By opting to join the American hard Right, Tony Blair has made the gravest mistake of his political

Blair’s drawn face, with its deepening gullies set in a near permanent hard frown, tells the story. This is the internationalist who is aiding and abetting, however unintentionally, the break-up of the UN system. The pro-European who is the trigger of the most acute divisions in the European Union since its foundation. The wannabe progressive whose closest allies are Washington’s neo-conservatives and conservative leaders in Italy and Spain. By opting to join the American hard Right, Tony Blair has made the greatest mistake of his political life.

Worse, he is fighting a barely legitimate war that is already a military and diplomatic quagmire, where even eventual victory may not avert a political disaster. He knows his capacity to survive the diplomatic humiliations piled on him by the Bush administration is limited; you cannot long lead Britain’s centre and centre-left from such a compromised position, wounding not only the country’s profoundest interests but torching any linkage with the progressive project. For the first time his premiership is genuinely at risk.

It is a political tragedy, Shakespearean in the cruelty of its denouement. 9/11 accelerated trends in America that had been crystallising since the 1970s and which made the political structures in which successive British Governments have managed simultaneously to play both the American and European cards unsustainable. Blair was confronted with an invidious choice that nobody in the British establishment has wanted to make: Europe or America. Side with Europe to insist that the price of collaboration in the fight against terrorism had to be that the US observe genuinely multilateral international due process — and certainly say no to some of Washington’s wilder aims. Or side with America insisting from the inside that it engaged in its wars multilaterally, and hope to bring Europe along in your wake.

Either choice was beset with risk, but it’s hard to believe that siding with Europe, for all its evident difficulties, would have produced an outcome worse than the situation in which we currently find ourselves: a protracted war with no second UN Resolution, no commitment to UN governance of post-war Iraq, no commitment to a mid-East peace settlement. But Blair misread the character of American conservatism, its grip on the American body politic and its scope for rationality. He continues to do so, the miscalculation of his life.

The rise of American conservatism is neither well documented nor well understood in Britain — but it’s one of the pillars on which I build my case for Europe in “The World We’re In”. Ever since the pivotal Supreme Court judgment in 1973 legalising abortion (the Roe v Wade case) which marked the high water mark of American liberalism, it’s been downhill all the way. American conservatism, an eccentric creed even within the pantheon of the western conservative tradition, now rules supreme. Domestically it offers disproportionately aggressive tax cuts for the rich and for business, reforms that shrink America’s already threadbare social contract and a carte blanche for the increasingly feral, unaccountable character of US capitalism.

Internationally it is this philosophy that lies behind pre-emptive unilateralism and the wilful disregard of the UN. American conservatives are bravely willing to use force to advance democracy and markets worldwide — the exemplars of a civilisation the rest of the world must want to copy. No other legitimacy is needed, the reason for the wrong-headed self-confidence that could launch war in Iraq expecting so little resistance. Rumsfeld’s exploded strategy is ideological in its roots. This conservatism is a witches brew — a menace to the USA and the world alike.

The conservative movement has deep roots. It made its first gains in the 1970s in reaction to economic problems at home that it wrongly claimed were wholly the fault of liberals, helped by the reaction of white working class Americans to the application of affirmative action: quotas of housing, university places and even jobs for blacks to equalise centuries of discrimination. When President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in 1964, outlawing the obstacles American blacks had experienced in exercising their civil rights from voting to sitting on juries, he famously joked that he had lost the Democrats the south. He could not have been more prescient; the uneasy coalition between southern conservative Democrats and the more liberal North was sundered — a political opportunity that Ronald Reagan was brilliantly to seize.

This laid the foundations for the conservatisation of American politics, helped by the growing economic power of the south and the west. The new sun-belt entrepreneurs, building fortunes on defence contracts and Texan oil, naturally believed in the toxicity of federal government and the god-given right of employers to cheap labour with as few rights as possible. Put that together with the south’s visceral dislike of welfare, well understood to be transferring money from God-fearing, hard-working whites to black welfare queens, and the need for crime — again understood to be perpetrated by blacks against whites — to be met with ferocious penalties and you had the beginning of the new conservative constituency. Include a dose of Christian fundamentalism, and the building blocks of a new dominant coalition of Republican southerners and middle class, suburban northerners were in place.

What was needed to complete the picture was intellectual coherence and money. America’s notoriously lax rules on political financing allowed the conservatives to outspend the Democrats sometimes by as much four or five times. Yet what opened the financial floodgates was intellectual conviction; a new generation of intellectual conservatives took on the apparently effortless liberal dominance, and beat it at its own game — the realm of ideas. The great right-wing thinktanks — the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute and the Hoover Institute — became the intellectual inspiration of the conservative revival.

The rich were virtuous and moral because they worked hard; the poor worthless and amoral because they had not boot-strapped themselves out of poverty. Welfare thus bred a dependency culture, they claimed, and made poverty worse. Taxation was an act of coercion and an affront to liberty. Markets worked like magic; choice was always better than public provision. Corporations spearheaded wealth creation. Conservatism was transmuted into a moral crusade. The rich could back it aggressively both in their own self-interest and America’s.

The capture of universities by the rich and the lack of education for the poor has meant that social mobility in the US has collapsed. American capitalism, in thrall to the stock market and quick bucks it offers, has hollowed out its great corporations in the name of the hallowed conservative conception of share-holder value — the sole purpose of a company is to enrich its owners. Productivity and social mobility are now higher in Old Europe than in the US — despite a tidal wave of propaganda to the contrary.

Ordinary Americans are beset by risks and lack of opportunity in a land of extraordinary inequality. Yet it is internationally that the rest of the world feels the consequences. Even before 9/11 the Bush administration had signalled its intention to be unencumbered by — as it saw it — vitality sapping, virility constraining, option closing international treaties and alliances, whether membership of the International Criminal Court or the Kyoto accords on climate change.

It intended to assert American power as a matter of ideological principle; 9/11 turned principle into an apparent imperative in order to guarantee the security of the ‘homeland’. There are only two possible rival power centres that champion a more rational approach to world order — in the US a revived and self-confident Democratic Party, and abroad an unified European Union. Britain’s national interest requires that we ally ourselves as powerfully as we can with these forces — both of whom are only too ready to make common cause. Blair has done neither.  Either he is now a convinced conservative or the author of a historic political misjudgment. Neither the Labour Party nor the country can indulge this ineptitude much longer.