Saturday 26 July 2008

Oba-mania hits the UK!

What I really want to know about Obama's visit to the UK is whether Gordon Brown, or any of our other leading politicians, asked Barack to clarify his rather dismissive tone of the United Kingdom in chapter 8 of his "The Audacity of Hope". On the subject of the multilaterist approach to situations like Iraq, he points out that multilaterism means more than "we round up the likes of the United Kingdom and Togo and then do what we please" [p.309].

Maybe I'm just being a bit picky, and in other places Obama does speak more highly of 'Great Britain' (noticeably using different terminology), however, I did find the notion that the UK will follow the US wherever the US decides slightly offensive. We are far from being the 51st state,and Obama will quickly find that out when (hopefully) he becomes the US president.

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