Why Obama Keeps Snubbing the UK

It looks like Obama has something against one of our best friends on the international stage (and this time it isn't Israel):

Before he became president it was said that Mr. Obama harbored a deep grudge against Britain for its colonialist past. It is alleged that his paternal grandfather, Hussein Onyango Obama, was tortured by the British during the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya in the 1950s, when it was controlled by Britain. In his autobiographical book "The Audacity of Hope," Mr. Obama unflatteringly compares the British Empire to South Africa's apartheid regime and the former Soviet Union.

Soon after his inauguration, he sent back to the U.K. a bust of Sir Winston Churchill that had been loaned to President George W. Bush after the 9/11 attacks. The sculpture had enjoyed pride of place in the Oval Office.

There is also an important ideological reason that Britain's leading policy makers find themselves increasingly shunned by the U.S. Key foreign-policy advisers to Mr. Obama are keen advocates of a federal Europe, one in which the European Commission based in Brussels is the main center of power and influence, rather than the individual capitals, such as London, Paris and Berlin. In this context, Britain's dogged attachment to a "special relationship" with America is regarded as an embarrassing relic of a previous era.

Michèle Flournoy, the U.S. undersecretary of defense for policy, is a leading supporter of an integrated European defense policy, which was anathema to the Bush administration because it would challenge the future of NATO. Philip H. Gordon, the State Department's assistant secretary for European and Eurasian Affairs, is another committed Europhile.

Before taking office Mr. Gordon wrote that America should "support the European project" and warned that Britain's historic resistance to closer European integration could seriously damage London's standing in Washington. "Fully in Europe, Britain has every chance to remain America's preferred and privileged partner," he said. "Marginalized from the EU [European Union], Britain could find itself less influential in Washington as well."

Yet in recent years, whenever the EU has been faced with a major international crisis, whether in the Balkans or the Middle East, the major European powers have tended to put their national interests first. This was graphically illustrated in Bosnia and during the build up to the Iraq war. And in Afghanistan, Europe divides between those who are prepared to fight, such as Britain, and those that are not, such as France and Germany.