Britain and America: An Alliance Under Strain

The "special relationship" between Britain and the United States has always been something of a useful fiction — a way of describing a genuinely important but fundamentally unequal partnership in terms that sound more reciprocal than they are.

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What Makes It Special

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The relationship rests on several foundations that are real and durable: intelligence sharing under the Five Eyes arrangement; military interoperability developed over decades of joint operations; a shared language and cultural inheritance; and a network of personal relationships between government officials, academics, and business leaders.

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These foundations have not changed. What has changed is the American political context in which the relationship operates.

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The Uncertainty Problem

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British foreign policy has traditionally relied on the US as a predictable anchor. Alliance commitments, backed by the credibility of the world's most powerful military, provided a stable framework within which UK foreign policy could operate.

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American unpredictability — the possibility that a future US administration might qualify or withdraw its NATO commitments — forces Britain to think about European security in ways it has not had to for seventy years.

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The European Alternative

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The uncomfortable reality facing British foreign policy is that its strongest guarantee of security is not Washington but the collective will of European democracies. The post-Brexit decision to step back from European defence integration looks increasingly costly.

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