First, Tony Blair is not running for office, which is too bad, since he was the best British prime minister America has had since Maggie Thatcher (who was, herself, the best since Winston Churchill). ~Tunku Varadarajan

One can begin to appreciate why so many people in Britain are tired of the “special relationship” when the best British PMs “America has had” have tended to have very mixed or rather bad records when it came to Britain. It is also fairly easy to argue against the claim that Blair is among the best PMs from the U.S. perspective. Blair was an enabler of our worst national instincts in both Yugoslavia and Iraq, and he identified Britain so closely with the U.S. that British interests were completely ignored along the way and real American interests were damaged when Blair’s support for invading Iraq gave Bush political cover with the American left and with many other European nations. If that is what it takes to be a good British PM for America, I would very much like to see Britain governed by someone entirely different, and so would most Britons.

For a column dedicated to telling “ten truths” about the British election, it is a pity that at least six of them aren’t true and that some of them are profoundly dishonest. To start, Nick Clegg is not anti-American, and he is certainly not the “most anti-American politician” to head a party in modern Britain. One has to ignore quite willfully everything Clegg actually says about America and the alliance to believe this. Likewise, neither Obama nor Cameron is anti-Atlanticist in the least. It’s not really possible politically to become the leader of the Conservative Party or President of the United States if one is anti-Atlanticist.

Even Clegg is a self-professed Atlanticist, and one reason he attacks Cameron is that Clegg thinks Cameron is too much of a supporter of the status quo in the relationship with the U.S. If Americans expect Cameron to lead Britain as a reliable “muscular smaller ally” anywhere except in Afghanistan, they are going to be disappointed. First of all, British defense spending isn’t going to escape the cuts that the “age of austerity” will require, and Cameron doesn’t automatically subscribe to Britain’s role as America’s deputy whenever and wherever Washington demands. This is where Cameron’s “candid friend” rhetoric becomes relevant. Cameron did support the war in Iraq, but it’s very unlikely that Britain could afford another major campaign or that Cameron’s government could survive politically if it embarked on one with the U.S.