Hillary Rodham Clinton’s 'Hard Choices'

After the author’s enigmatic “Will I, won’t I be running in 2015?” smile on its cover, the next thing to strike me about Hard Choices was that a 654 page hardback , printed in the UK with 48 colour plates, had been delivered to my house for £9, presumably with a margin of profit for all concerned. Disconcertingly, on 20 June the FT’s reviewer of Hard Choices, Edward Luce, had concluded:
me about

Hard Choices is something of a paradox. On the one hand it shores up the view that Clinton would make a good president – she is a tough, hard-working and very experienced figure. On the other, it is a dull affair. From the point of view of the reader it is an easy decision. Reviewers read Hard Choices so that you don’t have to.

So why would anyone persist? It might be firstly to discover any insights Hillary Clinton, having been responsible for US foreign policy for four years as Secretary of State, might offer the rest of us about the prospects for a complex and riven world and, secondly, would the book’s contents reveal anything about her fitness to be 45th POTUS? It soon becomes apparent that Clinton is not aiming to rival Henry Kissinger when it comes to providing a strategic view of geopolitics and that there is some guff to be waded through on the way. Perhaps a bit of folksiness is to be expected of a presidential candidate, but it makes for hard going even on page one:

Why on earth was I lying on the backseat of a blue minivan with tinted windows? Good question.

Not really, because obviously:

I was trying to leave my home in Washington, D.C., without being seen by the reporters staked out front. It was the evening of June 5, 2008, and I was heading to a secret meeting with Barack Obama.

then on page 2:

By the time of our meeting I had known Barack for four years, two of which we spent debating each other.

but on page 3:

We stared at each other like two teenagers on an awkward first date, taking a few sips of Chardonnay.

Oh come on! But leaving that sort of thing on one side (and there is more, for example Chelsea’s wedding), the problem a reader of Hard Choices often meets is revealed in this early paragraph, the only one about New Zealand:

[Australia’s] neighbor New Zealand presented more of a challenge. For twentyfive years, since New Zealand prohibited all nuclear vessels from visiting their home ports, the United States and New Zealand had had a limited relationship. However, I thought our long friendship and mutual interests created a diplomatic opening for bridging the divide and shaping a new relationship between Wellington and Washington. On my visit in 20L0, I signed the Wellington Declaration with Prime Minister John Key, which committed our nations to work more closely together in Asia, the Pacific, and multilateral organizations. In 2012, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta would rescind the twenty-six-year ban on New Zealand's ships docking at American bases. In global politics, sometimes reaching out to an old friend can be as rewarding as making a new one. (page 44)

Taken individually, none of these six sentences can be faulted – not surprisingly given the high-quality help (an awful lot of it) listed in the Acknowledgements. However, while the element of self-aggrandisement in the second sentence is forgivable in a memoir, up to a point, there is no mention of her predecessor as SecState, Condoleeza Rice, having visited New Zealand in 2008, nor of the Free Trade Agreement the two countries had been pursuing for some time.

At which point it should be dawning on even the most naive of souls that Hard Choices is a sort of grown-up’s LinkedIn entry - all about making the most of what you have done with an eye to what job you want to do next. This model makes some sense of the book’s content but has three inherent weaknesses. Firstly, as in other countries, US foreign policy is based on enduring national self-interest:

America will always do what it takes to keep our people safe and advance our core interests. (page 361)

So much of the time, successive Secretaries of State will have to pursue similar and unoriginal objectives. Secondly, Clinton visited many countries as FLOTUS (some as First Lady of Arkansas, between 1979 and 1992) so her account frequently leaps back to long before 2009, leading to daft remarks like:

Since my 1995 visit, Mongolian democracy had endured. (page 63).

Thirdly, in certain areas of the world, there have been significant developments since 2013 and she has felt it necessary to add appropriate material. This is the case with the chapter on Russia (see below) which has been supplemented to cover the Crimea/Ukraine developments this year. On the other hand, the latest complexities of Iraq, the self-proclaimed Caliphate and Iran have arisen since printing.

Hard Choices consists of 25 chapters and an Epilogue, grouped into six Parts. Part One, A Fresh Start, is the shortest and covers Clinton’s getting the job and her introduction to the State Department. Part Two of the book, Across the Pacific, addresses Asia and the Pacific following the adoption by the US of the strategic pivot. Clinton shows little hesitation at claiming credit for this concept:

Over four years, I delivered a series of speeches explaining our strategy and making the case for why the Asia-Pacific deserved greater attention from the U.S. government. In the summer of 2011, I began working on a long essay that would situate our work in the region in the broader sweep of American foreign policy. The war in Iraq was winding down, and a transition was under way in Afghanistan. After a decade of focusing on the areas of greatest threat, we had come to a "pivot point." Of course, we had to stay focused on the threats that remained, but it was also time to do more in the areas of greatest opportunity. 

