Friends are seen as vital to U.S.

Knoxville News Sentinel ^ | 3/31/6 | FRED BROWN

[SmithL]

Two of America's foremost political veterans, who have served at the White House, warned Thursday the world is shrinking and nations that once were on the outside looking in are now seeking their own special relationship with the United States.

Brent Scowcroft, former national security adviser to two U.S. presidents, and Howard Baker, Tennessee's favorite-son U.S. senator and President Ronald Reagan's chief of staff, said it is not in America's best interests today to become too sentimental about past special relationships. The country shouldn't turn its back on friends, they said.

Scowcroft and Baker, a former U.S. ambassador to Japan, were among two of the speakers on the last day of the well-attended conference on "The United States and Great Britain: The Legacy of Churchill's Atlantic Alliance."

The conference, which began Wednesday, was sponsored by The Howard H. Baker Jr. Center for Public Policy at the University of Tennessee and the Churchill Archives Centre of Cambridge University in England.

A number of British foreign policy experts, including Sir John Boyd, master of Churchill College at Cambridge, also discussed in three different panels the development of America and Great Britain's special relationship after World War II. The relationship was one of the legacies of Sir Winston Churchill and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt that continues to develop and bear witness on Prime Minister Tony Blair and U.S. President George Bush as it relates to Iraq, the foreign policy experts noted.

While the United Kingdom once wielded globe-girdling influence, the sun's reflection on its empire is not quite as bright.

Churchill once described the UK's reach by drawing circles on a napkin. One circle was the empire, another was the trans-Atlantic alliance with the U.S., and the final circle was Europe.

Scowcroft said the United States, Europe and Britain are now holding Churchill's "rings of relationship" together, though they have changed and evolved.

"What we are likely to see now," he said, "is Britain with one foot in Europe and one with the U.S. - and then can they bring us together.

"That will be the test of the new special relationship," he said.

Baker said it is important to "guard against over-sentimentality with the special relationships (of the U.S. and the UK). Historically we have had a relationship with Britain, and it is instructive on how the future will unfold.

"But it is not a requirement of our future."

He said that relationship must be taken for what it is: an extraordinary accomplishment by the English-speaking people and the Allies in defense of liberty during World War II.

"But it is not necessarily the final word on how Britain or the United States and other parts of the world design and arrange their future relationships."

As an example, he said that Japan, where he spent four years as ambassador, has 180 million people, the second-largest economy in the world, the world's second-largest navy and considers itself a world power.

"The Japanese are genuinely our friends, true friends. The Japanese think of themselves as having a special relationship with the United States. But they also think they should be accepted in the world community as a part of a special relationship."

Baker said the real challenge in the world today is that relationships cannot be simply based on what has gone on before. China, he said, is a superpower. So is India. They have nuclear weapons, "and Japan could get them within days or weeks."

"We can not exclude those who want to be our friends," Baker said.

The conference ended on a high note with Allen Packwood, director of the Churchill Archives, and Alan Lowe, executive director of the Baker Center, saying they expect to have more such exchanges in the future.

[CondorFlight]

Well, it wasn't the USA which split from our "friends"; it was Europe which detached itself from anything to do with halting radical Islam.

Now they are reaping the fruits of that policy.

(And the British ought to be grateful to Blair for preserving the US-British relationship; with anyone else at the helm in London, US-British relations would probably have gone the way of French-US relations. . . )

[Oztrich Boy]

I never watched it.

[GSlob]

With "friends" like some of those listed, who needs enemas?