Abandoned poodle shunned by US and Europe
Britain’s international reputation is so bad even the US is sidelining its former poodle,
says Robert Fox Gordon Brown talked tough at yesterday’s ineffectual EU summit on Russia, but it will have cut little ice with his European counterparts who now regard Britain with downright suspicion when it comes to international affairs. Not that the Americans have any higher regard for their old ally.
Some observers are even comparing Britain's position in world affairs with the low point reached following the debacle of the Suez intervention in 1956. "The policies of the US and Europe are diverging pretty fast, and Britain is now adrift between the two. It was well placed to play a role in the Georgia crisis, but it didn't know how," a senior European defence analyst and adviser to the Ministry of Defence, told me last week.
As if to prove his point, the Prime Minister wrote in the Observer: "The changing global order cannot begoverned by institutions designed in the middle of the last century." This was bluster straight out of the Tony Blair playbook of vapid futurismo geopolitics. The fact is, 20th century instruments of international security and cooperation, such as the UN Charter and the Helsinki Final Act, are appropriate in the present crisis - the problem is making them work. Russia and Georgia were in flagrant violation of both in Georgia last month.
Once again the British leadership appears to be following the line of the Americans, and speaking the language of confrontation and coercion rather than cooperation and engagement. Moscow needs no encouragement to reply in kind - its cancellation of key instruments "designed in the middle of the last century" like the CFE disarmament agreement to reduce conventional forces, has been ruinous.
Ruinous, too, has been the fatal friendship cooked up with America by George Bush and Tony Blair. This is why so much of what Britain proposes on the international stage now looks like damaged goods.
Next summer British troops will leave Basra, and the Blair project in Iraq will finally be at an end. Britain will emerge from a campaign a shade longer than the Second World War, with little credit - least of all from its senior partner, the United States, which has now taken over control from the UK of operations against the Shia militias in Basra.
The Americans seem to have lost confidence in the British at the operational and strategic level, while neo-con gurus like Fred Kagan and Marc Reuil Gerecht have been public in their contempt of the British.
Worse, if anything, is the plight of the alliance in the dysfunctional campaigns in Afghanistan. There the British are fighting a war in Helmand to an American strategy - to uproot drugs, beat the Taliban and support their dodgy Kabul proxy, Hamid Karzai. Yet the Americans treat the British as just another part of Nato, an organisation they like to pretend much of the time they are not part of.
The problem for the British, according to a senior adviser to the forces of the Dutch, the UK's closest
Last week Admiral Mike Mullen (left), head of all US armed forces, hosted a high-level strategic conference aboard the carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, cruising in the Indian Ocean, to discuss the worsening violence in Afghanistan and the border lands in Pakistan. With him were General David Petraeus and General David McKiernan, the US commander in Afghanistan who doubles as a Nato international commander. Their guests were General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, chief of Pakistan's armed forces, and his staff.
And what of America's principal ally, Britain, with 7,500 troops fighting and dying along the Afghan-Pakistan border and across Helmand? Where were their representatives at this floating summit? None was invited. 
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