Foreign Policy magazine published my essay in the fall under the title "America's Pacific Century" but it was the word pivot that gained prominence. Journalists latched on to it as an evocative description of the administration's renewed emphasis on Asia, although many in our own government preferred the more anodyne rebalance to Asia. Some friends and allies in other parts of the world were understandably concerned that the phrase implied turning our back on them, but we worked to make clear that America had the reach and resolve to pivot to Asia without pivoting away from other obligations and opportunities. (pages 45/46)

So it's presumably no accident that the map of the world at the start of Hard Choices has the Pacific at its centre and the Atlantic bisected to left and right. But at the time of reading, with the crisis in Georgia unresolved and Iraq’s existence in doubt, the concept looks a little simplistic. However, these current problems do not lessen the ever-increasing importance of China, and I hoped Clinton’s two chapters within Part Two relating to China to be of value. Unfortunately there is little of real interest. One chapter turns out to be a lengthy, but promptly forgettable, description of the way a Chinese dissident, Chen Guangchen, could have derailed important talks and how this was avoided. I was hoping for some insight into the relationship between the Chinese military, with its rapidly expanding capabilities, and the rest of the Party – is the Chinese hierarchy a monolith, or are there internal tensions? All that is on offer is a reference to:

… more hardline elements in the security apparatus. (page 89)

As to another fascinating uncertainty about China – will it be able to break through the $10,000 GDP/head barrier which seems to be an insuperable developmental barrier for some other countries – doubtless Clinton is aware of the issue but she doesn’t address it.

Another chapter in this Part, Burma: The Lady and the Generals, reports Clinton’s visits to Burma (she does not use Myanmar) in 2011 and 2012, with much feel-good stuff about Aung San Suu Kyi. Clinton describes Suu Kyi’s visit to the US in 2012 to receive the Congressional Gold Medal, but somehow forgets to mention that it was awarded during George W Bush’s administration in 2008.

Part Three is devoted to Af-Pak and portentously titled War and Peace as if those possibilities don’t arise elsewhere. There’s plenty about Zero Dark Thirty as it was seen from the White House Situation Room end of the telescope, but nothing about two particular elephants (Elephas maximus indicus, of course) in the Af-Pak room: India’s interest, selfish but no less real for that, in any Afghanistan outcome (for Kissinger’s views, see here) and Pakistan’s custodianship of nuclear weapons.

Part Five being given over to the Middle East, Part Four, Between Hope and History, might just as well have been called Best of the Rest, ie Europe, Russia, Latin America and Africa who get a chapter each, Europe’s subtitle being Ties that Bind. British readers should find pages 207-208 interesting. On David Miliband the adjectives pile up:

David proved to be an invaluable partner. He was young, energetic, smart, creative and attractive with a ready smile. We found our views on how the world was changing remarkably similar.

And quite keen on William Hague, too:

We both started off a bit cautiously with each other, but, much to my delight, I found him a thoughtful statesman with good sense and good humour.

On David Cameron:

President Obama and Cameron took to each other right off, starting with a private meeting before Cameron’s electoral victory [sic]. They had an easy rapport and enjoyed each other’s company. Cameron and I met together a number of times over the years, both with and without President Obama. He was intellectually curious and eager to exchange ideas about world events, …

which does little to dispel Cameron’s reputation as not being able to cope with intelligent women of ability (Hague and Miliband not so, indeed having married them). The French get only a few lines less than the British, Clinton observing of Sarkozy that:

Most leaders are quieter in person than they appear to be on the stage. Not Sarkozy. He was more dramatic – and fun – in person. Sitting in a meeting with him was always an adventure. [etc] (page 209)

Alain Juppé, mayor of Bordeaux in SW France and Sarkozy’s foreign minister, is described as a consummate professional. Sarkozy reappears during the Libyan crisis, when Clinton, the Illinois Methodist, encounters “the French public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy:

