Clegg! The year of the insurgents, British edition
Nick Clegg’s sudden forward sprint in the British elections has the political establishment in Britain in an uproar – and the Americans are suddenly noticing that they might have a slight problem on their hands. Obama ran as a committed interventionist, refusing to take an attack on Iran off the table, and emphasizing that he wanted to implement a "smarter" and stylistically more palatable — albeit no less energetic — brand of interventionism. Clegg, on the other hand, is explicitly offering British voters a real alternative to the "Atlanticist" policies loyally upheld by "New" Labor and the Conservatives, and that is a foreign policy that puts Britain, and British interests, first. He mocks the "lopsided asymmetrical" nature of the "special relationship," and descries "subservience" to Washington. His enemies characterize this as "anti-Americanism," as Gordon Brown did repeatedly during Thursday’s foreign policy debate, but as usual he misses the point: Clegg’s not "anti-" anything, he’s pro-British.