The Accidental American: Tony Blair and the presidency James Naughtie Macmillan, 251pp, £18.99 ISBN 1405050012

Lord Hutton has published the e-mails; Washington's players have spilled all to Bob Woodward; the story is even played out each night in London at the National Theatre. Is there anything left to say about the road to war in Iraq? James Naughtie, having previously written an insider's account of the turbulent political marriage between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, now turns to the relationship that appears about to determine the Prime Minister's place in history.

His elegant, discursive narrative is written from a "mid-Atlantic vantage point". American readers will doubtless enjoy having the intricacies of British politics explained to them. British readers will be no less interested in the riddle of what makes the Blair-Bush relationship tick.

Polemic would never be Naughtie's natural style, even without the constraints of his day job presenting Radio 4's Today programme. The author's judgements must be inferred from the weight given to the views of observers and advisers quoted in the book. Andrew Gilligan, David Kelly and the Hutton inquiry are despatched in three brief paragraphs - "it was an unhappy episode for all concerned, and left deep wounds" - though this is followed by a lengthy analysis of intelligence failures and the claim about Iraq's capacity to launch WMDs.

Naughtie's reluctance to take sides can be an advantage, as in his incisive analysis of Blair's motives. His account stresses that Blair was a far from reluctant partner. The "support minus" option - backing America's war without allowing British troops to participate - was mooted by Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, and then offered privately by George W Bush and publicly by his defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. It was never an option for Blair, because he was convinced that the war was right. Blair, Naughtie writes, "preferred Bush's judgement - because it coincided to a remarkable extent with his own".

In recounting how the concessions gained (Bush taking the UN route and backing the Middle East "road map") were quickly reversed, Naughtie implies that the Prime Minister, by underestimating his political value to Bush as a major public ally, underplayed his hand. Blair's main motivation, according to Naughtie, was to seize the alliance as an opportunity to put US power behind his own beliefs about how international affairs should be reordered. Blair had prevailed in a furious row with Bill Clinton over the conduct of the Kosovo war, and felt vindicated after the fall of Slobodan Milosevic. He had raised the possibility of military action against Afghanistan with the recently inaugurated Bush as early as March 2001. This, writes Naughtie, increased Blair's credibility with the US president: he was among those to warn of a gathering storm.

It is easy to forget that, prior to 9/11, Blair's convictions about how international affairs should be reordered chimed largely with the instincts of his party. Labour is not a pacifist party. The mainstream of left-liberal and Labour opinion had shifted a great deal in the 1990s - reviving the ideals of the Spanish civil war and calling for more intervention, not less, especially in the cases of Bosnia and Rwanda. There was broad support in the party for the Kosovo war, which had no UN authorisation, and for Blair's Chicago speech on foreign policy, given in 1999, which urged a reshaping of international law. Sketch-writers mocked as Messianic his post-9/11 party conference speech, which argued that the crisis was an opportunity to heal the scars of the world. And yet it caught the mood of the party.

So Blair, as much as anybody in the Project for the New American Century, thought that 11 September 2001 could be a catalyst for his world-view. Yet this was never Washington's agenda. Because Blair was so intent on stressing the west's shared values, he ignored the differences between the two political projects. "I've never known what people mean when they go on about this neo-con thing," the Prime Minister tells Naughtie. But Blair's project, in the tradition of Woodrow Wilson and William Gladstone, was about "new rules for the international community". This must make multilateralism central, while even the politest of neoconservatives would, at best, see it merely as a rather inconvenient means to an end.

Naughtie's history almost reaches the present day, but the final chapter is yet to be written. He concludes with a portrait of Blair as "the loner" - secure in his moral conviction that he has taken the right course, yet frustrated that others do not share (or understand) his near-apocalyptic view of how the balance of risk has changed since 9/11. It may have looked like the US presidential election was John Kerry's to lose - but now the Democrats seem capable of losing it. A second Bush administration will not contain Colin Powell - who, Naughtie reports, confided to Jack Straw that the parties in the Cheney-Wolfowitz-Rumsfeld axis are "fucking crazies" - and has its sights set on Iran. But will this mean Bush ditches his British ally? Even if the Prime Minister's instincts were to back the US again, what chance would he have of convincing the cabinet, Labour MPs or a sceptical public?

Sunder Katwala is general secretary of the Fabian Society

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