Problematising Anglo-American relations

President Reagan meeting with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the oval office, 16 November 1988

My research focuses on contemporary American history in a broader context. In particular, it examines the transfer of political ideas and policies between the United Kingdom and the United States and how an issue in one country affects policy making elsewhere. In short, my research revolves around the interaction between domestic politics, foreign policy and policymaking. It has resulted in two books.
 

 
The first focused on Anglo-American policy transfer between the Reagan administration and the Thatcher government, debunking common myths about the similarities between Reaganism and Thatcherism (Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan: A Very Political Special Relationship, Palgrave, 2012). The second examined the role of U.S. presidents in the Northern Ireland conflict and is a significant contribution to the emerging scholarship about American influence on the Anglo-Irish process and Northern Ireland ‘peace process’ (The Politics of Diplomacy: U.S. Presidents and the Northern Ireland Conflict, 1967-98, Edinburgh University Press, 2017).

Why did you not just choose to study the History of one country?
I do not believe that events and issues can be studied simply through the history of one country. The politics and policy making of countries do not occur in isolation from developments elsewhere and the writing of history should reflect this. Therefore, despite my primary focus being the history of the United States, my research considers America in a global context.

What are the highlights of doing your research?
My research has allowed me to visit plenty of interesting places and meet fascinating people. I conduct research in a variety of American, British and Irish archives, including numerous presidential libraries. My favourite presidential library is probably the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library (partially because it has the best canteen), although I would recommend that anyone with an interest in American history should try to visit any presidential library if they can! I was fortunate to be able to conduct over thirty interviews with key protagonists – including: Mr Paul Volcker, former chairman of the Federal Reserve Board; Lord (Geoffrey) Howe, former UK Foreign Secretary; Lord (Charles) Powell, leading adviser to Margaret Thatcher; Mr Edwin Meese, a leading figure in the Reagan administration; and, Lord (Neil) Kinnock, former Labour Party leader – and I am regularly able to consult the most recently available archival material. Researching in archives often leads to all sorts of surprises. I have read documents that detail the Reagan administration’s excitement about a visit by Michael Jackson to the White House and Bill Clinton’s offer to babysit Leo Blair, youngest son of Tony and Cherie, after his presidency ended in 2001.

Do you compare history to current affairs?
The subject matter of my research certainly lends itself to comparisons with current events in both Britain and the United States. I have blogged on ‘Cultural Thinking’ about the regularly asserted comparison between the Reagan-Thatcher relationship with the emergence and relationship of Donald Trump and Theresa May. In addition to making anecdotal comparisons in my teaching between history and the present, I have contributed to American and British news coverage about the politics in both countries.

What do people think about your research?
My research had led to very exciting opportunities. For instance, in 2012-13 I was the Fulbright-Robertson Visiting Professor of British History at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri (where I also curated an exhibit, based on my research on Reagan and Thatcher, at the college’s National Winston Churchill Museum). In November 2014 I was interviewed about the Reagan-Thatcher relationship on the BBC News Channel. I was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Norwegian Nobel Institute in Oslo in May 2016. My books have been positively reviewed by my peers and I am a regular contributor to academic journals, collections of essays and conferences. Many people find it interesting that what I study is considered to be ‘History’ given that it happened in living memory – including my own!

Dr James Cooper is Senior Lecturer in History at Oxford Brookes University

The Strange Death of Liberal England Revisited and Revamped

'Such is the brief opening scene of a political tragi-comedy. And since dramatic irony consists of the audience's knowing what the actor does not know, it is at least an ironical scene. History unfortunately has decreed that the rest of the play should be somewhat wanting in nobility and balance; that is it should be hysterical, violent, and inconclusive: a mere fragment of the play, with the last act unwritten.'

Is this Britain after the Brexit vote? Or perhaps this is a wry comment on the precariously ambiguous and vanishing mandate of the new Conservative government elected in June 2017. No, this comes from a judgement about Britain's dangerously volatile political scene just prior to the First World War. It comes from George Dangerfield's Strange Death of Liberal England and I was reminded of this text when I suddenly confronted an old American copy of this book in my local Oxfam bookshop. 

It is a demonstration that how we react to history texts can really be shaped by the context in which we read them! I first encountered the lyrical and winding prose of Dangerfield in the autumn of 1980 when I was a first year history undergraduate. Reading this next to the sounds of Bruce Springsteen's The River and The Clash's London Calling was incongruous and perhaps showed me how much had changed in a whole range of ways. But the killer impression this experience had on me was realising I was reading this during the first stages of the Thatcher revolution. From every pore of her government the desire to sweep away the cobwebs of the past was evident. Britain, so this narrative argued, had been irreparably damaged by the actions of complacent and old fashioned men schooled in the ideas and sentiments of a thoroughly liberal past. These evil men, so the Thatcher Revolution argued, should be discredited and held to account for the damage they did and for the havoc they wreaked. But actually so many of us in my small seminar group were still obvious products of the dying remnants of the consensus that had been an important part of the 20th century. Some of us even deployed regret in noting its passing. Many of us were exactly the right age to have had parents who had been involved in the War. Even then it seemed crucial that Mrs Thatcher was the first Prime Minister who really did not understand the War's impact upon people and political culture.

