Worth looking at a couple of other treatments of the Chilcot report; Zack Beauchamp at Vox, and Tom Switzer at Lowy. And here’s the punchline; especially in the wake of Brexit, but really even before, the United States government has come to view France as a much more important security partner than the United Kingdom. France maintains power projection capabilities (and the will to use them) that the UK does not, and France’s diplomatic voice carries greater weight in a variety of different regional multilateral fora. The UK remains an important contributor to Five Eyes and a variety of other intelligence sharing programs, and is one of the most important partners in the F-35 program. In the long term, however, the US prefers an ally that is not actively falling apart, which means that Washington’s best European friend in military terms is Paris, not London.

And this means is that Tony failed even against the exceedingly low metric he set for himself: To remain the poodle of the United States.