Special Relationship

Thank you Kyle for prompting this page in WordsThatDefineNations. I really wanted to talk about this since AmericanCulturalAssumption but somehow didn't want to be the first to munge together FDR's famous phrase. And Wiki was about software some time back wasn't it? But it's also been a very interesting get together of the English speaking peoples (with grateful appreciation to those whose first language isn't English but still bother ... like the Australians, whoops!).

-- RichardDrake

Like most political slogans, the much-cited, in the UK at least, SpecialRelationship with the US is a mixture of reality, wishful thinking and downright hypocrisy. The latter possibilities have never be more cruelly expressed than by PrivateEye, the satirical weekly founded by PeterCook, during the US bombing of Syria from its air force bases in the UK.

Margaret Thatcher had (perhaps reluctantly) supported President Reagan publicly over the bombings and, as ever, referred to the SpecialRelationship in which such decisions were taken in a spirit of mutual openness and friendship. That week's PrivateEye had the headline "Special Relationship". They had dug up a publicity photo of Thatcher smiling contentedly as she listened to the telephone. Out of the phone were coming the words:

"This is President Reagan's answer phone. We're going in again. Have a nice day."

Cynicism on

Actually, in American politics, this phrase is only rarely trotted out. Normally it happens when the U.S. wants to act militarily in a situation and does not want to seem like they are acting alone. Normally the U.S. can do this under the auspices of NATO, but sometimes the French (or someone else, but usually the French) won't go along, so the U.S. invokes the SpecialRelationship and goes in with only the British military additionally involved.

There is a certain amount of reciprocity here - we don't say much about British actions in Northern Ireland, and they stay quiet when we, for instance, bomb Libya.

Cynicism off

Outside of the military considerations, the SpecialRelationship is very helpful and somewhat meaningful in diplomatic terms. Each country can act to the other as a friendly, interested, but uninvolved third party available as a mediator. I think that the U.S. has done this in the Falklands and in Northern Ireland both, while Britain has done it in Lebanon and other cases.

Also, with cynicism off but treading real carefully ... FDR's and Churchill's SpecialRelationship partly worked as a phrase and a operational reality because it did reflect something really important between the peoples. Well, not all of the peoples all of the time of course, as that other guy might have said. I've worked in Boston enough to have noticed their one mayor who wasn't called O'Brien or something like it. I fully understand the wariness there and in more distant ethnic groups in both nations.

The cynicism of PeterCook and the generation that he and others deeply influenced here in the 60s doesn't make this easy to say but ... I have always really appreciated Americans, from the first few I met that my father brought home to the many that I've had the pleasure of meeting in work and play. They've almost always been a refreshing change from the negativity that sometimes seems to plague us. Sorry for letting the side down friends...

It's probably because I'm half Kiwi anyway. Have mercy, Astray Leona'a.

-- RichardDrake