So all this meant that Dangerfield's book and its analysis was remote and bewildering. The ‘death’ described happened long ago and Thatcher's Britain really did seem to be the greedy predator feasting on the carrion left behind. Dangerfield painted a fragile Britain outflanked by the uncertainties surrounding it and the growing number of enemies from without and within that it was helpless to combat. In contrast Thatcher's Britain, at least to start with, just seemed to carry all before it and was capable of vanquishing anything that lay in its path. The apogee of this was reached with victory in the Falklands which harked back to a time I was only just starting to read about professionally, but one which my generation had been told was irretrievably past. Anachronism could be reborn in our lifetime if you could recapture Churchillian rhetoric, if only for a moment.

But fast forward thirty seven years and encountering Strange Death once again invokes entirely different thoughts. The Britain of today is a thoroughly different place in which to read this enthralling work and it just gets still more enthralling when its story is used to think about contemporary events. Dangerfield described Liberalism as an out of date ideology that became an overbearing burden to carry around. Moreover, its tacit acceptance meant it was thus capable of inspiring discontent on the grand scale. For this read the modern Conservative Party which chose to wash its dirty linen in public in what has proved to be supremely damaging to its sense of coherence. Many believe this act risked destroying the country merely to save a tired ideology. Some of the cultural assumptions of free market capitalism are also being questioned in everything from complaints about corporate tax avoidance to what goes in our food and our building materials. For the various foreign policy problems faced by Liberalism on the eve of the First World War read the looming leap in the dark of Brexit negotiations and their multiple potential outcomes. Ulster said NO in 1912 and its politics have similarly ground to a halt in a fashion that creates headaches for Westminster. Ulster is even now in a position to demand YES from an embattled and beleaguered Conservative government. This text, The Strange Death of Liberal England is now alive and real in a way that it simply was not 37 years ago. The question is does a new Dangerfield wait in the wings to write lyrically and enthrallingly about our own time?

Professor David Nash who works on blasphemy, history of shame, blame and culpability, links between religion and crime, history of secularisation, history of radicalism and the affinities all these have with cultural history.

Back to the future: Trump and May, Reagan and Thatcher

On Friday 27 January, an outsider and polarising American president, with a background in showbiz, enthusiastically welcomed a female British prime minister to the White House. Both came to office in the context of a national rejection of the status quo and a demand to prioritise their respective national interests. It was the first meeting between the new U.S. president, Donald J. Trump, and the British prime minister, Theresa May. We have been here before and there are comparisons - including those made prominently by Trump himself - with the relationship between President Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s.


The Reagan-Thatcher relationship is feted as an example of the most special of Anglo-American relationships. Their proponents and opponents earmark them as political soulmates, committed to a marriage made in free-markets, tax cuts, and a Cold Warrior vow to stand-up to the Soviet Union. However, as in all relationships, there were quarrels and disagreements. Reagan was slow to publicly support Britain in the 1982 Falklands War and the 1983 American intervention in Grenada was a huge embarrassment to the Thatcher government. The prime minister was furious when Reagan almost agreed to total nuclear disarmament with Mikhail Gorbachev in their meeting at Reykjavik in 1986.

Trump and May’s first meeting was likely be a harbinger of the complexities of their relationship in power. This was certainly the case for Reagan-Thatcher. When Reagan welcomed Thatcher to the White House on 26 February 1981, both leaders publicly and enthusiastically promoted their commonalities in policy and shared purpose in office. Yet just as Maggie and Ronnie were indulging in their jellybeans in the Oval Office, the U.S. Treasury Secretary, Donald T. Regan, was assuring Congress that Reaganism would be different to Thatcherism. Likewise, the White House briefed the press on the differences between the two government’s economic policies. The Reagan administration would spend 1981 trying to ease the New York Times’ claim that ‘Reaganomics will produce Thatcheritis’. This balancing act between public diplomacy and a concern about economic programmes continued throughout the Reagan-Thatcher years. The Reagan administration did not want the president’s proposed tax cuts in 1981 to be rejected because of Thatcher’s struggling economy. In turn, the prime minister repeatedly asked the president to address the ballooning American budgetary deficit, given its negative impact on the global economy through high interest rates and subsequent undermining of her Thatcherite revolution at home.

Theresa May went to Washington, D.C. eyeing the prize of an Anglo-American trade deal that could be celebrated as a major victory for ‘Brexit Britain’. An Anglophile president, who is eager to show that he can transfer his ‘art of the deal’ from business to politics, hosted the prime minister. Nevertheless, just as public diplomacy and political cover defined the Reagan and Thatcher meetings, May, like Reagan 36 years ago, will continue to be aware of the domestic politics back home. She will not want to be too personally connected to such a polarising figure as Trump. After all, the British government daren’t allow fears to emerge that ‘Mayism will produce Trumpism’.


Dr James Cooper is a senior lecturer in History at Oxford Brookes University, specialising in contemporary American history. He was previously the twentieth Fulbright-Robertson Visiting Professor of History at Westminster College in Fulton, MO, and in May 2016 he held a fellowship at the Norwegian Nobel Institute.

Image: Wikimedia Commons