Finally, around 10 p.m., Jibril [Libyan rebel leadership] arrived at the Westin in Paris accompanied by Bernard-Henri Lévy, who had helped arrange the meeting. They made quite a pair, the rebel and the philosopher. Hard to tell who was who. Jibril appeared more like a technocrat than a firebrand. He was small and bespectacled, with thinning hair and a stern demeanor. Lévy, by contrast, cut a dramatic and stylish figure, with long wavy hair and his shirt open practically down to his navel. He has been quoted as saying, "God is dead but my hair is perfect." (To that I'd say, I think God is alive, but I'd love to have perfect hair!) (page 368)

Pivoting or not, Clinton, reassuringly for us Europeans, gives pages 211 to 213 over to NATO (remembering Canada is also a member). This leads her on to the EU and then Turkey, a NATO member since 1952, which the US envisages as a European state:

None of our relationships in Europe needed more tending than Turkey, a country of more than 70 million people, overwhelmingly Muslim, with one foot in Europe and one in Southwest Asia. (page 214)

Though this section ends:

Erdoğan’s support in more conservative areas of Turkey remains strong. Turkey’s future direction is uncertain. But what is certain is that Turkey will continue to play a significant role in both the Middle East and Europe. And our relationship will remain of vital importance to the United States. (page 218)

Later, in the context of Libya, Clinton does not omit:

There were already tensions between Sarkozy and Turkish Prime Minister Erdoğan because of France’s objections to Turkey joining the EU. (page 373)

I found the chapter on Russia, Reset and Regression, one of the most interesting, ignoring the reset button malarkey. It gives some of the background, “a modern-day version of the “Great Game”, to the Northern Distribution Network used to support the US military in Afghanistan (pages 237-8).

Part Five, Upheaval, is the longest Part and, to my mind, mostly better written than the others. It is worth noting that the first and last of its seven chapters are about Israel and Palestine and could have been combined for an audience focussed on foreign policy. But Clinton, as one might expect of a possible US presidential candidate, has no intention of joining the ranks of Israel’s critics. Related considerations probably led to one of the longest chapters in the book, Benghazi: under Attack, which deals with the death of the US ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, on September 11, 2012. This is a forensically-written account of events, presumably intended to block off attempts to make Clinton’s responsibilities at the time an issue in a future presidential election campaign. Otherwise, so great are the upheavals in the Middle East that much of what Clinton tells readers about relations between the US and Iran or Syria is being overtaken by events. 

The final Part, The Future We Want, rounds up what might be called supra-national, or supra-regional, issues that don’t fit in elsewhere, like human rights and the internet. It seems odd to have put Climate Change and Energy in separate chapters, Energy being addressed alongside Jobs – American ones, primarily. It’s in this chapter, rather than Part Two, that the tensions between the US and China over “state capitalism” are exposed. One of the shortest chapters gets the longest title: 21st-Century Statecraft: Digital Diplomacy in a Networked World.  The unsurprising conclusion is that Twitter, Facebook etc are fine and help support “smart power”, a concept which Clinton had “embraced” back on page 23 and “had been kicking around Washington for a few years”, but Wikileaks and Snowden are not.

Then, in the Epilogue on page 595, we come to the crunch: “Will I run for President in 2016? The answer is, I haven’t decided yet”. Not even having a vote in a US presidential election, my views are less than worthless, but I feel after 600 pages entitled to express a view! Firstly, just how effective was Secretary Clinton in terms of gaining domestic political support? Days after her book’s publication, this chart appeared on the FiveThirtyEight website. I’ve added the details of the administrations and Clinton’s term:

However, there is a general pattern here of trust being acquired when in opposition and lost when facing global realities in office.

Secondly, having been born in the same year as Clinton, I feel I can comment on her age. The chart below shows the ages of the US presidents in office since 1913 (notes below):

If Clinton were sworn in as POTUS in January 2017, she would be only a few months younger than Ronald Reagan was when he entered office in 1981. Four presidents in the last 100 years, all male, have lived into their nineties (all being well, Jimmy Carter will be 90 on 1 October this year). So, if her health is good, why not? But some stories in the press, like this one, will need to be countered, and, if I were a US voter, I would be looking for assurance from any candidate, given the demands of the Presidency, that their health was well above the average for their age, sex and class, and rather more than:

Over many years of travel I’ve developed the ability to sleep almost anywhere at any time – on planes, in cars, a quick power nap in a hotel room before a meeting. … (page 47)

The same press source quotes Bill Clinton as saying:

[Obama]’s convinced himself he’s been a brilliant president, and wants to clone himself — to find his Mini-Me. He’s hunting for someone to succeed him, and he believes the American people don’t want to vote for someone who’s been around for a long time. He thinks that [Hilary] and I are what he calls ‘so 20th century.’ He’s looking for ¬another Barack Obama.

