Britain is now very clearly signalling a rupture with George W Bush’s foreign policy. Instead of pledging to defeat the forces of Islamism that are intent upon destroying the free world, Britain is now setting itself firmly on the path of appeasement. Yesterday morning, the UK Defence Secretary, Des Browne, declared that Taleban participation was needed for ‘the peace process’ in Afghanistan. Excuse me? I thought the west was engaged in a war against the Taleban; having overthrown it, we are now engaged in a desperate struggle to prevent it from regaining power, since it was the Taleban that nurtured al Qaeda. Silly me— it seems we are not at war with them at all but are making peace with them instead. Browne told delegates at the Labour Party conference:

‘In Afghanistan, at some stage, the Taliban will need to be involved in the peace process because they are not going away, any more than I suspect Hamas are going away from Palestine,’ he told delegates.

Ah, I see! If terrorists and their godfathers aren’t going to go away, we have to make them partners in government! Brilliant! And so why stop at the Taleban and Hamas? Since Ahmadinejad isn’t going away, let’s have a peace process with him too! And while we’re at it, let’s invite Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri and let’s all have a party!

As I have observed before, treating as legitimate interlocutors those who gain and retain power illegitimately or violently simply because they have succeeded in using brute force is to hand terror its ultimate victory. It is simply astounding that Britain’s Defence Secretary should adopt such a position.

Then later in the day the Foreign Secretary David Miliband tried to face both towards and away from America simultaneously. Thus:

We share core values with America. It has more power for good than any nation in the world and we must come together in a great project.

But at the same time, as the Times put it today:

David Miliband promised a new chapter in foreign policy yesterday, as he admitted that Britain bore the ‘scars’ of mistakes that were made during Tony Blair’s decade as Prime Minister. The Foreign Secretary referred repeatedly to learning the lessons from British diplomacy over the past ten years, the biggest of which was that military action was never a solution in itself.

And he went on to say:

When I went to Pakistan I met young educated articulate people in their twenties and thirties who told me millions of Muslims around the world think we are seeking not to empower them but to dominate them. So we have to stop and we have to think - the lesson is that it is not good enough to have good intentions.

Actually, no – the lesson is surely to tell those young educated articulate people in terms that we are not trying to dominate them but they are trying to dominate us and we will not stand for it; and nor will we stand for the manipulated distortions and outright lies that are being told about our intentions and our culpability towards the Islamic world.

But now just look what’s happening across the English Channel. For just as Britain seems to be edging away from the ‘special relationship’ with the US into the murky waters of deniable ambiguity, a political and strategic earthquake appears to be under way in France — bastion for so many years of visceral anti-Americanism, but where the new Sarkozy regime seems poised to reverse direction and forge a new entente with America tres tres cordiale. As John Vinocur wrote yesterday in the International Herald Tribune:

France’s rekindling of its strategic relationship with America is part of a highly self-interested and completely respectable attempt to re-establish its status as the pre-eminent player in Europe… Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner was chosen by Sarkozy after laying out his views on how France could strengthen its own hand while playing a greater role in channeling America’s strength. In declining to hunt for profit from the United States’ very apparent weaknesses, Kouchner has argued: ‘Support for Washington, in a critical manner, remains the touchstone of a policy of power. Our relations with other great powers depend on our attitude toward the United States. It’s necessary to reinforce the ‘critical alliance’ with Washington.’

Britain’s relationship with the US has dominated western politics for the past half century. Might we be seeing the beginning of its replacement by a Franco-American alliance instead?

Maybe. And if we’re not careful, we stand to immeasurably damage our national interest if we allow our relationship with America to cool. That’s why Miliband is being so careful to stress how much Britain values the US. And we shouldn’t fool ourselves — Washington is seriously put out by Britain’s behaviour. It doesn’t buy the ambiguity but understands instead that something important has changed. It took an extremely dim view of the precipitate British withdrawal to the airport in Basra; the fact that this occurred at the precise moment that President Bush was facing the watershed moment of General Petraeus’s report and was under enormous pressure over Iraq from his political opponents was felt to be not a coincidence.

But America has a great deal to lose too from the weakening of this relationship, because it relies so much on Britain for political support — both to stiffen its backbone against its own internal fainthearts and to promote and champion its case in Europe. It’s not at all clear that France could ever play such a vital role. Britain, after all, is America’s cultural, moral, judicial and political mother-ship. That counts for a lot.

There are those who say that this problem will ease itself of its own accord if (when??) there’s a Democrat in the White House which would lance the boil of Iraq. After all, isn’t Gordon Brown an honorary American east coaster? Maybe. But if the special relationship can only endure when there’s a transatlantic consensus in favour of appeasement, the game for the west really will be up.