NY Sun The call by British parliamentarians for an end to the use of the phrase “special relationship” to describe the long affair of Britain and America will, we predict, come to be seen by historians as one of the tragedies of the Obama years. The parliamentarians, members of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, issued their call in a report released on today. The news service MarketWatch quotes one member of the committee, Mike Gapes, as characterizing the report point as being that “a more hard-headed political approach towards our relationship with the U.S. with a realistic sense of our own limits and our national interests.” That was a nice way of putting it. The matter was put more bluntly by others quoted by MarketWatch, who tie the deterioration in relations between America and Britain more directly to President Obama. “He is an American who grew up in Hawaii, whose foreign experience was of Indonesia and who had a Kenyan father. The sentimental reflexes, if you like, are not there,” MarketWatch quotes a former British envoy in Washington, David Manning, as saying in testimony it says was used in writing the report. What has made the American-British relationship special, however, was not blood ties or “sentimental reflexes” — who has a lot of sentiment for George III? — but rather a shared concept of democracy and of individual liberty. These are ideas going back to people like John Locke and Adam Smith. And there are those who see this, and not matters having to do with personal background, as that which is in danger of being lost. A senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, Nick Witney, is quoted by MarketWatch as putting the matter more bluntly, still. “If one thinks of what [Republican candidate] John McCain had to say about the league of democracies and so forth, I think that perhaps there would have been a stronger interest in a McCain Administration in reaching out particularly to like-minded democracies around the globe. That is something that the Obama Administration do not seem too concerned about.” Harsh words. There has been much comment about the fraying, during the first year of Mr. Obama’s presidency, of relations between America and all sorts of countries, from Germany and France to Poland and China. That has been all the more dramatic when contrasted with the ridicule the Democrats heaped on President Bush for supposedly damaging our relations with the rest of the world and its multi-lateral institutions. But those were instances in which Mr. Bush held the high ground. What strikes us about the sentiments Mr. Witney is describing is the sense that we are in a period in which it is America that is falling away from the countries that cling to principles that made Britain and America so special.