Prime Minister Brown has promised to keep British troops in Iraq until the situation in Basra has stabilized – see our latest report on Iraq to guess just how long that presence may last.

His visit to the US this week permits some consideration of the ‘cooling’ in the ‘special relationship’ since Blair left office.

The omens are not good. The State Department gave him a slot that ensured he would get minimal media coverage – the Pope is in town and is fascinating a population whose hold on faith is far stronger than that of Europe.

Domestic considerations and the reality of a new President appearing in January 2009 mean that the PM, a thorough-going Atlanticist, is hedging his bets, hoping to renew and reinvent the relationship after this year has passed.

The White House, equally, knows that Brown is such a thorough-going Atlanticist that it can, as far as big picture American interests go, take him for granted – they don’t have to be particularly nice about it either.

So don’t expect anything new from Brown. He made his obeisance to anti-American feeling in the late summer with his publicised intent to draw-down troops from Iraq (which events are now forcing him to back down from) and he is not under pressure to do more.

His domestic unpopularity is now thoroughly disconnected from foreign policy – he has far bigger problems with the economy. Although this particular posting is about foreign policy, in fact much of the real business this week will be directed at economic issues.

The Anglo-Saxons are jointly vulnerable in this essentially banking-led crisis. This is an area where intelligent discussion and debate can take place between officials.

In foreign affairs, Brown represents continuity with his predecessor far, far more than any new departure. This week has seen him trot out the hoary old image of the UK as bridge between America and Europe and as partners in dealing with climate change and economic management.

The obvious problem for him is that, since Blair’s departure, France and Germany might equally play the role of ‘bridge’ and the current White House is not very interested in anyone who is not as subservient as the previous incumbent in Number Ten, almost an American national hero.

As far as dealing with the Presidential candidates is concerned, all will be treated equally but the Brown Government really wants Clinton. She promises to restore the broadly liberal progressive multilateralist approach which is core to the New Labour view of the world.

Obama might be just a bit too radical, with a potential for exerting a bad influence on a sclerotic New Labour back home and encouraging 'change' in the direction of the liberal Mr. Cameron - while McCain would be a nightmare.

A national interest quasi-militarist President ordering the UK around like the subservient tool that it is would be worse even than the occasionally progressive-talking Bush.

There are also specific issues to discuss: Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran. The Government is caught between US expectations and public doubt – the British public sees no reason to be in Iraq, is pessimistic about Afghanistan and certainly sees no justification for direct confrontation with Iran except insofar as Iran might directly and provenly attack British troops in Basra.

Brown appears to have drawn back to a more realist position but his intentions remain to support the US far more than his public are inclined.

The US wants the UK to take command of the NATO operation in Southern Afghanistan, a potentially very expensive and bloody business, involving a significant commitment that will be hard to justify to the British people if the economy really does begin to turn down.

The fine judgement is whether military and nationalist rhetoric will carry the Government through. 

Sure enough, we have seen propaganda efforts in recent weeks and months to get the public to ‘support its boys’ and not ask too many questions about the policies behind their presence in faraway deserts and mountains.

The US also remains highly critical of the British method of ‘factional management’ (which they see as part of the problem underpinning the recent increase in violence in Iraq) but only now are they beginning to understand that the British are straining to maintain the commitments that they have already made.

The US is going to have to prop up the UK in some way much as it might prop up the Pakistani or Indonesian military. How to do this without making our troops look like mercenaries fighting an American imperial war will be the trick.

Our betting is that the British pitch will be for more reconstruction and development aid to pour down the black holes of Shia and Pathan local politics. The Americans pick up the bill and the British the credit so that the British can continue to police Basra and Southern Afghanistan.

This really is a very dangerous game. There are many risks to this. The British public may bridle at UK troops acting as mercenaries but the Government would be even more humiliated by a direct American military intervention to pull their under-resourced irons out of the fire.

The Ministry of Defence budget is also being squeezed dry, military recruits are drying up, an economic crisis implies defence cuts and the current political crisis almost demands diversion of funds into redistributive measures to deal with the effects of economic crisis.

The Financial Times of 15 April editorialized that “British defence policy is coming apart at the seams … grand visions … are being undone by the reality of a public spending squeeze.”

There are not only the financial sink-pits of Iraq and Afghanistan to consider but the maintenance of the absurdly unnecessary replacement of the Trident nuclear deterrent and a £4bn aircraft carrier programme which, it has to be said, at least has some logic for a nation wholly dependent on its sea lanes.

The FT captures the problem succinctly – Labour governments want to project power without paying for it. This is the essential internal contradiction within New Labour and probably the one that will eventually break it apart.

