Before the end of the 19th century, the great German chancellor Otto von Bismarck sagely predicted that the most influential geopolitical reality of the 20th century would be that the British and Americans shared a common language. Bismarck understood that language — and he might have added culture, history, and faith — is a strong attachment that draws nations and peoples together against common enemies, and the wise German statesman recognized that an alliance between the British Empire and rising American union would be a formidable one in the next century. It is why Slavic peoples find common cause against Germanic populations, Islam and Christians are at war across Africa, Hindus and Muslins engage in endemic warfare and nuclear confrontation on the Indian subcontinent, and Arabs can sometimes put their differences aside to unite against Turks and Persians. Human beings are at their root a tribal species, and the tribe of English-speaking peoples dominated much of the Earth for most of the last century. Theirs was a special relationship.
In was 1917, barely a century ago, that Anglo-American alliance was born amid the carnage of World War I. From the first months of the war in 1914, it was apparent that the overwhelming majority of American public opinion was on the Allied side. Britain and France were able to borrow enormous amounts of money from U.S. banks to purchase munitions and food for their bleeding armies and increasingly war-weary home fronts. The news, opinions, and views of the war that Americans heard came largely from British sources. Germany and the other Central Powers could not hope to compete in the battle for men’s minds and control of the world’s sea-lanes, which meant a de facto global economic embargo by both neutrals as well as Allied powers against German-controlled Europe. Strangled by a British naval blockade and British licensing agents in neutral countries, Germany responded in the only ways that it could: commerce raiding by submarines, secret diplomatic overtures to Mexico and Japan, and industrial sabotage inside the still neutral United States. In the end those measures drew America closer to Britain and resulted in a Congressional declaration of war against Germany on 6 April 1917.
In 1914 President Woodrow Wilson had urged Americans to be neutral in thought as well as deed. It was a directive that few Americans heeded, including Wilson himself, as tales of German atrocities, some of them true, outraged public opinion, especially on the East and West Coasts. Only a month after the signing of the Armistice in November 1918, Wilson was in London being greeted enthusiastically by the British people and feted by King George V and Prime Minister David Lloyd George, who would shortly win reelection as the Liberal Party candidate by promising to hang the Kaiser and make the Huns pay the full cost of the war. It was not quite the kind of peace that Wilson intended, but the idealistic, often self-righteous, and stubborn former college president was willing to compromise some of his principles to get a League of Nations accepted by the other victorious great powers. To allay British and French security concerns, as the price for a softer peace settlement, Wilson even agreed to a U.S. mutual assistance defense treaty with Britain and France. Such a treaty, if the U.S. Senate had confirmed it, might have prevented World War II.
When the Senate Republican majority, led by Massachusetts Brahmin Henry Cabot Lodge, rejected the Treaty of Versailles and U.S. membership in the League of Nations in March 1920, the Anglo-Franco-American mutual assistance treaty lost along with it as America tried to return to its prewar isolationism. There was no special relationship with Great Britain, and bilateral relations returned for a time to what they had been in the 19th century, when they were more adversarial than cordial. From the Treaty of Ghent, which ended the War of 1812, to the end of the century, the United States and Britain came perilously close to war on six occasions, the last in 1895 over the boundary between Venezuela and British Guyana. Britain’s alliance with Japan, forged in 1902, was of particular concern to U.S. strategists during the early postwar years. U.S. War Department planners prepared for a worst-case scenario, a two-ocean war against the British Empire that they designated “War Plan Red.” The final update of War Plan Red was written in 1930, which called for a multipronged invasion of Canada and a Jutland-style battleship engagement between the Atlantic Fleet and the Royal Navy. Britain and Canada made their own plans for such a potential Anglo-American war.
