'The rock upon which all dictators have perished'
The Anglo-American Special Relationship
Whenever a Right-wing American says something incredibly provocative about Britain, guaranteed to offend all right-thinking people, I always like to hide behind my favourite defence by pointing out that they are ‘directionally correct’. Sure, Elon often gets all the facts wrong when he’s talking about this country, and his statements border on the hysterical, but he’s ‘directionally correct’.
I thought of my weasel phrase when Donald Trump suggested that Britain ‘is not such a recognisable country anymore’ and that Keir Starmer ‘could be’ pandering to Muslim voters in failing to back his attacks on Iran. It’s true that British foreign policy is influenced by the Labour Party’s desperate need to win back Muslim voters, who have the power to unseat several members of the cabinet at the next election. As with France, it may also be true that an escapade in the Middle East could lead to unrest. But in this case, one doesn’t have to look at changing demography to understand why Britain might be reluctant to join in with Trump’s military adventure, either for strategic or political reasons: Labour voters of all stripes strongly oppose the action and there doesn’t seem to be any clear end goal in sight. I’m not even sure that this time he is ‘directionally correct’.
Besides which, Trump has hardly given Britain much reason to support him, having hit us with huge tariffs, threatened to invade the territory of a neighbour and close ally, and insulted our soldiers’ contribution to the Afghan mission.
But after Britain refused the US use of its military bases, Trump lamented that ‘Keir has not been helpful. It’s very sad to see that the relationship is obviously not what it was.’ The Sun, historically a very pro-American newspaper, framed this as ‘putting the special relationship in peril’, yet this term, so often loved by politicians and ambassadors, is most often most loathed by British conservatives
The ‘special relationship’ has been described as ‘rhetorical nonsense, sometimes majestic and often moving, yet nevertheless nonsense’, as British diplomat Ray Raymond characterised the framing, and it provokes much cynicism among British commentators. Two years ago, after the US ambassador invoked the special relationship following yet another series of missiles strikes in the Middle East, the Telegraph’s Madeline Grant expressed her loathing for a phrase that represented our country’s servile attitude to its ally.
American appeals to the ‘special relationship’ certainly feel cynical. When President Joe Biden was asked by Beth Rigby in 2023 if the ‘special relationship’ is still in good shape, he gave a thumbs up and said ‘in real good shape’. Yet Biden didn’t give much impression of valuing that relationship during his presidency, especially when it conflicted with ancestral loyalties to Ireland. (Even if, in fairness to him, as a senator he was among Britain’s firmest supporters during the Falklands War.)
At the time of Biden’s visit to Dublin in 2023, a triumph of Irish hospitality and diplomatic cunning, Rod Liddle wrote about ‘the damaging myth’ of the ‘“special relationship” between the US and the UK, which is not true now and never was. We are the only people who speak of it — in needy, clingy terms — and I feel a little embarrassed every time it is mentioned.’ In truth, as he pointed out, whether it was with nuclear technology, Suez or the Falklands, the Americans always served their own interests.
The British Right would prefer that we acted in a similar manner, and indeed the argument is that Britain’s submissiveness gives us less bargaining power, encouraging the Americans to court other European nations. It doesn’t help that Britain also has a ruling class who seem strangely averse to the idea of the national interest.
Yet it’s not untrue to point out that Britain and the US have had very similar foreign policy aims much of the time. The phrase first appears in Churchill’s Fulton speech of 1946, a point at which the two countries were, in Kenneth Minogue’s words, ‘almost uniquely focused [on] hostility to totalitarianism.’ The first George Bush described the special relationship as ‘the rock upon which all dictators this century have perished.’
In 2010, US diplomat Eric Edelman talked of the four pillars of the relationship, which he listed as ‘cultural leaders and political elites’ who were ‘committed to the notion that the English-speaking peoples have a special mission in the world; a will to wage war together; the British nuclear deterrent; and close intelligence cooperation.’
So while the term ‘special relationship’ may be galling, it does reflect something real, even if the relationship is very unequal. There may be a special mission to fight the ‘isms’, but there is also the fact that in many parts of the world Britain effectively handed over its empire to Pax Americana, and Mark Steyn even suggested that future historians might see British and American rule as two parts of the same political era. There is some truth in that, and Iranian politicians clearly see the two empires as linked (although we might grumble that the Americans, committed to liberal democracy and more optimistic about human nature, tend to be less suited to the managing of empires).
Indeed, even as far as back as the 1890s John Hay, U.S. Ambassador to Britain, said that the two countries ‘are bound by a tie we did not forge and which we cannot break; we are joint ministers of the same sacred mission of liberty’. As Raymond argued, this pointed to ‘the three pillars of the relationship - the shared common law heritage, the mutual economic investments, and the diplomatic and security ties.’
The triumph of the English-speaking worldview against Soviet communism could have weakened the relationship, but instead Britain became an even more loyal ally as its European neighbours shied away from the ‘special mission’. As Robert Singh wrote in the American Interest: ‘When Washington has needed the legitimacy that allies confer, London has mostly been there. The UK joined nine of the 12 operations the U.S. military conducted between 1991 and 2018, as the second-largest force contributor in all of them… To the extent that London has had a grand strategy since World War II, staying close to Washington has been at its core.’
In the eye of many Britons, this made us ‘poodles’, a term most commonly used against Tony Blair, a man who was unusually religious by the standards of his countrymen and possessed a certain messianic quality when it came to spreading liberal democracy - an idea most British imperialists would have regarded as dangerously unhinged.
Blair’s loyalty to the Americans probably did more than anything else to weaken the ‘special relationship’ in British eyes, and he was also notably guilty of perhaps its most cringeworthy aspect, the tendency of British politicians to view the US as always willing to support Britain. In the most notorious incident, in a joint press conference with George W. Bush soon after 9/11, Blair said: ‘My father’s generation went through the experience of the second world war, when Britain was under attack, during the days of the Blitz. And there was one nation and one people that, above all, stood side by side with us at that time. And that nation was America, and those people were the American people.’
As Geoffrey Wheatcroft noted in his polemic Yo, Blair!, ‘Apart from Soviet Russia, just about the only important country on earth which was not “side by side with us” that winter was the United States, which was very profitably neutral.’ Indeed, the lesson of the war might have been that our real special relationship is with France, with whom we have fought side by side in at least 21 conflicts since 1815.
Blair’s enterprise damaged the special relationship, but I wonder to what extent it’s a generational idea. I grew up during the high watermark of Atlanticism, and one of my first political memories was the US bombing of Libya in 1986, which – aged eight and raised on war films – I took to be some sort of victory for ‘us’, since we’d allowed them to use British air bases. A few months later, and visiting the Berlin Wall with my parents, I was very conscious of seeing the American soldiers and having a sense that they were protecting us from sharing the miserable life I saw on the eastern side.
Reagan and Thatcher were intensely close and embarked on a shared crusade, and that’s not too strong a word, against the Evil Empire. I doubt that many people my children’s age grow up feeling that their country is fighting for a righteous cause in the same way.
