Why Boris Johnson is right to want to ditch the term ‘special relationship’

During his gripping recent testimony to a Commons committee, Dominic Cummings shed a little light on the relationship between Britain and America. In a day of chaos when lockdown, the American bombing of Syria and a press story about the prime minister’s “girlfriend” and their dog vied for the attention of Boris Johnson, one outcome was that the British declined the US invitation to join in the air assault. In the past, during say the Thatcher or Blair premierships, joining in with such a limited but powerful symbolic action would have been almost automatic. But times are changing.

“Special relationship” is, arguably, one of the most vexed and least useful expressions in the British political vocabulary. According to well-informed reports in The Atlantic, it seems that Boris Johnson is sceptical about its usage, and dislikes it because it makes Britain seem “needy and weak”, and pushed back on it when President Biden used it, no doubt thoughtfully, in an inaugural phone call to Downing Street in January. It might just be a sign that Johnson is attempting to make the best of what will never be a particularly warm friendship with the Biden administration, given the president’s public aversion to Brexit and devotion to the Good Friday Agreement. For the prime minister, it might also be simply a recognition that the “special relationship” has been, mostly, fetishised by a succession of British diplomats and politicians, but largely neglected or ignored in Washington. Sadly, that has largely been due to the long-term decline in Britain’s power and influence since the Second World War.

Whether Brexit enhances or weakens the UK’s international status remains to be seen. It is, though, apparent that a UK-US free trade deal is as remote as ever. Despite his affinity with Brexit, Nigel Farage and Johnson, aka “Britain Trump”, Donald Trump’s trade policy was strictly America First and protectionist, and so is Joe Biden’s. When Barack Obama warned Britain it would be at the back of the queue for a trade deal if it voted for Brexit, he was merely stating the reality of the imbalance in the “special relationship”. Trade policy towards the UK has been more or less constant across the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations, and owes little to sentiment.

No doubt the famous phrase possessed real geopolitical force when it was coined by Winston Churchill to help consecrate the Atlantic Charter and his wartime partnership with Franklin Roosevelt. At that time the world’s greatest empire and the world’s most powerful republic were joined in a struggle for survival against the world’s most evil powers. Since then, the relationship has relied on some occasionally strong personal chemistry, not always between political soulmates, and a coincidence of national interests, of values and by the absence of a strong foreign and defence policy dimension to the European Union. It has not always thrived, though.

David Cameron, like Johnson, faced a White House with a president not known for his special interest in the UK, and Cameron was probably the first premier to try to downgrade the importance of it, given that he could expect no special favours from the United States, and indeed, apart from Obama’s “helpful” intervention in the Brexit referendum of 2016, he received none.

One prime minister, Edward Heath, was so dedicated to the European ideal in the 1970s that he spurned the transatlantic alliance, and that followed an uneasy period when a Labour premier, Harold Wilson resisted Democrat president Lyndon Johnson’s insistent appeals for the British to send troops to Vietnam, and not even a token force. The Eisenhower administration in the 1950s was enraged to have been kept out of the plotting with France and Israel in the Suez invasion, and reluctant to share nuclear secrets after a series of embarrassing British spy scandals.

Such episodes of frostiness and even hostility tend to be forgotten in the warm glow of the memories of happy cooperation between Churchill and FDR, Macmillan and Kennedy, Callaghan and Carter, Thatcher and Reagan, Major and Bush Sr and Blair and both Clinton and Bush Jr. Yet there was always a strong element of coincident national interests, with not that many “favours” being called in (an exception being America’s secretive assistance in the Falklands War, at the expense of another ally, Argentina).

The special relationship, then, can be close and productive, and has been one of the more enduring in international relations, but there is nothing permanent or unchanging about it, and it cannot always be relied upon by either side, as we are perhaps shortly to discover.