Bush’s last news conference has been widely reported and was well received for his ‘apologies’ for 'mistakes'. That won't cut the mustard with many angry activists but admitting a mistake or two at least shows that he can't be all bad. His demonisation is as silly as that of his rival, Ahmedinejad.

Bush used the opportunity of his final official conversation with the White House media to promote free trade and to remind Americans of nuclear proliferation threats, with special emphasis on North Korea.

He also asked Congress to release the remaining $350bn of the financial rescue package (responding to the request of the incoming President whom he praised). In short, his parting showed that, even if you disagreed with him, he had been consistent in his ideology and was generous to his successor.

But there is a point to be made here. A conservative American and a liberal American can differ in many respects but anyone who wins the Presidency will be thoroughly American in his way of thinking and acting. An American liberal is not a European in deep disguise.

The Realignment of American Foreign Policy

There was one aspect of Bush's presentation that could easily be overlooked. He seemed to single out Europeans as ‘opiners’ who didn’t like him, whereas (in his view and with some justification in regard to Asia, Africa, Australia and Latin America) he was still respected, as was America, elsewhere.

Our reports are naturally European or Arab/Iranian/Muslim-focused. Eurabia and Eurasia have taken a sharp turn against both the outgoing President and, to a lesser extent, America but Europe is not the world by any means. It is a dog that has had its day in that respect.

There is an argument that Bush’s legacy is the finalisation of a process of realignment of the US from being primarily an Atlantic power to being global power in terms of national ideology rather than just in its direction of material resources.

The US has always been half-turned towards the Pacific. It played the rest of the world much as the Soviets did but the core of Washington's focus was always, until now, NATO and the Eastern frontier of the then-developed world. This may not be the default attitude bequeathed to President Obama

A Surprise For The Europeans

Historians may be more charitable than we are inclined to be towards the Bush administration’s role in creating the initial prototype for American-Chinese collaboration in global economic management and in changing the relations of the US with the emerging world in general.

It may even be that the strains of pre-emption and of the war on terror on the ’45 Atlantic Settlement, that have so disturbed European Atlanticists, were implicit in Bush’s determination to see American liberal free market values as global in scope.

Euro-Atlanticists (Blair being typical) have expended vast amounts of domestic political capital to preserve and re-invent America as their own guided missile for the projection of Atlantic power outwards, misunderstanding that American national interests are not so easily manipulated.

If this is so, then Obama’s arrival may be a rude surprise for Europeans. He is not an Atlanticist first but an American first. Just as Bush was half-in and half-out of the East Coast elite, Obama owes little to it as a Chicagoan of multi-ethnic background with informal links of his own to the global community.

Strains between Europe (which is increasingly the German economic machine with an ambiguous relationship with Russia) and the US will, of course, not be so likely to be centred on specific war crises and incidents but interests are diverging slowly and remorsely.

The US is concerned with economic recovery and a global mission whereas Europe is more concerned with state formation against internal resistance, boundary drawing and the management of relationships (with some major historical baggage) in Eurasia, the Middle East and Africa.

Europe is important to the US as part of its global free trade and liberal values system but (given that its slippage into fascism or communism is unlikely) its practical use-value lies only to the extent that it turns outwards and spreads those values to the benefit of US business, deterring threats to US hegemony.

Since the spread of values and open trade are of growing importance to America's relations with at least three other continents (Latin America, Asia and Africa), the Europeans are only part of the story and their historically-based post-imperial claims to co-management with the US are looking distinctly shaky.

The Atlanticist Dream-Time

There is, of course, a natural inertia based on economic scale that brings the US and Europe together. There is no expectation that the core security alliance or a general willingness to co-operate in containing insurgencies, Russia and Eurasian or Eurabian 'rogue' states will come to an end.

What we need to do is sweep away some of the romantic and lingering Obamamania that took his electioneering August visit to Europe at face value. The idea of an ‘interplanetary unity’ (a phrase used by the Financial Times) led by benign Westerners (Americans led by European wisdom) is wishful thinking.

Atlanticists have a tendency to make an ‘ought’ into an ‘is’, to believe that if you say something often enough, then it becomes a fact – in that sense, they practice politics as if it were badly performed High Magick.

American policymakers, especially in the Pentagon, see no leadership but America's across the world with 'equal' junior rights to those given to Europe in the past now accorded to pivotal states and regional giants. This no longer privileges Europe on the global scale - and certainly not the United Kingdom.

America may be going through a rough patch but it has no doubt that it is still ‘top nation’ and that it won’t be displaced by a ramshackle European Union in the near future. If an American strategist worries about threats, he worries not about Berlin or Moscow but about Beijing.

