That is why I will continue to ask … difficult questions about foreign policy assumptions the other parties don’t want to question at all. ~Nick Clegg

The alliance with America is the sacred cow of British foreign policy, many of whose practioners dream, in unguarded moments, that Britain can play Greece to America’s Rome. Disparaging the relationship publicly is just not done. ~R.M., Democracy in America

Clegg is hardly the first one this year to disparage the relationship in public. Actually, disparage is the wrong word. It would be more accurate to say that Clegg was acknowledging the real nature of the relationship, just as the Select Foreign Affairs Committee’s report did last month. We all understand that Clegg is going to be more outspoken on this because his party is far more at odds with the British foreign policy consensus, and his position as the Liberal Democrat leader allows him an amount of greater freedom in making such criticisms. At present, the Liberal Democrats are surging in popularity partly because they offer an alternative, they are still marginal enough that they can attack the major parties without enduring too much scrutiny, and they can make refreshing critiques of stale consensus views. What we will probably find after the next debate is that Clegg is speaking for a huge number of people in Britain appalled by the one-sided nature of the U.S.-U.K. relationship.

Whatever the election outcome, it is still virtually impossible that Nick Clegg will become Prime Minister, so on one level Lib-Dem views on the relationship with the U.S. are not that important. Then again, the Liberal Democrats are most likely going to be an important part of any governing coalition, so their views cannot be dismissed as entirely irrelevant. At least as far as the alliance is concerned, my guess is that Clegg’s remarks reflect the views of far more people in Britain than the “default Atlanticism” of the major parties that he has been criticizing, and Washington would be unwise to ignore how poorly the “special relationship” is now viewed.

Washington’s obliviousness to the DPJ in Japan before the last election was a mistake. Because virtually no one had paid any attention to the possibility of an LDP loss, our government was forced to scramble blindly to make sense of what a DPJ win meant for the alliance with Japan. That led to a period of overreaction and confusion, which was followed by an even less productive period of assuming that everything could continue on exactly as it had done before. The quarreling over Futenma shows us that this was also mistaken. If the Liberal Democrats have a significant role in the next British government, Washington will have to take account of the changing attitudes of the British public. It would be another mistake to assume that Washington can continue to count on “default Atlanticism” after next month’s election.