I returned last month to live in England after a 30-year break. It was raining. The weatherman on TV, standing before a map with dark clouds gusting across it, predicted “sunny spells” over the next 24 hours. That took me back.

Sunny spells! I had not heard the phrase in a long time but it inhabited some place deep in my bones. Yes, those illuminated moments between clouds, so typical of Britain, where the wind seldom dies and everything drips. A “spell,” in this usage, has a rough duration of four minutes, somewhat shorter than its variant, a “sunny interval,” which has been known to last half-an-hour. The phlegmatic outlook of the British is well-known and probably has much to do with its millennial monarchy and unstable skies.

I asked a friend about climate change. Hard to know, he said, the climate here changes every ten minutes. But surely there’s been global warming? “Well, certainly since we got central heating in the 1970’s!” This is a nation that has seen a lot. To the British, wit is the best riposte to life’s vagaries. Empire has come and gone, as has Tony Blair’s “Cool Britannia.” What’s left right now is an indebted nation fed up with the City’s fat-cat bankers and anxious about budget cuts.

Before I get to politics, a word is needed on the English language. Its London usage differs from that of its fellow metropolis across the pond, New York. I asked for the mail box the other day and got a stare. Yes, I insisted, brandishing a letter, a mail box. “Oh, you mean the letter box.” I suppose that is what I meant. Yeah, no worries, I might have said in good Anglo mode, got that “sorted.”

But things soon got unsorted. I drove past a garage offering “tyre changes.” This prompted an explosion from my teenage son. “They don’t actually spell tires with a “y,” do they?” Yes, I confessed, they do. They also ask for their coffee “white” when they mean with milk.

A thousand little differences can make for misunderstanding, so perhaps it’s not surprising that relations between the United States and Britain are cool, despite the fact that both have fresh-faced forty-something leaders, both are facing a hangover from the securitized-mortgage boom, both face runaway deficits, and each needs the other to confront a world of changing power patterns.

If nothing else, Britain, which once aspired to be Greece to America’s Rome (a sort of civilizing influence on the new great power), might offer counsel to the United States on how to transition from dominance to the cooperation among equals embodied in the British Commonwealth. But Barack Obama is not Bill Clinton, who was schooled at Oxford. He’s not even George W. Bush, who inhaled Atlanticism through his coldwar- warrior father.

Nor is he Ronald Reagan, whose ideological marriage with Margaret Thatcher was of a heady intensity. No, Obama is of Asian bent and his economic advisers are telling him fast-growth Asia is what matters. America’s “special relationship” with Britain has turned rather ordinary. That’s a pity. The western alliance is important. If London and Washington can’t find a shared lexicon, the world will be less stable. David Cameron, the new prime minister, is a pragmatist.

He’s drawn to a moderate foreign policy in the style of a Tory leader of another age, Harold Macmillan. He sees Britain as a bridge between the United States and the European Union, but needs a new level of engagement from Obama. Britain’s “sunny interval” on the world stage ended decades ago.

America’s will pass, too. For all Cicero’s advice ? “Do not hesitate for a moment in prosecuting with all your energies a war to preserve the glory of the Roman name, the safety of our allies, our rich revenue, and the fortunes of innumerable private citizens” ? Rome fell. Washington, at war as China rises, needs all its friends right now, even old ones on the slow-growth, gusty western edge of Eurasia.


INTELLIGENCE/ROGER COHEN