The challenge of declining influence is not the relationship between America and Britain, but that of both countries to the non-western world
They are a remarkable couple. The grandson of a Kenyan cook in the British army who was detained and brutalised as a Mau Mau suspect stood up before both houses of parliament in Westminster Hall and a proceeded to give them a lecture on leadership. He got rapturous applause. No less memorably, his wife took the pupils from a north London secondary school whom she first met two years ago around an Oxford college. She was inspirational, not least to her immediate audience. Here was a high-achieving woman who declared, without any reservations or compromise to her career ambitions, the centrality of motherhood and the importance of relationships and children to her as a mother.
For one brief day in this nation's political life, the truth about the special relationship or the educational prospects of students from ethnic minority backgrounds (who make up a tiny proportion of Oxford's undergraduates) receded to the symbolism of two people whose lives embodied the triumph of aspiration over reality. No other American presidential couple could have pulled off this trick or done it with such ease, warmth and passion. They did not stoop, but they did conquer. They are indeed potent ambassadors, and the adjectives we use about Britain's relationship with this particular couple – special, essential or indispensable – hardly seem to matter.
Barack Obama was no less ambitious in his message: that America and Britain still had the ability to lead the world, not by force, but by example, drawing on the strength of our common patchwork heritage which showed people could be united by ideals. He rejected the false choice between our interests and our ideals, between stability and democracy. At times this address came perilously close to being George W Bush's freedom agenda without George W Bush. As Mr Obama rightly acknowledged, democracy could not be imposed. It was a route that each nation on its own had to travel. Translating that message into policy, a variety of paths could be pursued. Will Mr Obama's administration be quite as comfortable with free elections in Egypt and Tunisia, both of which he promised to help with aid, if the primary beneficiaries of that representative process are conservative Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood? Maybe it will, and just to reinforce its intent the Brotherhood is sponsoring a large number of Coptic Christians as its candidates. But move over just a few more inches on the map and see whether the same logic and the same universal principle applies to the elections that Palestinians will hold next year – elections which, if they go ahead, will be contested by both Fatah and Hamas. No, here you get a different response – the Palestinians have "hard questions" to answer.
It is up to the Palestinians to choose their leaders, and the most dispiriting aspect of the duel that was conducted in Washington recently between Mr Obama and the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, over the basis on which peace talks would start, was that this joust took place over Palestinian heads, as if their aspirations or reactions were incidental. In a few lines of a speech designed to present a positive roadmap to negotiations, Mr Netanyahu dismissed two of the three final-status issues that have been on the table since Oslo – the division of Jerusalem and the Palestinian right of return. He received 28 standing ovations from Democrats and Republicans alike in Congress. Has America's ability to mediate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict increased or declined as a result? Our betting is the latter.
As the stage now moves across the Channel to the G8 summit in Deauville, the challenge of declining western influence is not the relationship between America and Britain. It is the relationship of both countries to the non-western world. And that is whom Mr Obama should be addressing.