For all the flak he has taken at home for his perceived kowtowing to the foreign policy agenda of the United States, former British prime minister Tony Blair still thinks there could be no better partner with whom to have a “special relationship.”
This is an overarching theme of Mr. Blair’s newly published memoirs, and one he thinks governments in Canada and Britain alike should internalize as they seek to buttress their countries’ influence in a multipolar world.
“Canada has got to decide – in a world that is opening up, [with] power shifting to the East, where America is looking at its own alliances shifting – what its place is,” Mr. Blair confided in a far-ranging interview in Washington, where he is taking part in the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.
“You want to maximize the strengths of your relationships, so that in the evolving policy decisions that will determine the future – whether in trade, the economy or security – you’ve got a voice and a say that, looking ahead 20 or 30 years, is bigger than your size will permit you on your own.”
It is up to Canada to choose its partners. But Mr. Blair leaves little doubt about his own preference. The North American editions of A Journey: My Political Life begin with an encomium to the United States that, for reasons obvious to anyone familiar with recent history, is purposely absent from the version of the book he intended for domestic consumption.
At home, Mr. Blair’s perceived subservience to America – most controversially by thrusting his country into former president George W. Bush’s war in Iraq – continues to weigh on his legacy. But for his Canadian and American readers, Mr. Blair serves up a full confession.
“In a strangely different but deeper way than when PM, I have come to love America and what it stands for,” writes the ex-Labour chief who transformed his left-leaning party into a centrist juggernaut to win to three consecutive majorities. “America is great for a reason …There is a nobility in the American character … a devotion to the American ideal that at a certain point transcends class, race, religion or upbringing.”
Comfortably ensconced on a plush sofa in his suite at the chic St. Regis Hotel, Mr. Blair explained that one of his reasons for including such ebullient praise for the American way of life – and the values the United States shares with Canada and Britain – was to soothe the battered psyches of Westerners in the post-market crash, post-9/11 era.
“People have lost a little bit of confidence in those values – in our financial system, in the security challenges we face, maybe even in our cultural dispositions and attitudes,” he told me on Wednesday. “One of the things I wanted to do is to say to people, look, we should actually be very grateful for the blessings we have, very proud of what we’ve done. We’ve got a great future.”
In his book, which he describes as both prospective and retrospective, Mr. Blair takes a swipe at “the schadenfreude” of politicians and opinion makers on the left who seized on the financial crisis to cast doubt on capitalism itself and push for the rehabilitation of the all-powerful state. He worries that too many leaders may be falling for it.
“To start calling into question the whole of the competitive market system, it’s daft and self-defeating,” Mr. Blair said in his suite overlooking the White House. “What will lift our economies forward in the future is the creativity of the private sector and the enterprise there. If we lurch into big state solutions to this [crisis], we’ll just repeat a whole lot of mistakes of the past.”
This is a message Mr. Blair, 57, said he has been spreading to leaders in the “progressive” political parties across Europe. One presumes they include his own Labour Party, which is currently embroiled in a leadership battle that has exposed old fault lines.