All that faded away as the 1920s came to an end and the rivalry of the Atlantic great powers was defused by the 1922 Washington Naval Disarmament Conference, which established parity in battleship tonnage between the British and American navies, and subsequent naval treaties in London dealing with cruisers and submarines. American attitudes toward Britain were changing as well, heavily influenced by Hollywood’s depiction of stalwart, usually noble British characters and a virtuous and civilizing British Empire. Such films as Clive of India (1935), Gunga Din (1939), The Four Feathers (1939), Another Dawn (1937), The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), Wee Willie Winkie (1937), Prisoner of Zenda (1937), Stanley and Livingstone (1939), and The Dawn Patrol (1939) portrayed Englishmen as noble soldiers, explorers, and imperialists doing their patriotic duty in making certain the sun never set on the Union Jack. A large expatriate community of English and Commonwealth actors in Hollywood included Errol Flynn, David Niven, Cary Grant, Leslie Howard, C. Aubrey Smith, Ralph Richardson, Ronald Colman, Victor McLaglen, and Charles Coburn, among many others who reinforced this image of the courageous, self-sacrificing, loyal servant of the king for whom you could always count on when the bullets were flying. It was the most effective propaganda in the world and better than any amount of money could buy . . . all for the price of a 10-cent movie ticket in Depression-era America.
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Young Winston Spencer Churchill graduates from Sandhurst Military Academy as a cavalry junior officer in 1895. Born in 1874 to an American mother, socialite Jennie Jerome of Brooklyn, New York, and influential British parliamentarian and statesman Randolph Churchill, young Winston was heavily influenced by his American mother as well as by his distant but much admired father. He felt an attachment to America all of his life and visited the country on numerous occasions as prime minister and as a private citizen. In 1932 he was almost killed there, run down by a New York cabbie and hospitalized with serious injuries. As a young soldier he participated in the last great cavalry charge of the British Army at the Battle of Omdurman in 1898 and lived to serve as prime minister during the atomic age and the Cold War. No single person was more instrumental in cementing the special relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States than Churchill.
What later came to be called “the special relationship” had its origin during the late 1930s in the private correspondence between U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, then living as a writer during his decade-long “years in the wilderness,” in which the two warned the world of the gathering storm clouds in Europe. This private correspondence between Roosevelt and backbencher member of the British Parliament, whom no one took seriously, established the special relationship on a personal level before the two men met for the first time, each man addressing the other in their letters as “former naval person.” Roosevelt had served as the Assistant Secretary of the Navy under Josephus Daniels during World War I and Churchill had served as First Lord of the Admiralty in the cabinet of Herbert Asquith. Both men assumed a proprietary interest in their respective naval services and traveled by warship whenever possible. Churchill, who never served in the Royal Navy, often shamelessly wore a naval uniform.
No need for any kind of special relationship would have arisen without the political rise to power of the failed artist and charismatic rabble-rouser Adolf Hitler in 1933. Hitler had as late as 1938 been praised by Churchill as the man who had saved Germany from national humiliation and restored her to world power. Churchill lamented that if Britain ever found herself in similar circumstances that it would find a man like Adolf Hitler to rescue her. In the end Hitler proved not to be a statesman in the mold of Bismarck, but a self-styled revolutionary immersed in an uncompromising racial ideology that was incompatible with Western tradition and values. His amoral ambition to bring all German ethnic minorities in Central Europe under the Reich led to a series of prewar diplomatic crises that eventually led to the outbreak of a second European war and culminated on 10 May 1940 with King George VI requesting that Churchill form a coalition war cabinet to succeed Neville Chamberlain, who had less than a year to live, as prime minister.
If the United States had a grand strategy in the summer and fall of 1940, it was to keep Britain in the war at all costs and prevent the total domination of the Eastern Hemisphere by totalitarian powers without entering the war as a full-fledged belligerent. Roosevelt, the consummate politician, understood all too well that he would win no third term as president that year if he did not pledge to the voters that American boys would never be called on to fight in any foreign wars. It was an outright lie, of course, but Roosevelt never had any hesitation about being fast and loose with the truth in an election year. He was determined to do everything short of war to help Churchill keep Britain in the war and prepare for the inevitable day when the United States would become an active belligerent. Public opinion, he hoped, would follow, but in the meantime duplicity would just be one more tool in his arsenal. Roosevelt won his third term, beating Republican Wendell Willkie in an Electoral College and popular vote landslide.