And it’s certainly the case that US presidents often appear as if by magic from some nowhere far beyond the Beltway – as did Bill himself. In the case of the Clintons, will it be this desire for “clean skins” or a feeling that one bite of the cherry is enough, given their current wealth, that will be Hillary’s undoing? Hillary Clinton told ABC News on 9 June:

We came out of the White House not only dead broke, but in debt. We had no money when we got there, and we struggled to, you know, piece together the resources for mortgages, for houses, for Chelsea's education. You know, it was not easy. Bill has worked really hard — and it's been amazing to me — he's worked very hard. First of all, we had to pay off all our debts, which was, you know, he had to make double the money because of obviously taxes and then pay off the debts and get us houses and take care of family members.

Well we’d all like to do that, of course, but most of us can’t – except people like “our old friend Tony Blair” (page 30)!

Summing up, I found Hard Choices had its good elements but the omissions that a potential presidential candidate has to make detract from the book’s interest. To have added more on China and Af-Pak would almost inevitably have risked offering future hostages to fortune in the Oval Office, but a discussion of Turkey without any reference to the Kurds seems hollow, particularly by June 2014.

It is, however, salutary for someone who lives in a country which merits four paragraphs in one chapter in one Part of this book to be reminded just how totally global a power the USA continues to be, as the UK once was. The responsibilities of POTUS, even without the domestic burden, are almost supra-human and one has to admire the unusual people prepared to take them on. Nothing in Hilary Rodham Clinton’s book made me think she was unfit for the job, if she wants it, and she’s probably more able than many men have been.


Notes on the Ages chart above 

1. The black circles indicate the deaths of former Presidents over the age of 90 (Hoover, Ford, Reagan) and of deaths in office (Harding, Roosevelt, Kennedy).
2. Harding’s successor, Coolidge died in 1933 at the age of 60, four years after leaving office. When they told Dorothy Parker, she is supposed to have asked “How could they tell?”
3. All dates of birth, death and office have been taken from Wikipedia. For dates of birth before 1900 in Excel I used a “quick and dirty” method as before here. As always, please advise any errors.

New Year Predictions 2012

A year ago in a post on this blog, I recorded three predictions (see below) which had surfaced in 2010 and might prove worth revisiting in time.  Here are three more which came up in 2011.

In March in an interview with the Guardian, Adam Posen,

The Bank of England's leading dove has predicted that inflation will tumble to 1.5% by the middle of next year … “If I have made the wrong call, not only will I switch my vote, I would not pursue a second term. They should have somebody who gets it right and not me.”

In May, Henry Kissinger was interviewed by Simon Schama for the FT (£). He offered a scenario for Afghanistan after US withdrawal:

“An India-Pakistan war becomes more probable. Eventually,” says the Doctor, his voice a deep pond of calm. “Therefore some kind of international process in which these issues are discussed might generate enough restraints so that Pakistan does not feel itself encircled by India and doesn’t see a strategic reserve in the Taliban.” He looks directly at me. “Is it possible to do this? I don’t know. But I know if we let matters drift this could become the Balkans of the next world war.”

Finally, and quite immodestly in such company, I made the suggestion in June that the Queen might retire in April 2016 after her 90th birthday.

I will number these 11.1, 11.2 and 11.3 and have applied the same format to last year’s which were:

10.1 “It will be fascinating to see whether the coalition conceived after the 2010 election holds. It may, since the Lib Dem desire for electoral reform is so intrinsic to them. But if that doesn’t come about, I doubt the coalition will last long. However, I may be wrong ...”
Tony Blair, currently looking as though he was “wrong”, but who knows what may happen in 2012?

10.2 “whoever wins this [2010] election will be out of power for a whole generation because of how tough the fiscal austerity will have to be”
Attributed to Mervyn King, who may be proved right in that many aspects of the UK’s fiscal austerity have yet to be realised.

10.3 Prince Charles would never be King and that William would succeed his grandmother
Attributed to Princess Diana – too soon to tell.

‘We don’t have to stay, Henry’

The review section of the Daily Telegraph on 15 August offered readers its Pick of the paperbacks, starting with Leading from the Front by General Sir Richard Dannatt, ‘A searing indictment of how Labour failed the armed forces in Iraq and Afghanistan’. (Back in May, I commented on Dannatt’s appearance at the Hay Literary Festival in connection with this book, and in April posted on Matt Cavanagh’s articles on Labour and the generals.)

