A Special Relationship

In the Cold War, whether it was arms control or strategic planning, there have always been first-class allies and second-class allies. The difference lay in the “special relationship.”

St. Paul’s Cathedral in London: on the occasion of the American holiday Thanksgiving, four U.S. Marines carried the United States flag in slow-march down the aisle to the altar. The predominantly American congregation sang “America the Beautiful.” What Winston Churchill called the “special relationship” between America and Great Britain, “two nations separated by a common language,” was being celebrated.

People love their legends. The rebellion of 1776 is forgiven and forgotten, except when the French remind them of who it was that stood by their side and shed their blood in the fight against the British Parliament and George, the tyrant king. And the fact that since the War of 1812, when America invaded Canada, there has hardly been a decade in the history of the Atlantic that there hasn’t been a new war. As, for example, when the Americans persisted in clinging to slavery longer than did the British. Around the end of the 19th century, the British finally decided that German naval power was more of a threat to their empire than the United States was.

First and second-class allies

The baptism of fire came in 1917 when the United States entered the European war on the side of the Entente, making it a world war and ensuring the defeat of the Central Powers. But the instinctive American tendency toward isolationism wasn’t very impressed with the special relationship. It wasn’t revived until Hitler and Stalin joined forces at the beginning of World War Two. Later, as the British strove to save their empire, the United States pushed to end imperialism. When the British and French intervened in the 1956 Suez conflict, the United States objected and left them holding the bag. The result: France, as a nuclear power, wanted veto rights and Great Britain allied themselves with the United States. The British gave the U.S. military bases and in return got – with limitations – access to American strategic technology. Thus “Echelon” was born, the global Anglo-Saxon eves-dropping system, the intimacy between secret services, the nuclear watchtower on the Elbe and Spree. In the Cold War, whether it was arms control or strategic planning, there have always been first-class allies and second-class allies. The difference lay in the “special relationship.”

For the British, the “special relationship” remains the power-booster against Europe as well as against the United States itself. The relationship was already being abused during the Clinton administration and Bush’s people were more in favor of “allies” than they were of “alliances.” In the Yugoslavian war of succession, the British complained about American tactics and strategy. In Iraq they became the victims of an attempt to rescue the “special relationship.” They got very little thanks for it.

The “special relationship” will survive, in spite of it all, as a continuation of balance of power politics by other means.