Winston Churchill Would Despise Boris Johnson

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/27/opinion/sunday/boris-johnson-churchill-britain-trump-brexit.html

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Winston Churchill’s ghost still hovers over Washington and London. American presidents have often modeled themselves after the British wartime leader, especially in times of conflict.

George W. Bush was a great admirer. And so in the buildup to the Iraq war, Prime Minister Tony Blair lent him a bust of Churchill, while another one, which had been in the White House for several decades, was being repaired. When President Barack Obama returned the bust after the old one was fixed — as had been agreed before Mr. Obama came to the White House — he was accused by a British politician of doing so out of spite, because of his “ancestral dislike of the British Empire, of which Churchill had been such a fervent defender.”

That politician was Boris Johnson, who became prime minister of Britain on Wednesday. He once wrote a fawning biography of Churchill and did nothing to discourage the impression that he identified with the great man: the upper-class mannerisms, the jokes, the love of grandeur and the appeal, post-Brexit, to the myth of wartime Britain standing alone against the Nazi menace, the much-vaunted “Dunkirk spirit.”

President Trump, who placed a Churchill bust in the Oval Office with great fanfare, has no upper-class mannerisms or, indeed, manners at all. But he, too, is an admirer of Churchill, and of Mr. Johnson, whom he called, somewhat oddly, the “Britain Trump.” Some supporters of Mr. Johnson see this as a sign that the special Anglo-American relationship will revive in all its old glory. If so, this relationship will stand for everything Churchill — and especially his great wartime ally Franklin D. Roosevelt — despised.

Churchill was indeed a defender of empire and held some serious racial prejudices, especially against Indians, whom he detested. But he was also an internationalist. Far from wanting Britain to go it alone during the evacuation of Allied troops from Dunkirk in the spring of 1940, he even entertained the idea that Britain and France should merge as one nation to fight Hitler.

The idea of Britain’s special relationship with the United States was also very much Churchill’s. His mother was American, so there were sentimental reasons. And Churchill was a great believer in the greatness of the “English-speaking peoples.” But the relationship was born out of dire necessity. Churchill knew that Britain would not be able to defeat Nazi Germany without active help from the United States.

Roosevelt, who was no friend of British imperialism, was well aware of the danger posed to the United States by a Europe dominated by the Third Reich. But in 1940, most Americans were not at all keen to go to war to help Britain. The most fervent opposition came from right-wing isolationists, and some of them, such as the aviator Charles Lindbergh, had more than a sneaking sympathy for the Nazis. Their slogan, revived by the Trump campaign in 2016, was “America First.”

At the end of 1941, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s declaration of war against the United States silenced the America Firsters. Churchill and Roosevelt drew up the Atlantic Charter, envisioning the world after Hitler’s defeat. It was marked by deeply internationalist ideas: cooperation between countries, free trade and political freedom for all. The United Nations, now much disdained by the Trump administration, was born from this charter.

After the war was won, Churchill gave a famous speech in Zurich, in which he called for the creation of a United States of Europe. He believed that only full European integration would stave off another devastating war. Quite where Britain fit into this grand European design was left a little vague. Churchill thought that Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union should at least be sympathetic patrons of a united Europe. Many members of his generation had a hard time seeing Britain as just another European country, on a par with France or Italy. Among the 52 percent of Britons who voted for Brexit, there are plenty who find this difficult still.

The new British prime minister, Mr. Johnson, sometimes gives the impression that he feels nostalgic for the glory days of British imperialism. When he visited Myanmar as foreign secretary in September 2017, he startled his hosts, as well as the British ambassador, by reciting Rudyard Kipling’s patronizing poem “Road to Mandalay” in Shwedagon Pagoda, one of the country’s main Buddhist sites.

But even the most radical Brexiteers realize that those days are over. Some, perhaps including Mr. Johnson, see a future Britain as a larger version of Singapore, a kind of low-tax and low-regulation free port. Others dream that it will become a global power again once it is released from what they see as the chains of Brussels. Yet others believe that a revived special relationship with the United States is the gateway to national greatness.

The special relationship appeals to another type of nostalgia: kinship with the largest nation of English-speaking peoples, which many older, mostly white, Britons find more congenial than shared arrangements with foreigners on the Continent who eat garlic and speak in strange tongues.

Mr. Johnson has pushed all these buttons. But the main thing most Brexiteers have in common is an obsession with national sovereignty, “taking back control” and keeping foreigners out — a yearning for that old British idea: splendid isolation.

Hence the fetish of the Dunkirk spirit, used to great effect in the Brexit campaign. Hence, too, Mr. Johnson’s rhetoric revolving around the fantasy of wartime derring-do.

When he promises that Britain will leave the European Union by Halloween, “do or die,” he is mimicking Churchill’s bulldog defiance of the Nazi foe. Like Trump, he has an exaggerated belief in national power and in his own country first, unfettered by international institutions or cooperative arrangements, even though many of those were set up by the American and British governments in the wake of World War II.

The United States can afford to indulge in bashing international norms, at least for a while, because it is a huge country, with a powerful domestic economy, unparalleled military strength and great natural resources. Britain has none of these things. The idea that Britain, acting alone, can exact favorable terms from much larger powers such as China, Europe or, indeed, the United States, is a delusion. If it leaves the European Union, Britain will become a middling provincial country, whose fortunes will be subject to the whims of others. Trump probably won’t care. Churchill would have been horrified.

Ian Buruma, a professor at Bard College, is writing a book about the Anglo-American relationship.

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