In contrast, but also on 15 August, Sir Rodric Braithwaite reviewed in the Financial Times Frank Ledwidge’s Losing Small Wars:

… a savage indictment of the military leadership that got British soldiers into one impossible situation after another in Iraq and Afghanistan. His conclusion is stark: “The reputation of the British army has been seriously damaged. The British were at sea in both places, devoid of viable doctrine, without awareness of their environment, lacking adequate forces and minus any coherent strategy to pursue. All this was coupled with a hubris which attracted its inevitable riposte – nemesis.”

Braithwaite concluded:

The generals can be blamed, as Ledwidge says, for not insisting that they were given objectives that were clear, consistent, adequately resourced, and achievable within a reasonable time. Instead, they assured ministers that they could do whatever was asked of them, in a misguided desire to show off their prowess and secure their future budgets. They acquiesced, may even have believed, in the dubious proposition that we needed to follow the Americans to Iraq and Afghanistan to pay, in Tony Blair’s distasteful phrase, “a ‘blood price’ to secure [Britain’s] special relationship with America”. No wonder they failed to produce a convincing military plan. It was, however, a failure of moral fibre rather than strategic thinking.
The real problem, however, goes far beyond two failed wars and it is not only the politicians and generals who are to blame. The British public, too, seems to want the country to have aircraft carrier and missile submarines so that we can “punch above our weight”, sending military expeditions hither and yon, provided the price in blood and treasure is not too high. That will not change until Britain finally works out what sort of country it is – a floundering former empire still dreaming of a global reach, or a serious medium-sized power with a realistic view of its national interests. Then it can decide what kind of armed forces it really needs and is prepared to pay for. Meanwhile, Britain will have no coherent strategy and its foreign and defence policy will remain in its present sad muddle.

Sir Rodric has been UK ambassador to Moscow and Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC), and is the author of the recently published and well-regarded Afgantsy, a history of the Soviet involvement in Afghanistan. So lesser mortals ought to take care when picking over anything he writes, but nonetheless …

Firstly, was it ‘Tony Blair’s distasteful phrase, “a blood price” ’? In 2002, prior to a visit to the US, Blair gave an interview for a BBC Two programme, Hotline to the President. The BBC News website still has an item (image below) on the programme, headed Britain will pay 'blood price' – Blair, and starting with:

Britain must be prepared to pay a "blood price" to secure its special relationship with the US, Prime Minister Tony Blair has told the BBC ahead of talks on Iraq with President Bush.

But further on it reads:

Hotline to the President presenter Michael Cockerell asked Mr Blair whether one of the elements of the UK-US special relationship was whether "Britain is prepared to send troops to commit themselves, to pay the blood price".
Mr Blair replied: "Yes. What is important though is that at moments of crisis they (the USA) don't need to know simply that you are giving general expressions of support and sympathy.
"That is easy, frankly. They need to know, `Are you prepared to commit, are you prepared to be there when the shooting starts?'"

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem likely, according to the BFI, that this programme will be turning up soon on YouTube or anywhere else. But from the BBC webpage it appears that it was Cockerell’s ‘distasteful phrase’, not Blair’s. Unless, of course, Blair had used it earlier, somewhere off the record, and Cockerell was primed to spring it, gobbet-style. Although an admirer of Cockerell’s work for many years, I knew very little about him, so his entry on Wikipedia (which, of course, may not be accurate) proved worth reading. He is 71 this month and has had seven children from three relationships, two former wives coming from high Tory circles.

Secondly, Sir Rodric’s remark ‘The British public, too, seems to want the country to have aircraft carrier and missile submarines’ touched on something I posted here, much less elegantly, earlier this month:

Perhaps in 2011, if the UK is envisaged in some quarters as having accepted being on the way to minor power status (eg eventually abandoning its nuclear deterrent, aircraft carriers and a serious intelligence capability), keeping on good terms with the US is not seen as worth the price. However the UK would need to be confident that it could address the current and future threats to cyber security without close cooperation with the US.

and I quoted the National Security Strategy:

2.11 Our strong defence, security and intelligence relationship with the US is exceptionally close and central to our national interest.

