As attention falls on Britain’s historic interests in the Falklands amid reports of closer Trump-Milei ties and tensions over Iran, concerns grow that America might not back the UK as it did in 1982.
It’s worth asking in that context: what even is the special relationship?
The phrase has been thrown about as a truism for most of my life, but rarely with any explanation. For most of us Brits, it’s just taken for granted. We think of it as “special” because the US is a spin-out of the United Kingdom, and there are cultural and language ties between us.
But if you look at Hansard, which is the UK’s parliamentary archive, you realise the phrase didn’t come into popular usage until the 60s, notably, when Britain began to explore closer ties with Europe in the context of the formation of the European Economic Community and Britain’s potential role within it.
References then pick up again once Trump comes to power.
That’s pretty meaningful. It implies that the true significance of the special relationship may have been something more concrete.
Looking at the entries themselves, what emerges is the picture of a gentleman’s agreement struck between nation-states postwar, based on the idea that the US would support the UK economically from then on. But also — and this is the critical bit of the agreement — that for appearances sake, this de facto subsidy would be kept on the down low to preserve the illusion, for the sake of the orderly administration of the former empire, that Britain still had power. Britain would therefore be allowed high levels of autonomy but only for as long as it championed the transformation of the former empire into a federation of independent states modeled on the American system. Aka the Commonwealth.
One way to think of it, therefore, is as a now-independent and wealthy child, who, feeling responsible for the security and health of their increasingly economically immobile parent, offers to provide a quiet stipend into their account. Simultaneously, they agree to respect the illusion that the parent’s influence over how the old family estate should be managed still matters, even as they aim to entirely reform the system.
The nature and scope of the first official reference to the “special relationship” in Hansard is fascinating in that light.
It is brought up (and referenced in Hansard in quotation marks) by Lord Boothby in August 1961, just five years after the Suez crisis had made it obvious to British elites that whatever gentleman’s agreement had been struck, its quiet promise to allow Britain to maintain authority in its sphere of influence had limits. What had become apparent in 1956 is that if America, as the controlling partner in the relationship, was crossed on factors vital to the sustenance of its own hegemony, it would not hesitate to invoke the right to override British interests. This, understandably, was difficult for many of Britain’s imperially-minded elites to process.
From then on, the term “special relationship” is increasingly utilised in Parliamentary references as a type of IYKYK code for “American subsidy”, the economic reality of which will not be spoken of publicly for fear of unleashing a democratic crisis.
At the same time, the phrase is increasingly invoked in public channels whenever British unease about American policy actions boils over.