For King Charles, this could be his greatest challenge

When King Charles makes his much-anticipated visit to Washington this week as part of the commemorations marking the 250th anniversary of American independence, it will be his first visit to the United States since he ascended the throne in 2022.

He can expect the warmest of welcomes from Donald Trump.

Differences over the war in Iran may have soured the president’s relationship with His Majesty’s government, but Trump remains an ardent admirer of the King, whom he implausibly describes as “a good friend of mine”. With the recent fall of Viktor Orban, and Trump’s excruciating dispute with the Pope, it is arguable that King Charles is the only European leader – whether head of government or head of state – with whom the president still has a good relationship. Other than Vladimir Putin, of course.

Notwithstanding the scandals which have tarnished the reputation of some other members of the royal family, the Crown is still – by far – Britain’s greatest soft-power asset. Few leaders, regardless of where they sit on the political spectrum, are immune to the bewitching power of British royalty. Even Malcolm Turnbull, asked by a journalist after his audience with the late Queen whether he was still a republican, gallantly replied, “I am an Elizabethan.” (When I told Her Majesty that anecdote during my own audience some time later, she was delighted.)

A lifetime in training for the role has made King Charles a skilful diplomat, with experience – including personal acquaintance with world leaders spanning more than 50 years – which no Foreign Office official, however accomplished, could hope to match (as they themselves will tell you).

While planning for the visit began well before the Iran war and the subsequent diplomatic fallout, it could not be more timely. The relationship between the two countries has not been so poor since the Suez crisis of 1956. Even that was not as bad as the current tensions: President Eisenhower may have punished Britain for its ill-starred military intervention in Egypt after it nationalised the Suez Canal, but he never called into question the importance of NATO – or threatened other important British strategic interests.

There is a striking historical echo of Suez in the present contretemps over Iran, just as there is also a remarkable similarity between the circumstances of the King’s visit this week and those of the Queen’s first visit to the United States in 1957.

In 1956, the roles were reversed. Britain was the aggressor. In coalition with France and Israel, it attacked a Muslim nation in the Middle East against the wishes of an American administration. One of its declared objectives was regime change – to depose Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser. In its initial phases, it was a military success, in the limited sense that the attack by British and French armed forces on Port Said overwhelmed Egypt’s negligible military power. But it was, for Britain, a strategic catastrophe.

Eisenhower was outraged. American sensibilities were deeply offended by the neocolonialist presumption which underlay the intervention. The fact that the attack came a week before America’s election, at which Eisenhower was seeking a second term, did not help matters. After the president used the power of the dollar in currency markets to cause a run on the pound, crashing the value of sterling, Britain backed off.

The Suez crisis deeply divided the ruling Conservative Party and destroyed the prime ministership of Antony Eden. Nasser, posing as a champion of Third World nations standing up to Western aggression (and conveniently ignoring America’s decisive role in ending the conflict) – grew in stature. While Eden was forced out of office within two months, Nasser remained in power until his death 14 years later.

While the healing of the strained relationship between the US and the UK began with Eden’s resignation, American scepticism about Britain remained deep. There has always been an anti-British strain in US politics, as there is in Australia. But unlike Australia, where hostility to Britain is largely to be found only among parties of the left, in America, it exists – for different historical reasons – among both Democrats and Republicans. The Suez crisis strengthened those sentiments.

It was in that environment that the Queen made her first royal visit to the United States. As King Charles will be, she was feted at a White House banquet, although she did not, as he will do, address a joint session of Congress. Her visit also marked an important commemoration – in that case, the 350th anniversary of English settlement. The goodwill the Queen attracted did much to restore the pre-Suez relationship and set anti-British sentiment back on its heels.

One of the fruits of mending the relationship was the United States’ decision the following year to share its undersea nuclear propulsion technology with Britain – something it had never before done (and would not do again until 2021, when Scott Morrison secured the AUKUS agreement).

It is 70 years since the Suez crisis. There is a near to unanimous consensus among British historians that it marked an important – probably the most important – inflection point in the decline of Britain’s postwar global power. In decades to come, historians may well judge that, as was Suez for Britain, America’s war against Iran – ill-conceived and poorly executed, an undoubted military success but already an obvious strategic failure – marked an important moment in the decline of American power.

The King’s visit may put balm on the wounds of the tortured Anglo-American relationship; no amount of royal flattery will repair the more lasting damage to America’s global influence.

George Brandis is a former high commissioner to the UK, and a former Liberal senator and federal attorney-general. He is a professor at the ANU’s National Security College.

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