A Much Less Special Relationship

By ROGER COHEN, NYT

LONDON — Britain’s decision not to stand with the United States, its closest ally, in possible military action to punish the Syrian regime for a deadly chemical weapons attack marks a watershed moment that leaves the “special relationship” in search of meaning and Britain in search of its role in the world.

The trans-Atlantic alliance has been a central pillar of the security of the postwar world. The core of it was the British-American bond, developed after a depleted Britain passed the baton of global leadership to Washington in 1945. Differences soon emerged, not least over Suez in 1956, but this was a relationship built on the notion that its importance overrode inevitable frictions, especially in matters of war and peace.

When Britain opts for the sidelines with Germany, leaving an American president to look to France and Turkey for support in holding Bashar al-Assad accountable for breaking the world’s taboo on chemical weapons, there is little or nothing special left. Rather than standing shoulder-to-shoulder with its ally, Britain has turned its back.

It has been a very long time since a British prime minister lost a war-and-peace vote in Parliament, as David Cameron did on Syria in a stinging personal defeat. He paid the price for the “dodgy dossier,” “Bush’s poodle” and all the other damning epithets that came to accompany Tony Blair’s support a decade ago of the war America fought in Iraq on false pretenses. Something broke then in the U.S.-British bond. It is now clear that Barack Obama, for all the hopes vested in him, has failed to rebuild it.

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