Blair Hitch project: the real reason Britain's prime minister stood by Bush on Iraq.

• Author: Chotiner, Isaac
• Position: Book Review

American Ally: Tony Blair and the White House By Con Coughlin Ecco Press, $26.95

In the spring of 1999, Tony Blair received a furious call from Bill Clinton. Policymakers in both London and Washington were concerned that the war in Kosovo was not proceeding smoothly. Disputes over ground troops and logistics had found their way, anonymously, into the British and American press. When Blair picked up the phone, Clinton lit into him, accusing the prime minister of not adequately controlling the leakers in his own administration. The episode rather surprised the new premier, who had been enjoying a rapport with the second-term president. But there was no mistaking the message from Clinton, according to the author of a new book on Blair and his relationship with America: "Washington was happy to have Britain as an ally, but only so long as Britain followed Washington's agenda" This would not be the last time Tony Blair was confronted with being the decidedly junior partner in his country's "special relationship."

Con Coughlin's American Ally: Tony Blair and the War on Terror is a useful guide to the way Great Britain has conducted its foreign policy since "New Labour" swept into power in 1997. A hawkish, conservative British journalist, Coughlin has written a brisk summary of the international crises of the Blair years. Unfortunately, Coughlin seems unwilling to state for the record what his own reporting suggests--that Blair went along with the Iraq war primarily out of pragmatism and a desire to maintain Britain's historic closeness with America.

What does make Coughlin's book important, however, is that it highlights the inability of (mostly conservative) commentators to differentiate between liberal internationalists like Blair and the neoconservatives who led the charge for war in America. While liberal hawks are often willing to use force to prevent humanitarian violations and ethnic cleansing, neoconservatives are much more prone to acting unilaterally and without the consent of international institutions. By not adequately explaining this important distinction, Coughlin's analysis of Blair's motives comes up short.

On the whole, Coughlin's discussion of Blair does not offer much beyond that of his fellow countrymen, Peter Riddell and Peter Stothard, who have both recently published helpful books on the prime minister and his foreign policy. Additionally, these two works were on the whole more engaging to read, if for no other reason than that the writers had an ear for interesting anecdotes and personality quirks among the major players. The closest Coughlin gets to anything resembling gossip is a paragraph mentioning the decision by Cherie...