Taking stock of a ‘special relationship’

Ever since Winston Churchill used the phrase “special relationship” to describe British-U.S. ties, said Nicholas Watt in The Guardian, it has been invoked by “prime ministers of all hues.” But this week, Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee declared the phrase “potentially misleading” and recommended that it be scrapped. In a report on Anglo-American ties, the committee said the phrase had contributed to the “perception that the British government was a subservient poodle to the U.S.” in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, when Prime Minister Tony Blair was widely seen as having supported President Bush’s ill-conceived war while getting nothing in return. From now on, the committee said, Britain should be “less deferential and more willing to say no to the U.S. on those issues where the two countries’ interests and values diverge.”

What took us so long? asked John Charmley in The Times. For more than 60 years, we have “adopted an attitude of more or less complete subservience to the Americans,” trotting obediently after them even as they repeatedly kicked us. During the crisis over the nationalization of the Suez Canal in the 1950s, for example, the U.S. “dropped us in the guano” by siding with Egypt instead of with us. And during the Falkland Islands dispute in the 1980s, President Reagan waffled over whether to back Britain, its firm ally, or Argentina, which at the time was “a nasty dictatorship.” Thank goodness Britain is finally going to stop “behaving like a love-struck co-dependent.”

Our love was always unrequited, said Peter McKay in the Daily Mail. The Americans never saw us as equals—which is not surprising considering that American high schools teach that the U.S. generously bailed us out in both world wars, when the truth is “that we paid fantastic over-the-odds sums for the equipment we bought from them.” Americans are also told that they selflessly protected us from the Soviet Union, when the reality is that the U.S. “colonized Europe with military bases” to ensure that war with the Soviets “would be fought on our soil, rather than theirs.” We hardly need a committee of MPs to tell us that the special relationship is dead.

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Surely a bit of “skepticism is in order,” said Bruce Anderson in The Independent. We’ve heard this kind of talk before. Those who announce the demise of the “special relationship” usually profess to have made a “shocking discovery” that America puts its own interests first. What of it? So does every country, including Britain. Yes, the Americans have a tendency toward unilateralism, and yes, they can be difficult. Our interests are not identical. But we share many of the same values, and when times are tough, we are there for each other. “In foreign affairs, there is only one certainty: There will be regular proclamations of the death of the special relationship. But the hearse will never arrive.”