Its leadership is idealistic and progressive (in fact, closer to the liberal reformers of a hundred or more years ago than anything remotely socialist), but it also needs to keep together a coalition based on the presumption of continued domestic prosperity – a mundane matter of jobs, low inflation and decent wages and working conditions.

That is absolutely fine if jobs can be made to depend on guns – as for many Amicus workers – or the economy is growing so fast that any increased defence expenditure may not be noticed.

But the UK is a global services economy and not some interwar fascist machine for global conquest while the global down turn is just a fact of life now.

As Empire has shrunk, the British have got into the habit of taking two steps back and one forward in a shuddery sort of retreat from global leadership.

They fly the flag and then have to withdraw again as the pretensions of the Crown [not the Monarch but the Executive] come up against the same problem that the over-extended Habsburgs and Stuarts once faced, lack of hard cash.

The revolt over the loss of the 10% band for low income single workers is a sign that the Party Whip may be able to will the intent in foreign policy but it cannot will the means if the means are going to result in serious pain to the wider population.

Militarists are now going to have to place their hope in a Tory Government that does not mind ‘screwing the workers’ to get taxes low and spend some of what remains on soldiers.

When the history of New Labour is written, its foreign policy will always be at the centre of any account of its fall from grace and Tony Blair will be seen as the 'trickster god' of British politics, a winner of elections at the cost of his party and his nation.

Those are our views and others remain sure of 'British leadership' but the Financial Times itself also concludes that a decision has to be made between spending more and doing less.

And yet, as we have seen, Brown’s Government is about to get inveigled into more rather than less commitment within the US imperium

Something simple and almost animal in emotion is blocking the acceptance by Government and public of a truth – that it is not a case of Britain becoming a second rate power, it is a second rate power and its attempts to prove otherwise mean that it is now ready to crack under the strain.

There are more specific risks arising out of the battles it has chosen to fight.

The struggle between Al-Maliki and Al-Sadr in Iraq may come to have a peaceful conclusion but it may equally result in a civil war and a civil war might bring the US and Iran into direct confrontation – and not only in Iraq.

The few troops in Basra could be faced with an uprising that they cannot control without complicity in the sort of brutal tactics that alienates any modern public.

It is one thing to firebomb retreating conscripts in a turkey shoot and to accept occasional civilian deaths from occasional air raids. It would be another to use air power Guernica-style on Shia cities where the militia are embedded within the population.

The US and UK is virtually cornered now into relying on air power because there is no political will to increase its military presence on the ground. What does that mean? 

It means not using it in a full uprising and watch a weak Iraqi Government be fought to a standstill, using it and enraging the Shia against the ground troops or using it against Iran and setting the conditions for regional conflagration.

As for Afghanistan, the problems are probably not those of defeat per se – no one really ever wins or loses in Afghanistan until the Treasury runs out of cash for a bottomless pit – but of how long the British, like the Russians before them, can take the financial strain.

There is a sense that the British believe that ‘something will turn up’ – above all, that all they have to do is just hang on in there and the ‘international community’ will rally round to invest in reconstruction and hearts and minds will follow. 

Eventually, apart from outbreaks of banditry, all will be well. There may be some truth in this, especially now that Pakistan has been ‘settled’ and with the prospect of Hilary Clinton following the ‘plan’. Similarly, even Obama is committed to seeing Afghanistan through.

The question is not whether such a plan would work but the extent of non-Anglo-Saxon enthusiasm for the effort (very limited) and how long the British defence and development budget can hold out. Trusting in luck can only take you so far.

But what do Iraq, Afghanistan and Trident all have in common? The sin of pride. Think about it.

There is the humiliation of American troops moving in to Southern Iraq because our presence is next to useless in a crisis. There is the investment in a hearts and minds liberal strategy in Afghanistan. There is the continued believe that the country needs a 'big willy' to deter invaders when there are no invaders out there.

All these represent concerns about status, a misplaced idealism and a failure to match dreams with reality. It could be an aristocratic ideal, a knightly fantasy.

Whatever way we look at it, the psychology of the British State has scarcely changed from that of a medieval monarch worried about what his peers would think of him and taxing the peasants to make a land grab with a title attached.

It just so happens that 'progressives' have captured the British State but they are still using it as tool for the extension of their own particular vision of the world, wearing it out and failing to keep it clean and oiled for the purpose that it should be used for - the interests of the people.

'Gloire', prestige, 'la grande illusion' - all admittedly in a noble dream of a better world - but, ultimately, hubris. Our State has become Don Quixote.

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