Part of the history of the Bush years is of the emergence of a new grudging respect between two powers, China and the US, each with one foot firmly planted in the Pacific. This is of far greater importance than the creation of an unstable 'democratic' state on top of the oil wells of Mesopotamia.

The British Flummoxed

Meanwhile, as part of the process of settling the boundaries of American hegemony (i.e. a hegemony of trade and values), the machinery is being put in place for a major ‘surge’ in Afghanistan.

The British are now irrelevant, mere tribal auxiliaries. The Americans are going to have to decide if they should let Europeans off the hook and not ask for their help. This is tantamount to keeping the EU West of Tehran to the obvious discomfit of the British.

The alternative is for Washington to make a highly political request for help which will variously humiliate, confuse or be treated with circumlocutory disdain by the different players in our Holy Roman Europe.

If the US asks for help, the US-European relationship will be damaged as will be a concept of the West co-terminous with NATO that is central to British foreign policy. If it does not, the burden falls entirely on an exhausted London whose armed forces will be the puppet of Centcom.

The entire economic, security and foreign policy of the United Kingdom is so deeply integrated into its attempt to ‘manage’ Washington that it has nowhere to go if the Americans take it for granted and treat it as little more than a house slave.

The deluded ‘play’ of the FCO has been that only the UK can arbitrate between Washington and Europe in support of the Atlantic Charter and free trade. The Churchillian story behind 60 years of ‘junior partnership’ has degenerated into Blairite ‘poodledom’.

The nuclear deterrent, intelligence sharing (in which the UK acts as supplier to the American security supermarket), involvement in Iraq, the rise of London as unstable global financial centre, the adoption of progressive standards in business policy – the list of embedded dependencies is endless.

The whole thing begins to fall apart if the costs of alignment with America are not merely politically uncomfortable (which they are) but start to cost the British people their prosperity. Like all pragmatic democratic peoples, the British will brush aside humiliation but not economic loss.

The threat to the British Establishment (since the British people have been far less engaged in this project since the Communist threat receded in the 1990s) is that its role in managing various components within the American succession to the Atlantic empires is about to become meaningless.

Why? Because it is no longer required. The US no longer needs the UK East of Suez (or France South of the Sahara) while the UK is increasingly soiled by its association with the US in the Middle East. Foreign Secretary Miliband and Prime Minister Brown are ciphers to the Arab world. Why deal with the monkey?

Now - add to this that the US and Eurasia can have decent bilateral relations without needing an Atlantic intermediary nor perfect alignment and that the long term maintenance of the global economic and strategic system is not merely global but a matter of an ‘understanding’ between the the US and China

British Discomfort With Obama-ism

The British are facing a dreadful crisis under Obama. They have no relationship with the man and they have little to offer. The very basis of British foreign policy, despite all the Atlanticist platitudes, is coming to an end. All it can do is toady around like Uriah Heep, hoping to be noticed.

The Brown-Miliband strategy is to try to recover ground by positioning the UK as the key player in global economic recovery. There may be some merit in Brown’s being part of the international advisory network for the re-ordering of capitalism. He has experience - albeit his competence is clearly exagerrated.

Brown thinks that the UK can broker a regulatory structure that is both free market along US lines and regulated along European progressive lines in a manner analogous to the UK role in brokering security arrangements within NATO. He thinks Obama is a European-manque because he is a progressive.

But Obama is an American with strong libertarian values. Federalist government intervention along Rooseveltian lines is not and never has been statist, socialist or social democratic. It is designed to make the capitalist system work better for all Americans and not for anyone else.

Negotiations on the regulation and management of capitalism do not need America’s free market imp in London to get in the way of direct talks between the EU (i.e Berlin consulting with others) and Washington – and Beijing.

To date, all Brown’s attempts to intrude himself into the economic recovery debate have been failures – whether on oil inflation or global economic recovery. The conferences and summits have been so many damp squibs. He and London just do not matter that much any more.

Worse, British domestic economic policy is being driven by its external dependency. Major policy initiatives on lending are undoubtedly being held back to ensure that their presentation is linked to the arrival of Obama in office - both to get political cover and achieve reflected glory from the ‘new Kennedy’.

Without cover from Obama, Brown’s domestic neo-Keynesianism will become bogged down in partisan warfare from the Tories, will result in further damaging criticism from more cautious European politicians and may startle international investors into a run on sterling.

This is why British officials are spinning like mad that they have a major role to play in the Obama era. Every effort will be made to have Obama appear to endorse Brown’s economic leadership (whether he does or not in practice) at the London Summit in April.

But be very wary of news coverage before and then. We have no prediction to make but we do know that Obama holds all the cards but one and that one, poodledom, is the only card left in the New Labour pack.

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