THERE'S someone pretending to be Alex Salmond on the micro-blogging site Twitter. I don't know who writes this entertaining spoof, but he or she has a talent for one-liners that are both perceptive and cruel.
These, for example: "Just sent the driver to get some Rennies..." "Budgets sorted. Took me four days to sort out what Swinney took four months to cock up. Who's the daddy!" "Can't sleep – going to call Kevin and make him play some poker." And, when S
almond was in the United States last week: "Got to love American portion sizes."
The blogger suggests last week's photograph of Salmond with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was a chance encounter in a corridor, fortuitously captured by the First Minister's faithful manservant Kevin Pringle on a camera phone. Now that's unfair. Here I find myself in the unfamiliar position of springing to Salmond's defence.
The meeting with Clinton was a political masterstroke – the product of meticulous planning and genius timing. It fair put Downing Street's gas at a peep. More than a week before Gordon Brown is received at the Obama White House, here's his grinning rival discussing affairs of state in Washington DC with the most powerful woman in the world.
The half-hour conversation in Clinton's office was apparently dominated by one of the new administration's touchstone ideas – alternative energy generation as a means of transforming the economy and saving the planet. Salmond is right to say the US and Scotland share this common purpose.
But forgive me if I'm slightly sceptical of the notion that the US government's primary interest in the Scottish National Party is the Nats' enthusiasm for windmills. May I suggest the State Department is rather more concerned about Salmond's stance on nuclear weapons, and the implications for Nato, the world's most powerful military alliance, of Scottish independence?
I don't doubt the warmth of the welcome offered to Scotland's First Minister last week, but rest assured the State Department desk that has been following the SNP's progress for the past 40 years is called something like 'Bureau for Keeping Tabs on Obscure Nationalist Movements That Could Give Uncle Sam a Poke in the Eye'.
An independent Scotland's operational effect on Nato would be profound. Under SNP policy, Scotland would withdraw from the alliance. Any warship carrying nuclear weapons would not be welcome in Scottish waters. Key areas of the North Atlantic currently patrolled by UK and US submarines keeping an eye on Russia's Baltic fleet would be declared out of bounds.
Royal Navy warships – which always refuse to confirm or deny if they're carrying nuclear weapons – would no longer be welcome in Scottish ports (and could not be maintained or refitted or resupplied at Scottish dockyards).
Then there's the effect of Scottish independence on America's closest military ally, the UK. Denuded of tactically-important territorial waters, its military personnel would be cut by at least a 10th and it would be forced to find a new home for its nuclear submarines. There would inevitably be calls for the rump of the UK to surrender its place at the United Nations Security Council.
I mention all this not necessarily as an argument against independence – although a move towards full sovereignty would have to take account of such geopolitics – but to illustrate that the US has an impossible dilemma when it comes to its attitude toward the SNP.
A glimpse of the complexities involved was provided in 1998 by Philip Lader, Bill Clinton's appointee as US Ambassador to the UK. When I interviewed him about US interest in the debate about Scottish independence, he said bluntly: "We have an interest in the continued strength and prosperity of the United Kingdom." The key word, of course, was "continued".
In many ways this was only common sense. HM Government was the ambassador's host. Was he really going to be neutral on the destruction of the British state? And yet the convention is – quite rightly – that America has no right to interfere in the internal politics of the UK or its constituent parts.
It will not have gone unnoticed by the State Department – which receives regular updates from the US Consulate in Edinburgh's Regent Road – that all attempts to reverse the SNP's opposition to membership of Nato since then have been consistently rebuffed.
When John Swinney became SNP leader in 2000, his aides made known his intention to ditch the policy. But the reaction was so overwhelmingly hostile he eventually handed the job of reviewing defence strategy to Roseanna Cunningham, a left-winger who further entrenched the anti-Nato stance.
When Swinney resigned, Mike Russell fought for the SNP leadership on a modernising agenda. "We are in a different world and one in which most of the new nations of Europe have been clamouring to be part of Nato," he said. "As long as we can be a non-nuclear member, as Canada and Norway, and indeed most other countries, are, this will not only give our defence policy relevance but ensure we can explain our stance, which is hard to do at present."
He didn't stand a chance. Russell, with a pleasing symmetry, is now the minister in charge of selling independence to the Scottish people.
Back in 1998, Lader was out of line. The State Department distanced itself from his comments and he was forced to phone Salmond to apologise. But he spoke a truth: America's national interest is best served by a united UK.
The next time Alex and Hillary have a chat there may be more than wind and waves on the agenda.
