Having told the young men of Harvard in 1943 that the British and the Americans were united by “the ties of blood and history” (that “blood” was dubious), Winston Churchill went further in 1946, again on American soil. In his famous “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Mo., he proposed “a special relationship between the British Commonwealth and empire and the United States.”
British politicians have been beguiled by the idea ever since. The latest is Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who said recently that the two countries were uniquely “intertwined.” With a sense of dull inevitability, he insisted that the British American special relationship was flourishing, and professed admiration and a liking for President Trump, which nobody can really believe.
His reward for this egregious flattery was a 10 percent tariff on British goods imported to the United States in the round of duties announced by Mr. Trump last week.
It’s true that Britain was not punished as much as the European Union (20 percent) or Switzerland (31 percent), let alone the British territory of the Falkland Islands (a ferocious 42 percent — what’s that about?), but 10 percent is merely the base line Britain shares with Singapore and the United Arab Emirates, neither of whom claim to have any special relationship with Washington.
Mr. Trump has said that the prime minister is very happy with the tariff, which seems unlikely, and is rather contradicted by a BBC report that the Starmer government was far from pleased, but relieved that it wasn’t worse.
Gerhard Schröder, the former German chancellor, may not have been the first to say that the special relationship was special because only one side knew it existed. Is it too much to hope that the tired and foolish phrase might now be given a rest?
Certainly the United States and Britain are bound by defense treaty, intelligence sharing and common language. But then, NATO always included France, Italy and Denmark and now includes Poland and Finland as well. The intelligence sharing embraces Australia and Canada (yes, the 51st state Mr. Trump covets), and the supposedly unique tie of language means far less now that English is the global lingua franca, spoken daily by well over half a billion people.
History makes it clear that the relationship was special in an unpleasant way. When I hear “The Star-Spangled Banner” I take modest patriotic pride in recalling that the “rocket’s red glare” came from British projectiles during the War of 1812, and in thinking of our brave lads in red coats burning the Capitol. (I dare say some Americans wouldn’t mind if we came back and gave it another go.)
After 1918, the Americans were implacable in pursuit of the huge sums London had borrowed to finance the World War I, to the bitter resentment of Churchill among other Englishmen. In 1928, Churchill’s wife, Clementine, wondered whether he might move to become foreign secretary, although she then added, “But I am afraid your known hostility to America might stand in the way.”
By 1940, when Churchill was leading his country at a time of supreme danger, the hostility was forgotten as he tried cajolery and flattery to lure President Franklin D. Roosevelt into the war. He was without success until December 1941, when the choice was taken out of his hands by Japan’s bombing Pearl Harbor and Hitler’s declaration of war on the United States.
The date of Churchill’s Harvard speech was no accident. As historians have observed, it occurred when global leadership was passing to the United States from the British Empire, thanks to the explosive transformation of the American economy brought by war, and the emergence of America as a superpower, while Britain languished as an indigent American dependency.
The change greatly pained Churchill, but he salved his own feelings by ingeniously if implausibly proposing that the two nations were really one. As the British historian Max Hastings wrote, “The notion of a ‘special relationship’ was invented for reasons of political expediency by Winston Churchill, who then became the first of many prime ministers to discover it to be a myth.” Since then, one prime minister after another has nevertheless flaunted the phrase, and one prime minister after another has been disabused of its validity.
Some Americans actively disliked it. When Dean Acheson, President Truman’s secretary of state and a notorious Anglophile in dress and manner, learned that State Department officials were working on a definition of this special relationship, he told them to stop immediately.
Acheson was one of the creators of NATO in 1949, with the Americans and the British the leading partners. And yet this mutual defense pact did not make them “special” friends outside “the North Atlantic area” that the treaty specified. In 1956 Prime Minister Anthony Eden’s British government, in secret alliance with France and Israel, sought to topple Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s president, in the Suez Canal crisis, until the Eisenhower administration pulled the rug out from under them. Ten years later, Harold Wilson, the Labour prime minister, sinuously avoided sending British troops to fight in Vietnam as President Lyndon Johnson very much wanted. One might add that Eisenhower and Wilson were both quite right.
In the 1980s it was widely supposed that there was an intimate bond between President Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. She liked him personally and shared his free market and anti-Communist convictions, but she had her private misgivings. Shortly after Reagan was inaugurated in 1981, Thatcher was talking about the new president with Lord Carrington, her foreign secretary, when she tapped the side of her skull and said, “Peter, there’s nothing there.” Later, she was enraged by Reagan’s opéra bouffe invasion of Grenada, whose head of state was Queen Elizabeth II.
Twenty years later there was certainly a relationship between President George W. Bush and the man he called “my closest friend and partner on the world stage,” Prime Minister Tony Blair. And see where they landed us, special partners in a catastrophic invasion. Any intimate British American relationship should have met its nemesis in the sands of Iraq.
Even then, still suffering from the same delusion, Mr. Starmer sat in the Oval Office in February groveling before Mr. Trump. The performance culminated in his theatrical gesture of producing an invitation from King Charles III to visit England, which Matthew Parris, a journalist and former Thatcher aide, called “a cheap, embarrassing and degrading stunt, undoubtedly painful to the king.”
Since at least one poll has found that a clear majority of British people have a negative view of Mr. Trump, a state visit by him and his wife, Melania, could well have an effect far from what he hopes. It might be less like the popular 2009 visit of President Barack Obama, and the first lady, Michelle Obama, than that of Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu of Romania, when Buckingham Palace staff were reportedly told to lock up the valuables.
Rather then invoking a mythical special relationship, Mr. Starmer might do better to recall the wise words of a predecessor, Lord Palmerston, who said that England has no eternal friends and no eternal foes, only eternal interests. Has any serious nation, including the United States, ever followed any other principle?
Geoffrey Wheatcroft is a British journalist and the author of “Churchill’s Shadow: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill.”
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