"New Conservative" Cameron: rooted in the Atlantic alliance.

• Author: Fraser, Maurice
• Position: Politics in Europe - David Cameron

"When it comes to the special relationship with America, Conservatives feel it, understand it and believe in it." Thus David Cameron, who during the months since he took over the leadership of the British Conservative Party, has set in motion one of the most dramatic repositioning exercises in the party's history. After years of appearing marginalized in British politics and foreign policy, the Conservatives are reaping useful (if not spectacular) dividends in the polls, enabling them to pull ahead of the ruling Labour party and Britain's third party, the Liberal Democrats. Under Cameron, all areas of party policy are being revisited, and foreign policy is no exception.

Cameron's choice of keeping the word "special" to qualify the UK-U.S. relationship was carefully made, and all the more striking for its indifference to clever punditry which dismisses the notion as a tenacious self-delusion of the British. But Cameron put his own spin on the phrase by calling for a "rebalanced special relationship." That grabbed headlines and inspired commentators to proclaim that yet another Conservative orthodoxy had been stood on its head. Cameron's speech in September to the British-American Project in London certainly provided some basis for this, with its insistence that "we should be solid and not slavish in our friendship with America;" its caution that "bombs and missiles are bad ambassadors;" its chiding of the U.S. over Guantanamo Bay; and its call for "a new multilateralism." Important as these statements are in defining Cameron's approach, his words need to be read, not as an echo of zealous anti-Americanism, but as a careful restating of British positions within a tradition of Anglo-American alliance.

There was obvious political advantage, in British electoral terms, in putting some distance between the Conservative Party and a Bush administration mired in difficulties. Cameron's points were aimed at refuting the Manichaean geopolitics and strategic stark choices that have been posited by the neo-conservatives as the basis for foreign policy. Cameron's own concept has a clear lineage within the three currents of Conservative thinking about foreign policy: the Atlanticist strand, the primacy of British vital interests, and a "conservative" re]ex of caution about intervening around the globe.

The first of these, the Atlanticist strand, has enjoyed doctrinal primacy since World War II amongst the UK's political leaders and policy-making elites. This primacy survived both the Suez debacle and Harold Wilson's refusal to send troops to Vietnam, reached its apogee in the Reagan-Thatcher years and has been pursued just as determinedly by Tony Blair.

The second strand is somewhat analogous to U.S. isolationism and is sometimes dubbed 'Powellite' (after the late Enoch Powell, a controversial and idiosyncratic High Tory who championed the full political integration of Northern Ireland into Great Britain). This doctrine eschews foreign interventions except where territorial sovereignty or the safety of British nationals is in peril. The constituency for this view has been a small (though not negligible) one, mostly on the right of the Conservative Party.

The third strand invokes a conservative tradition of caution in the face of life's complexities and the imperfectability of mankind...