LONDON: The most important political story of our time is the rise of the American Right and the near collapse of American liberalism. This has transformed the political and cultural geography of the United States and now it is set to transform the political and cultural geography of the West. Britain’s reflex reactions to an ally with whom we apparently share so much and which has served us well are going to be tested as never before.

The signals are all around. It takes extraordinary circumstances to produce the kind of warnings voiced over the last week by Chris Patten, EU commissioner for external affairs and former chairman of the Conservative Party, but these circumstances are extraordinary.

Patten has damned the emerging US reliance on its fantastic military superiority over all other nations to pursue what it wants as it wants as an ‘absolutist and simplistic’ approach to the rest of the world that is ultimately self-defeating.

It is also intellectually and morally wrong. He is the first ranking British politician to state so boldly what has been a commonplace in France and Germany for weeks.

The most obvious flashpoint is the weight of evidence that after Afghanistan George Bush intends a massive military intervention to topple Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. Dangerous dictator he may be, but the unilateral decision to declare war upon another state without a casus belli other than suspicion will upset the fabric of law on which international relations rests, as well as destabilising the Middle East.

American loyalists shrug their shoulders; Tony Blair is reported to have said privately that ‘if we can get rid of Baghdad, we should’, a devastatingly naive remark which so far stands uncorrected.

This is the traditional British view that insists we stick close to the US. It remains the same good America that has been on the right side of the great conflicts of the last 100 years; worthwhile allies put up with the bad decisions as well as the good.

But it’s not the same good America. The postwar US that reconstructed Europe and led an international liberal economic and social order has disappeared completely. Its former leaders would no more volunteer the scale of defence spending now contemplated in the US — a 12 per cent, 48 billion dollars increase on an already stunning military budget — while offering the less developed countries close to nothing in increased aid flows, debt relief and market access than fly to the Moon.

Britain, in its own self-interest, has to play the same balance-of-power politics it used to do in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Europe. That means siding with the EU and no longer being US conservatism’s lapdog. We cannot, for example, be part of the US national missile defence system if its purpose is to destroy the fabric of international law or join America’s war against Iraq.—Dawn/The Observer-Guardian News Service.