1 week ago
14
Opinion|What Special Relationship?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/09/opinion/us-uk-special-relationship.html
You have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.
Guest Essay
April 9, 2025, 1:00 a.m. ET
By Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Mr. Wheatcroft is a British journalist and the author of “Churchill’s Shadow: The Life and Afterlife of Winston Churchill.” He wrote from Bath, England.
Having told the young men of Harvard in 1943 that the British and the Americans were united by “the ties of blood and history” (that “blood” was dubious), Winston Churchill went further in 1946, again on American soil. In his famous “Iron Curtain” speech in Fulton, Mo., he proposed “a special relationship between the British Commonwealth and empire and the United States.”
British politicians have been beguiled by the idea ever since. The latest is Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who said recently that the two countries were uniquely “intertwined.” With a sense of dull inevitability, he insisted that the British American special relationship was flourishing, and professed admiration and a liking for President Trump, which nobody can really believe.
His reward for this egregious flattery was a 10 percent tariff on British goods imported to the United States in the round of duties announced by Mr. Trump last week.
It’s true that Britain was not punished as much as the European Union (20 percent) or Switzerland (31 percent), let alone the British territory of the Falkland Islands (a ferocious 42 percent — what’s that about?), but 10 percent is merely the base line Britain shares with Singapore and the United Arab Emirates, neither of whom claim to have any special relationship with Washington.
Mr. Trump has said that the prime minister is very happy with the tariff, which seems unlikely, and is rather contradicted by a BBC report that the Starmer government was far from pleased, but relieved that it wasn’t worse.
Gerhard Schröder, the former German chancellor, may not have been the first to say that the special relationship was special because only one side knew it existed. Is it too much to hope that the tired and foolish phrase might now be given a rest?