It’s difficult to argue against a former Chairman of the JIC if he thinks it a ‘dubious proposition that we needed to follow the Americans to Iraq and Afghanistan’, but I wonder what Sir Rodric would make of the programme Document broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 15 August. (Don’t worry, dear reader, you have the rest of your life to catch up – apparently it will be ‘Available until 12:00AM Thu, 1 Jan 2099’; hopefully so will the BBC).

Mike Thomson investigates the collapse of the US UK special relationship in 1973, via a revealing transcript of a phone call between President Nixon and Henry Kissinger which suggests the split was deeper and more severe than previously thought.
As Britain joined the EEC, US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger became increasingly annoyed at the lack of support by Edward Heath's government for American foreign policy. Mike uncovers papers which suggest that in retaliation, the US switched off the supply of intelligence to the UK.
Among those Mike speaks to are former Defence and Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington and Lord Powell, later Margaret Thatcher's Private Secretary.

The problem which arose in 1973 had been described in Richard J Aldrich’s GCHQ, and he appeared in the programme. This is an extract from the chapter, Trouble with Henry (pages 289-90):

Kissinger was looking for a symbolic area to hit that would send a clear message to London. He chose the intelligence relationship. The next day, intelligence relations between the two Countries were halted. NSA went quiet, and officials told Heath that the CIA had 'suspended the supply of certain intelligence materials to us’. NSA and the CIA had been instructed to cease intelligence exchange with GCHQ and SIS. British officials regarded this as ‘sinister’.  ... the JIC discussed Anglo-American intelligence relations at four consecutive meetings during late August and early September as it struggled to address the problem. Kissinger's 'cut-off' had the desired effect, and sent shock waves through the British establishment. This event is so sensitive that even after more than thirty years have passed, the Cabinet Office still [2007] refuses to declassify further documents on the subject.
The reactions of the American intelligence agencies to Kissinger’s insistence on a cut-off varied. NSA offered a legalistic response, insisting that its relationship with GCHQ was governed by 'a binding international treaty", so it would have to investigate and see what could be done. This was a polite way of telling Kissinger that it intended to ignore him. The CIA also fudged its reply on the matter of human intelligence or reports from agents that were supplied to SIS. Certainly at a station level, some cooperation continued. The area that was hit hardest was imagery the supply of top-secret photographs from spy planes and satellites. The senior RAF officer tasked with collecting this sensitive imagery, who travelled to Washington once a week on an RAF Comet airliner, turned up and found that 'The bag just was not there.'

The Document programme had uncovered a recorded telephone conversation between Nixon and Kissinger. The President’s exasperation with the emergent EEC led him to remark: ‘We don’t have to stay, Henry’ [ie we can withdraw US forces from Europe].  Document ended with contributions from Powell and Carrington, the former very pro the UK/US special relationship, the latter now very sceptical – “ … a figment of the British imagination”. Aldrich records (page 282) Carrington’s attitude at the time:

Carrington explained that the Anglo-American partnership was perhaps a natural one, given that the two allies' 'geography and size are so different'. Although the scope and scale of Britain's residual empire was continually declining, the small remnants were nonetheless supremely valuable. Carrington continued:
Because of the number of our remaining island dependencies, we are able to provide the Americans with facilities which they would get from no one else on a comparable scale. Indeed, the very fact of our possession of these dependencies enables us to make a considerable contribution to an alliance which is important to both of us but in which otherwise our respective contributions might be very ill-balanced.
All this allowed Britain to benefit from what he called 'the massive American military technological and intelligence machine'. Carrington argued that the hidden reciprocal benefits to Britain were in three areas: nuclear weapons, research and development, and intelligence. While these things were relatively invisible compared to the requested British real estate, they were nonetheless extremely valuable. Without American intelligence, he argued, 'and particularly that derived from the NSA/GCHQ Agreement', Whitehall would be unable to assess the key military developments inside the Eastern Bloc and China, and indeed would struggle even to produce good intelligence on lesser threats in the Middle East.

Sir Rodric is surely right to propose that Britain should ‘… decide what kind of armed forces it really needs and is prepared to pay for.’ However, what if the UK concludes that it must have the capabilities provided by ‘aircraft carrier[s] and missile submarines’? Since RN submarines are equipped with either Trident or Tomahawk missiles, both from the US, and the future carriers are likely to carry the F35 Joint Strike Fighter, perhaps we should not forget what happened in 1973. The film, Fair Game, recently released on DVD, is a reminder of the US’s intolerance of anyone who wasn’t ‘with us’ in 2002. Whether Bush’s White House would have behaved like Nixon and Kissinger’s is something that only insiders can judge.