'Special Relationship' Under Strain as Obama and Cameron Meet

[Geee]

Politico:

'Special relationship' under strain as Obama and Cameron meet

By CAROL E. LEE | 6/26/10 7:06 AM EDT

The unease between Britain and the U.S. has grown since BP's Gulf Coast oil spill.


TORONTO – If there’s one takeaway snapshot from the gathering of the world’s economic powers here this weekend, it will be President Barack Obama, last year's new kid on the block, shaking hands with British Prime Minister David Cameron, the new, new kid on the block.

The hour-long session between the two leaders scheduled for Saturday is among the most important on Obama’s busy schedule during his three-day trip to Canada for the G8 and G20 summits and, as his first meeting with the new leader of the U.S.’s closest ally, it will generate the usual invocations of “the special relationship” between the two countries. But Obama and Cameron, who ousted Gordon Brown and his Labor government a little over six weeks ago, will go into the meeting with their relationship already under strain.

There is growing unease in Britain over the White House’s handling of the Gulf the oil spill, particularly its hard-nosed approach to BP, and over Afghanistan, where just days ago Obama ordered a shakeup in the U.S. command that coincided with the deadliest month for NATO troops since the war began in 2001.

Shortly after Obama arrived in Muskoka Friday for the G8 summit, Cameron dropped the news that he wants all British troops out of Afghanistan by 2015. “We can’t be there for another five years, having been there for nine years already,” Cameron said in an interview with Sky News television.

It was a sign of the domestic political pressures felt by U.S. allies, especially Cameron, over their support for an increasingly unpopular war.

Cameron’s wish – to set a deadline for pulling out the largest contingent of troops from any other NATO country other than those of the U.S. - comes a day after Obama stressed the flexibility in his July 2011 timetable for beginning U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. The deadline, he said, doesn’t mean “we’d be switching off the lights and closing the door behind us.”

A senior administration official downplayed the significance of Cameron’s statement, pointing out that 2015 “would be some time in the future.”

“We’re certainly comfortable with the commitments that we have from our allies,” the official said.

Tension between the U.S. and Britain over BP has mounted as the company has become more of a target with every failed effort to stop the oil gushing from its Deepwater Horizon drilling rig.

Obama’s repeated criticism of “British Petroleum” - a name the company has not gone by in nearly a decade - has been widely regarded across the Atlantic as anti-British. And the president’s insistence that BP be held financially responsible for the accident has sparked concern about the impact the company’s downturn would have on the British economy and the pension funds that have large holdings in the company’s stock.

As BP’s stock has dropped to its lowest price in over a decade and polls show British opinion of Obama waning, Cameron has become more aggressive. His spokesman indicated Wednesday that the prime minister will press Obama in Saturday’s meeting to give BP a better sense of the ultimate price tag for the oil spill.

Still, Obama’s face time with Cameron does present him with an opportunity to personally put U.S. relations with Britain on a new footing.

The president didn’t have a particularly warm relationship with Brown, Cameron’s dour predecessor. It got off to a rocky start – Obama did not hold a joint press conference during Brown’s first White House visit and it was widely noted that the gifts Obama presented to the prime minister were generic. The British press concluded that Brown had been snubbed, and the perception stuck.

[AceRimmer]

Brilliant strategy, the syncophants will proclaim on tomorrow's Sunday shows! Not.

 

Sucking up to the Arabs and quasi-Hitler's like Hugo Chavez while alienating our best ally are symptoms of a telepromper-in-chief's incompetence.

 

The Europeans are bailing on this disaster in the White House. How long before Japan, S. Korea, the Aussies and Kiwis, along with the rest of our allies in the Pacific do the same?