Influence without Leverage? Anglo-American Relations and Intervention Post-9/11: the cases of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria

Abstract

This thesis examines the evolution of Anglo-American relations in Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa (CA+MENA) region following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks from the perspective of the UK, the junior partner within the alliance. Building upon the work of Suzanne Nossel and Joseph Nye, this thesis develops the idea of smart power to understand how the UK has influenced US decision-making across four case studies of Anglo-American military intervention: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. Moreover, it also incorporates the role of personality in the exercise of smart power, an element that has largely been overlooked in the literature to date.
This thesis aims to answer the following core research question: how did the UK influence US intervention in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria between 2001-2013? Proceeding from the hypothesis that the US-UK alliance has evolved post-9/11 with the UK projecting greater influence over US policy, this study gathers and analyses qualitative data, comprising 29 semi-structured interviews with British and American political elites, and over 120 primary source documents, including 55 political speeches and official statements, in developing its argument.
The principal aim of this thesis is to reconceptualise and reinterpret the US-UK special relationship from a British perspective by using the framework of smart power to understand how the UK has influenced US foreign policy behaviour in Central Asia and the Middle East and North Africa post-9/11. Moreover, this analysis contributes to the literature on Anglo-American relations and the study of power by providing a more nuanced understanding of the alliance that is more than just about the exercise of hard power, but emphasises the importance of the relations between leaders and their individual national role conceptions in the endurance of the alliance.