The Brits are bothered, as usual. President Donald Trump has registered his displeasure at Prime Minister Keir Starmer for failing to join the Iran War with the proper gung-ho spirit, and the latest instantiation of this is reportedly a Pentagon proposal to back Argentine claims to the Falkland Islands. The response (including this one in The American Conservative’s pages from the admirable Iain Macwhirter) has been indignation and a great deal of fretting about “the special relationship.”
One might reasonably ask where they’ve been for the past 80 years. Americans are perfectly happy to let the Brits borrow our nuclear deterrent or to ride shotgun on our various world adventures or to export their soppy cultural content to our shores (much of which, particularly in music, is just American cultural content repackaged with funny accents). But British security? British sovereignty? British political ambition? Do you people know how this country started? Have they heard of the Monroe Doctrine, which was specifically formulated with the idea of keeping Europeans out of our hemisphere?
The classical analysis of the British importance for American policy is that the United Kingdom is both a balance and a buffer: a nation powerful enough to prevent a hegemon from arising on the continent, powerful enough physically to halt any transatlantic expansion that an ambitious continental power may have in mind. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the United States also relied on the British Navy to keep sea lanes clear for world trade, but the rise of American naval power in the Second World War and the collapse of the British Empire rendered this concern obsolete.
The Americans are solely responsible for that collapse. The Roosevelt and Truman administrations were overtly anti-imperial. The settlement of the Bretton Woods monetary system, negotiated on the American side by the Soviet asset Harry Dexter White, explicitly ousted the pound from its status as the world reserve currency and abolished the system of Imperial Preference, eliminating the UK’s sole asset in its uphill battle against a disastrous balance of payments crisis; along with the curtailment of credit and grant aid to the UK, it crushed the British fisc and all but ensured that the colonial possessions would go their own ways. Was this anti-imperialism wise in the long run? The Americans have spent a great deal of blood and treasure trying to fill the vacuum the British left in the Middle and Far East. Looking narrowly at today’s challenges to American policy, one might wistfully wish for more robust military powers in, say, India and Japan. Yet the entire thrust of American policy since the Second World War has been to discourage empire and to keep Britain as a second-rate power, trammeled in its own narrow European lane. The sentimental attachment is much more important to one side—namely the weaker, the dependent—than the other.
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Once this mental hurdle is cleared, well—why should America particularly care about British control of the Falklands? The haplessness of His Majesty’s Navy has been on embarrassing display lately; at the same time, the government at Buenos Aires is very philoamerican. It seems certain that whatever American interests are served by friendly control of the Falklands can be met just as well and even better by Javier Milei and his crowd of crypto-crooks than by the self-hating limeys at Westminster. Sure, sure, the Brits gave us Shakespeare and the common law tradition, but what have they done for us lately? Oasis? Trainspotting 2?
God knows this is not an endorsement of the piratical and bellicose strategic mood dominating Washington these days. I don’t think alienating all of our allies at once is, in the long run, a very good idea; the mass delusion of American benevolence has been very good to America in many respects. Perhaps we do not have to rub the Brits’ noses in their abject decline quite so thoroughly. But I would exhort the Brits to consider the world as it is, not as they’d like it to be. American power has always been competitive with British power; the latter is tolerated only insofar as it is a complement to or extension of the former. Toadying is, I suppose, a sort of “special relationship,” but not a very good one to cultivate sincerely. The grinning cynicism of Mark Rutte, one suspects, is far more psychologically healthy and, indeed, something approaching prudence.
It’s time to grow up. We’re just not that into you. Americans may have an affinity for your bad television and your silly ceremonial outfits, your Beatles and even your strangely uncompelling baked goods, but Americans are the great consumers. They also like tacos and margaritas; ask the Mexicans how much slack that’s buying them these days. We have spent a quarter-millennium kicking your military to the curb and strangling your economy. Isn’t it time to recognize that you are alone? In your unsplendid isolation, you might draw your eyes away from the Falklands—or, soon enough, Las Malvinas—to your own demographic and economic suicide at home. The illusion may be dying; the Financial Times recently leaked audio of the British ambassador to the U.S. making a frank assessment of “the special relationship.” But the faster it dies, for Britain at least, probably the better.
