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How special is the special-relationship?
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The term special relationship to describe the closeness between the United States and the United Kingdom was first spoken in a 1946 speech by Winston Churchill, and has remained in use ever since. It is the child of the Second World War and had been fathered by Churchill when his country was in desperate need of American assistance against Nazi Germany. Britain’s survival depended on American economic and military help, and his correspondence with Franklin Delano Roosevelt shows Churchill’s much greater enthusiasm for the English speaking world than of the thirty second president. In Christopher Hitchens’ book, “Blood, Class and Nostalgia”, he writes how Churchill even considered the US and Britain using the same currency as a means to further cement the relationship. Roosevelt, on the other hand, was cooler to the special relationship, although he never spoke against it. And even as the concept has survived 63 years, it is true today as it was in the 1940’s, that the special relationship is more special for Britain than it is for America.
This relationship may be seen as a means to soften Britain’s loss of power that was felt as Germany bombed its cities during the blitz and when victorious Britain had to give up its colonies, with great American pressure that it does so. A Britain of less world importance could at least console itself, it would seem, that another “Anglo-Saxon” country was the most powerful in the world. The historical and cultural links between the two countries were always emphasized, to make Britain’s dependence and security on a foreign country seem less foreign. But this was never a partnership of equals. When America asked Britain, like all west European colonial powers, to de-colonize, it had to do so grudgingly. When Britain, France and Israel invaded Egypt in the 1956 Suez War and the Eisenhower administration told them to back down, Britain and its allies did so. Niall Ferguson said in a recent speech at a forum that the US even threatened to sell British bonds and thus wreck Britain’s economy if it did not end that war. Likewise all accounts of Tony Blair’s first visit to Washington during George W. Bush’s administration, reflect a giddy man who wanted to walk in the halls of power and be in on the action: an obviously sycophantic secondary role- which was even more embarrassingly reflected in Bush’s “Yo, Blair!” during the Group of Eight summit in St. Petersburg, Russia in 2006.
When Gordon Brown met Barack Obama for the first time, the British media made much of the little time given to the prime minister. President Obama even repeated the phrase special partnership rather than special relationship that seemed to be a cool treatment of the ally. If one watches press conferences between Obama and Brown, or Hilary Clinton and David Miliband, Obama’s and Clinton’s comments on the special relationship seem little more than lip service to a tradition, that initially really wasn’t all that special for the United States. How long will the special relationship last? It’s hard to say, but since nothing is lost by repeating the phrase, it’s easy to imagine that it’ll remain in use long after the belief in it has passed: like saying “God bless you” after a sneeze, without even thinking of the actual meaning of the words. That, of course, won’t stop many conservatives on both sides of the Atlantic from writing books and articles that reflect less fact than romantic antiquarianism.
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