Its Sometimes Good Not To Talk - the Power of Bilaterals...

 

As the UK mourns the passing of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and prepares for the greatest State Funeral in British history, London has become full of world leaders who will attend the funeral too. In what is arguably the single greatest gathering of leaders in one location in history, the UK has found itself at just 10 days notice hosting a hugely complicated series of state visits, just one of which would normally take months to prepare for.

The nature of the funeral means that normal government business has, to all intents and purposes, been suspended. The onset of official mourning means that much government work, and political campaigning has been paused, while the majority of the central government departments in Whitehall have refocused their efforts onto supporting the myriad of activity linked to the funeral and its procession. There is very little spare bandwidth in Whitehall this week to do anything but this event.

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright 2023.

As part of the gathering the new Prime Minister Liz Truss has met some world leaders, mostly those from Commonwealth Realms who are in the UK for an informal ‘getting to know you’ conversation via meetings at 10 Downing Street (10DS). These meetings have served as a chance to build working links and rapport, but not usually conduct any meaningful business with these leaders. Focus though has been on the fact that President Biden has cancelled his own meeting with the Prime Minister, preferring to slip it to a formal more business-like engagement at the UN General Assembly (UNGA) later this week in New York. Naturally social media is agog with the perception that the President has’ snubbed’ the Prime Minister and are determined to see this as some kind of calculated insult, or sign that the ‘special relationship’ doesn’t matter. What utter nonsense.

Organising bilateral meetings at this level is usually done for two reasons – either as a very informal way of building links with leaders for whom the UK has fairly limited relationships, or as a means of getting business done. In the case of the meetings where the PM has engaged, this has been with other leaders who she may not yet have met, or more rarely have the chance to speak to. This is a good opportunity for an informal 10-15 minutes (for that is usually their length) to make an initial call– this is particularly relevant for a Prime Minister in her second week on the job and where a prior telephone call may not have happened. In those circumstances, a short friendly ‘get to know you’ chat is ideal.

The PM and POTUS do not need the same type of meeting – despite what popular imagination may think, there is no particularly good need for them to be friends, or to get on particularly well. The relationship between the UK and USA is far deeper and embedded at official level in a manner unlike any other two nations on earth. The incredibly strong working links between officials on a wide range of national security issues and other policy concerns means that you don’t need a leadership ‘tete-a-tete’ to get to know each other. The two spoke within hours of her appointment last week, and no formal bilat seems to have been planned ahead of the UNGA meeting this coming week, which will be a more formal meeting.

There is a big difference here between getting to know you calls and formal meetings. The latter is a very tightly scripted event, where officials from both sides will have laboured behind the scenes for a long time to work out what each other wants to raise, work out solutions, identify challenges that may come up and ensure that neither leader is taken by surprise. A formal bilateral meeting like this takes an enormous amount of work to deliver, and the outcome should never (in theory at least) come as a surprise to either party. At the UNGA meeting this coming week, there will be a chance for exactly this sort of meeting, which will have been carefully prepared for and which will really get the next stage of the Anglo-US leadership relationship off to a good start.

This matters because the links between the US and UK are so close in foreign and defence policy that it is very much ‘handing over the baton’ between leaders, while the real work is done by their respective government departments. It is a uniquely close relationship that does not need regular calls and meetings at the highest level because it already works so well at the operational level. The sign of a good bilateral relationship is one where officials can get on and do stuff, not constantly need their political leadership to intervene at the highest levels to unblock things – that is a sign of a less healthy relationship.

Was it a snub then that Biden chose not to call on the PM at this time? No, it absolutely was not. Given how tightly choreographed the plans are for the period between the passing of the Queen and her funeral, there is very little time or space for wider activity to occur. It was almost certainly never assumed that POTUS would attend the funeral, particularly given that no US President has ever attended a foreign Head of State funeral before, let alone a monarchs.

The challenge with bringing POTUS into any environment is that the US Secret Service imposes an inordinately large footprint wherever it travels. The sheer scale of the protection requirement may seem unnecessary to others but given the USSS has to deal with a wide range of threats against one person, and has previously lost Presidents, one can forgive their overly cautious approach. This force protection is non-negotiable, and if you want POTUS in country, then you accept that he comes with a large footprint. If you don’t like it, then there are plenty of other places he can visit instead…

In normal times moving a POTUS convoy around London is a challenge, but these are not normal times. Dozens of heads of state are present, London is full of road closures and complex security arrangements around its centre, and as anyone who ventured into Westminster last week can attest, it is very hard to move vehicles around easily without causing significant disruption. Given all this, moving POTUS into London on the Sunday before the funeral, when all sorts of logistical arrangements that would normally be used are otherwise engaged, and roads are closed but the public is all over the place would be both a complete headache and a security nightmare.

This is before we ask what the purpose of the meeting would be – the two leaders spoke last week and will have a formal meeting this week. At this level, global leaders do not have time to spare, every minute of their day is minutely controlled to get the most from it. Working the PM and POTUS up for the meeting would require a lot of work by officials to deliver a meeting that doesn’t materially change or add anything to the working relationship, and which doesn’t really serve a purpose beyond ‘getting to know you a little bit better’. At this level, leaders don’t have the time or need for meetings like this, particularly not when the ties are so strong as it is.

There may well have been quiet sighs of relief across Whitehall and the US Embassy when the meeting was cancelled, knowing that it would significantly ease security arrangements and save a lot of work to prepare for a nugatory meeting that didn’t serve a coherent purpose. It also would have helped ensure the risk to the timetable slipping was minimised, while reducing the impact of trying to move the POTUS around London on those seeking to gather and mourn. All in all, it was a very sensible decision.

Some will see it as a snub, but it really isn’t. A snub in this case would have been a decision to send the Vice President or a representative to the funeral instead. The fact that POTUS has got on a plane, totally disrupting his plans, and travelling to the UK for less than 48hrs before returning to New York and a critical UNGA session speaks volumes to the importance he places on the relationship. Only the British could see an unprecedented visit as a snub.