America and Britain: The Firm, Old Alliance

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Then, too, both peoples are grossly sentimental, deeply unsophisticated and dangerously stubborn—the English pride being narrow-nosed, the American blustery; but the effect is equally irritating to anyone who deals with them. The English are famous for not adjusting to foreign places, but Americans don't do this either. Both countries are inventive. The English like to demean American know-how, but they are just as dazzled by ingenuity. They simply have an older world to cherish along with the new; thus they make an elaborate point of doing so. Both countries are class-ridden, though the U.S. says that this accusation applies only to Britain. Both are run by their middle class, though the English have better tailors.

What camouflages these similarities is the style in which they are framed. The English imply everything, including their constitution; Americans feel compelled to be explicit. This is why an Englishman can make a lie sound like the truth, while an American will do the opposite; it's all in the vowels. Stylistically the difference between the two countries is the difference between Rex Harrison and Gary Cooper—a difference that is generally played to the hilt by both sides so that they may simultaneously find each other quaint and horrifying, each regarding his counterpart as if he had never seen such a specimen before. Put crudely, one is a nation of shopkeepers and the other a nation of shopping malls; different size, different look, but the same goods.

Not that any of these things forms the real basis of their alliance, of course. That depends on one matter only: the rather slippery and rarely mentioned principle of the rights of the individual. Both countries have violated that principle too often in the past, but the principle prevails. Add the rights of property, free speech, freedom of religion, and a few other advantages that Britain and Amer ica have developed over the years, and you have the central reasons that if these two nations continue to blunder through history, at least they will do so together.

Argentina is a place where the rights of the individual are barely visible, if they exist at all. The Reagan Administration's rationale for smiling in that nation's direction in the past few weeks is an effort to keep the peace. Insofar as that effort protects America's true and worthy friends, more power to it. But the American public does not base its affections on anything quite so delicate. And the English should know this now. In the Wall Street Journal, Geoffrey Smith, a columnist with the Times of London, asked not plaintively but properly: "What use is an alliance if your friends will not support you on the merits of the issue when you are in the right?" The answer is: None. If the American Government does not realize this, the people will soon remind it. The fate of Britain is this nation's own, and we would be worse than fools to think otherwise.

—By Roger Rosenblatt