As Gordon Brown polishes his shoes and his prose ahead of today's big speech in Washington and his session with Barack Obama the London papers are full of it – as the US papers will not be. It's the same when any foreign leader passes through the Oval Office for the photo-op: big at home, small in DC.
I spent part of yesterday hastily researching the turbulent relationship between British prime ministers and US presidents in the near-century since David Lloyd George met Woodrow Wilson soon after the Princeton professor-politician arrived in Europe for the Versailles peace conference in December 1918.
But was I wasting my time? Is all that stuff over, or at very least passé?
I ask, not because I think the Obama administration doesn't value the British link or hold Brown in less than reverence. The PM may not know the new president well – Obama has not been a big player for long, after all. His rise has been meteoric.
But Brown is well known in Democratic power circles, not least because he has worked them hard for 20 years, holidaying in Cape Cod, close to Harvard and Boston. Massachusetts is to the Democratic party what Scotland is to Labour, a heartland state. The "special relationship" will stagger on, because mutual interest dictates that it should.
But the world is changing for America, and thereby for Anglo-American relations, just as it did when Britain was top dog in the late Victorian era and became what Aaron Friedberg's book calls the Weary Titan. Jeremy Paxman, a bit of a weary titan himself, caught a whiff of it in Victorians, his Sunday night BBC series on painters of the period. Suddenly we sensed the coming fall from pre-eminence.
Is that now happening to the Yanks? I've bet the farm for years that the United States has enormous powers of resilience, that it isn't over yet. Obama seems to agree: he'd have been suicidal not to. But the emerging new world order will not be bipolar, as it was in the cold war, nor Eurocentric as it was for 250 years. Not yet unipolar, as foolish "end of history" types told each other in Washington after the Berlin wall came down.
But look at recent events. The financial crash that has affected everyone in the world (today's Guardian story about the ubiquity of mobile phones is the most heartening globalisation story I have read in years) has shifted power away from the west, back towards Asia, for the first time in 500 years. Obama's tilt is already Pacific-orientated. After all, he was born in Hawaii. Japan's PM has already paid a call.
Manchester United's forward, Park Ji-Sung of South Korea, is now a bigger star than any team rival at home and beyond. As with microchips and car production – and cricket too now – it is only a matter of time before the biggest football leagues in the world will also be in Asia.
Latin American teams have long proved that it's not just a matter of money, though it always helps. By the same token, Penélope Cruz's Oscar win the other day reflects globalisation too. All right, she's a Spaniard, but she reflects the growing power of the Hispanic peoples of the United States – in Hollywood and beyond.
And Bobby Jindal may have screwed up making the Republican response to Obama's economic package on TV last week. But the governor of Louisiana, a famously mixed ethnic state, is still Baton Rouge-born of Punjabi parents, Indians of the non-John Wayne variety.
It's not a one-way street, of course. British-born Howard Stringer (Sir Howard actually) is the naturalised American head of Sony of Japan. There are plenty such examples. And is Slumdog Millionaire's Oscar night triumph a cultural win for Britain – or for India? Both, of course.
But all this is going to feed through to the UN security council – whose "permanent five" reflect the past, not the present – to the IMF and World Bank, their voting rights and financial contributions, and much else. Britain may choose to snuggle up to the US – as it has done in the 20th century – or throw in its lot with Europe. Rising China and India – Japan, too – will not lose much sleep either way.
Which is not to say that Brown's trip is pointless or without value. He needs to have a success, both theatrical and substantial, in economic policy and in international affairs, as well as personal. The wonk in Gordon needs to cosy up to the inner wonk in Barack.
Flicking through the shelves yesterday I was surprised to notice how much the personal chemistry mattered. Less well known than Ron and Maggie or Tony and Bill/George, Clem Attlee and Harry Truman, long overshadowed by charismatic men, felt comfy with each other. Jim Callaghan respected Jimmy Carter, but felt happier with his modest moderate Republican predecessor, Gerry Ford. They became firm friends. Harold Macmillan's warm relationship with JFK survived with his wife, Jackie, long after the president was murdered; one bond was unfaithful spouses.
Most intriguing was a near-disaster I had quite forgotten. Lloyd George may have charmed Wilson in December 1918, but in July that year it was Winston Churchill who had made a far more important American contact at an allied war ministers' dinner at London Gray's Inn.
According to the then-US junior navy minister, Franklin Roosevelt, his far more famous British counterpart, then minister of munitions, rudely "acted like a stinker'' towards him at the dinner. Unsurprisingly, Churchill did not recall the occasion when FDR told Joe Kennedy (JFK's Brit-hating Irish-American bootlegger dad) 20 years later.
Fortunately for Anglo-American relations in the dark days of the second world war, FDR, by then US president and the most powerful man on earth, chose to forgive the war leader of bankrupt and beleaguered Britain.
But in dealings between Downing Street and the White House, self-interest and sentiment have usually been mingled – with self-interest well on top. FDR drove very hard bargains in the second world war. Truman cut off the cash in 1945. Even the peace-loving Wilson warned Britain in 1918 that if it wanted to retain its historic naval preponderance it had better think again.
"The United States could and would show her how to build a navy," he confided. And she did. Somewhere behind closed doors in Beijing, Chinese admirals, the first with a blue water fleet since the 1420s, are probably having the same thought.
