By John Simpson (Filed: 30/06/2002) telegraph.co.uk

In 32 years of reporting on international affairs, I have never seen Britain and the United States more separated from each other: not during the terrible last years of the Vietnam War, not during President Reagan's Iran-Contra dealings or his espousal of the crackpot Star Wars system.

The way George W Bush's administration deals with the outside world is affecting even the most traditionally pro-American elements in British society.

On two occasions last week I met senior civil servants from government departments in London who would normally be regarded as the natural bedrock of support for the Atlantic Alliance. In both cases I found open contempt for current American policy, especially towards the Middle East.

You might expect a certain amount of this from the Foreign Office, or from ministries which have to deal with the US over trade. Not from the government departments I was dealing with.

It's easy enough to spot particular elements in this change of attitude. One is President Bush's new line on Yasser Arafat and his support for the determination of Israel, under Ariel Sharon, to break up what little remains of the Oslo Accords.
It took the Bush administration a good deal of internal negotiation to come up with its ringing endorsement of the Sharon line, but leading British civil servants I spoke to about last week's speech by Mr Bush regarded it as - I quote - "puerile", "absurdly ignorant" and "ludicrous".

These are private opinions, but I suspect that they come from people who would never have said anything as strong about American policy in their lives before; certainly not to an outsider such as myself.

I should stress that these were not people I would regard as covert Guardian readers, nor members of the pro-Arab tendency that so many outsiders believe exists within the Foreign Office. They were mainstream, small-c conservative figures whose work, in its different ways, sometimes depends on maintaining good relations with the Americans.

It is possible to spot some common elements here. There is, for instance, a rooted dislike of the "arrogance" - not my word, but that of a senior and much respected civil servant - that enables President Bush ("a bear of very little brain" - ditto) to announce to the Palestinians who should and shouldn't be their leader.
And there is a parallel impatience at the "stupidity" (ditto) which will unquestionably ensure that Palestinians of all kinds will now feel obliged to support Yasser Arafat as their leader, for better or worse.

But it goes much wider than the Middle East. There is a feeling in large swathes of British society that Americans now believe, post September 11, that they have a licence to throw their weight about.

Next week we will have the latest round in the trade war that has blown up between America and Europe over issues such as steel, where Washington reserves the right to impose tariffs on some foreign imports and pay huge subsidies to sections of its own ailing industry, while lecturing the outside world about the duty to support free trade and allow US goods into their markets at preferential rates. The moralising is starting to grate: and it looks like hypocrisy.

Take another, completely different example. The creation of an international criminal court is something that people across the world have worked towards for decades.

Suddenly, it exists and has the power to try suspected war criminals; but the US, nervous that its own citizens - from a private soldier who kills people on a peace mission to, shall we say, Henry Kissinger - might be dragged before the court, is demanding immunity from arrest or prosecution for any American troops involved in United Nations peace-keeping duties.

To be honest, I can't quite work out whether this is because the Bush administration dislikes the UN and its peace-keeping role almost as much as it does the international court, and wants to undermine them; or whether it comes primarily from a sense that Americans are not as other people, and shouldn't be subject to the same rules. For obvious reasons, other countries find this distinctly annoying.

There are all sorts of other irritants. Over the next two months, for instance, we will be reminded again and again how the United States, the world's leading polluter, is trying to wreck the proposals for controlling the gas emissions that are threatening the entire global climate.

This is one of the issues that will come up strongly at the Johannesburg summit in August, 10 years after the Rio summit which President Clinton so effectively undermined.

And amid all this, poor old Tony Blair has to try to stay on friendly terms with a president whom even some of his own ministers and civil servants regard with contempt. It won't be at all easy.


John Simpson is the BBC World Affairs Editor

© Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2002.
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