A New Chapter in U.S.-British Relations

...But Whitehall fears that this chance may be squandered because of the excessively close links between the United States and Israel...

...His scouts did not return with rave reports...

...relations with its European allies, the London Times equivocated: "Few Europeans expect [Reagan] to be a great President...

...AS TORY MEETS REPUBLICAN A New Chapter intXS^British jRcliBtlQIlS by norman gelb MARGARET THATCHER London With a conservative President in the White House and a conservative British Prime Minister scheduled to be his first major European visitor, there is once again talk of a revival of the British-American "special relationship...

...Prime Minister Peter W. Botha's government apparently believes that pressure to compromise will diminish under a Reagan team that is determined to block the spread of Soviet influence in Africa...

...Athird possible point of British-American divergence is South Africa...

...It noticed that Reagan's victory delighted Pretoria, and was a factor in South Africa's reluctance to give any ground on Namibian independence...

...The President himself, though, is still something of an enigma to Britons...

...will "match loyalty with loyalty...

...But he may prove to be a President whom they can understand and with whom they can come to terms more easily than his recent predecessors...

...Some people watching him live on television worried that he might not even get around to mentioning international affairs, or that he would only squeeze it in as an afterthought...

...If the Reagan Administration pursues the kind of catch-up-with-the-Rus-sians approach to military preparedness that is seen in Moscow as a bid for global supremacy, and thus triggers a resumption of the arms race, the British and their European partners would be faced with a dilemma...

...The situation is quite different where the Middle East is concerned...

...and perhaps even the PLO??into the autonomy talks...

...Still, some British observers, looking for the cautionary, elusive small print, feel they may have found it in Reagan's Inauguration Day remark about how the U.S...

...On the matter of U.S...

...Such words of implied gratitude had not been expressed too often in Washington during the last few years, and they provided a measure of reassurance...

...Britain, with its long tradition of close ties to many Arab states, has never been happy about the Camp David agreements...

...Indeed, before his inauguration Ronald Reagan dispatched observers to scout out Britain's economic performance under Margaret Thatcher, to determine what tactics of so right thinking a political figure might be imitated to help America back on the straight and narrow path to prosperity...

...Was this merely a rephrasing of former Defense Secretary Harold Brown's repeated calls for Europe to pull its own weight in defense...

...This is another possible bone of contention between Britain and its European Economic Community (EEC) partners and the Reagan Administration...

...To that extent, the feeling here is one of not disagreeable anticipation...

...But Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher is not likely to allow their pressure to mar her meeting with President Ronald Reagan...

...where the Carter Administration chastised them with whips, Mr...

...They are convinced that only after the U .S...

...But aside from officials concerned with specific policy problems, the British generally seem relieved by the change in Washington...

...Londoners had been pleased, for example, to hear Secretary of State Alexander Haig tell interrogating senators, "It is important for the American people to recall...

...The Foreign Office is worried that Haig might not understand the subtleties of the Namibia impasse and its significance for the rest of black Africa...

...And adding to the dilemma in London would be the fact that Mrs...

...They would have to decide whether to fall in line behind the United States or challenge Reagan's leadership of the West (as they challenged Carter's less forceful leadership over the last three years), with unpredictable consequences for the Western alliance...

...Intimately connected with the question of defense??now complicated by the conflicting signals from Haig and Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger on deployment of the neutron bomb ??is the issue of detente...

...Unlike Lord Carrington and some others at the Foreign Office, she is not persuaded that detente has proved all that it was cracked up to be...

...In any event, barring some unexpected dramatic development in one of the world's trouble spots, the next few weeks should be a busy time for British ornithologists . They will be out in force trying to determine whether the hawks nesting in the American capital today are hawkish hawks or dovish hawks, whether Reagan was sincere when he spoke on Inauguration Day about" mutually beneficial relations," and whether former nato commander Haig'sassurances of a greater American consultation with nato simply mean that Europe should obey orders...

...It did not escape the notice of Englishmen that Reagan's Inauguration Address focused primarily on American domestic issues...

...hauls itself out of its recession will the Europeans be able to climb out of theirs...

...More immediately, there is a strong belief in the Foreign Office that since the Russians now find themselves confounded by Middle East developments, an excellent opportunity exists for cementing Arab-Western links by helping to resolve the Palestinian self-determination deadlock...

...Reagan brings to the job an inner security, an absence of chips on his shoulders, a sense of accommodation and an unusual ability to communicate," said the London Sunday Times' Washington correspondent, avoiding any indication of where these qualities might lead America...

...Unemployment levels and business closures are still scare stories of headline proportions on this side of the Atlantic...

...Thatcher probably prefers a hard line toward Moscow...

...The London Financial Times, for instance, thinks so...

...Reagan will chastise them with scorpions...

...Long dormant, it has been revived in recent months and is drawing on tens of thousands of participants at its rallies and demonstrations...

...what we get out of the nato alliance...

...The Reaganites already had made clear, of course, that far from being isolationist, they felt a deep commitment to America's allies...

...Washington and London could continue their agreement to disagree on this issue, but Foreign Office mandarins who have worked hard to float the European initiative may nevertheless have to watch its scuttling by force majeure...

...The British, in fact, are desperately looking to President Reagan to pave the way to resolving this problem...

...Europeans, it has warned, may find that Norman Gelb, a regular New Leader contributor, reports from London for the Mutual Broadcasting System...

...The fear here, though, is that despite the new Administration's avowal of free-market ideology, Washington may find protectionism??at the expense of its trading partners??a convenient means of achieving economic renewal...

...There is a sense that a new chapter has been opened in international affairs, and that it was overdue...

...For although the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Car-rington, is publicly tougher on the Soviet Union than his counterparts in the EEC, he has been convinced by the West Germans that, especially given the extent of East-West trade, the prospect of detente sustaining peace is greater than the danger of Soviet expansionism becoming an intolerable threat to it...

...In an attempt to salvage the situation, Carrington has been a prime mover in the so-called European initiative, designed to bring the Palestinians...

...Prime Minister Thatcher's tough, monetarist approach did manage to trim back inflation at a faster rate than predicted, but the other components of recovery remain dangerously lacking...

...The one group that seems to have made up its mind about the newly arrived White House occupant is the British movement against nuclear armaments...

...The new Administration's armaments policies is an attractive horror issue for the anti-nuclear activists, who want such American weapons as the cruise missile banned from British bases...

...Many journals have commented about the high caliber of most of the Reagan Cabinet...

...Moreover, she is a firm believer in the British-American special relationship, and this would be jeopardized if the British proved contrary on a basic Reagan policy directly involving the two superpowers...