush was none of these. Blair began his premiership with a belief that military power, particularly American military power, could help right some of the wrongs of the world. When Bill Clinton came to office, he did so as a relative pacifist who “loathed the military.” Before long, Clinton’s air force was essentially fighting Blair’s war in Kosovo. Both men were denounced as war criminals by the usual suspects, though the media overall was supportive. George Bush came into office offering a “humble” foreign policy and flatly opposed to nation-building. He will leave office with a joint US-British occupation and rebuilding attempt of Iraq.

In reality, it was Blair who shrewdly used American power through two US Presidents to attempt his grand ambitions. To conclude from this that Blair was a Bush poodle, caving in to curry favor with the White House, is deranged.

The last decade also reminded us that if given enough time, the Left can screw up anything. Even when blessed with good leaders, they wind up hating them. Blair committed a trifecta of unforgivable sins that created an unbridgeable chasm with th Left. Iraq, of course, but there were also two other post-9/11 transgressions that seemed only to highlight his misadventure in Iraq. Blair was fairly pro-Israel, in a country that has developed a bizarre hatred for the Jewish state and a myopic fascination with Palestinian “martyrs.” And when young British men, who do nothing but collect welfare from the British state, began to embrace radical Islam and call for the killing of Britons and the toppling of the state that gives them succor, Blair had the temerity to question the sacred cow of liberal multiculturalism. All of this was too much for the Left to tolerate, and the divorce was final.

As he left No. 10 for the last time yesterday, the British press was mostly sneering, the American press indifferent. No matter. It seems to be the cosmic fate of all British PM’s. Margaret Thatcher was unceremoniously dumped by her own party in a juvenile row from which the Conservatives have still not recovered. And Winston Churchill was famously tossed from office just weeks after he flashed his victory sign to the VE-Day celebrants in London.

We’ve not heard the last from Mr. Blair. His immediate appointment as an envoy to the Middle East peace process is likely just the start of an eventful post-premiership. And he will be recalled fondly by the hundreds of thousands of lives he helped save with military intervention in Sierra Leone and Kosovo. Millions of Iraqis, too, hold him in higher regard than the average Englishman.

But it is with the passage of time that Blair’s actions, goals, and warnings are likely to be given their full credit. His is a serious, humanitarian doctrine of foreign intervention, and another such outlook suggested by the Western powers has yet to be articulated. Iraq isn’t the last of the foreign interventions, merely the latest.

In Peter Stothard’s book Thirty Days: Tony Blair and the Test of History, Blair is wistful about this decision to back the Iraq war on the eve of hostilities. “We’ll see,” he says. “God and history will judge me now.”