If the special relationship between the two Atlantic great powers has a birthday, it is 3 September 1940. On that day Britain and the United States signed the controversial “destroyer deal,” in which the Americans agreed to hand over 50 World War I–vintage destroyers to the Royal Navy, which was desperately short of convoy escorts, in exchange for U.S. naval and air bases in Newfoundland, Bermuda, the Bahamas, and the West Indies, extending the U.S. defense zone far out into mid-Atlantic. While only a historical footnote 75 years later, the destroyer deal was a watershed event with aftershocks that are still with us today. It effectively ended American isolationism that had guided U.S. foreign policy since the Harding administration and tied the fate of the Anglo-Saxon powers together for the war years and beyond.
The destroyer for bases deal may have saved Britain from starvation during her finest hour at the height of the Battle of Britain. It is hard to imagine in our age of abundance how meager and bland were the weekly rations for the average British citizen at that time and how close the U-boat threat was to denying the British Isles the essential imports of food and raw materials that were needed for basic survival. The transfer of those rust-hulled smokestack destroyers may have made the difference in the crucial battle for the Atlantic sea-lanes. Yet it was only the beginning of a partnership that neither nation expected or intended to be permanent. On 11 March 1941 the U.S. Congress passed House Bill 1776, the Lend-Lease Act, which allowed the bankrupt British government to purchase unlimited quantities of war material, which in theory could simply be returned after the war, on credit that would not come due until the end of the war.
The British were, quite frankly, broke and at the end of their tether, drained of their last gold reserves and foreign credit. By all rights they should have made peace with Germany after the Battle of Britain in order to save the empire and their future as one of the great powers. To their credit or folly, they did not do so and have paid the price ever since. Lend-Lease made Britain dependent on American financial largesse. When you are a dependent country, your freedom of action is seriously curtailed and your conduct has to conform to that of your benefactor. Thus it would be with Great Britain, although it did not seem quite so clear at the time. In fact the relationship appeared to be a marriage of equals.
On 9 and 10 August 1941 the British prime minister and the American president met for the first time at Placentia Bay in Newfoundland on the deck of the U.S. Navy cruiser Augusta. Churchill had been carried across the Atlantic by the pride of the Royal Navy, the newly commissioned battleship Prince of Wales, which only four months later would be sent to the bottom of the South China Sea by swarms of Japanese bombers flying from bases in Vietnam, a staggering blow to the prestige and influence of the British Empire in the Far East. The two leaders of what would come to be called the Free World held joint church services with their military and naval entourages, sang the hymn Onward Christian Soldiers together, cemented what Churchill thought was a warm personal friendship (although it is debatable whether Roosevelt reciprocated those feelings), and forged a document called the Atlantic Charter, which, in effect, was a broad blueprint for Roosevelt’s vision of a postwar world, embracing the policies of national self-determination, free trade, advancement of social welfare, and global disarmament that would be the death knell of empires, the beginning of the decline of the West, and the onset of a world gone mad. It is unclear whether Churchill took any of this claptrap seriously, but Roosevelt and most of the people around him certainly did so.
That December the United States was an active participant in the war, thanks to the folly of the Japanese and the impulsive miscalculation of Adolf Hitler, and Churchill was a guest in the White House, where he allegedly encountered the ghost of Lincoln while naked after climbing out of a bathtub. Churchill attests that he was quite unperturbed by the supernatural event and that his brief encounter with the Great Emancipator was a cordial one. The two Western world leaders agreed at the Washington Conference that Christmas that the war against Hitler would have priority over the defeat of Japan and that the greatest share of Allied resources would go to Britain and Russia, which were bearing the brunt of European Axis pressure in North Africa and on the Moscow front. It was understood that it would be some time before significant numbers of Americans could be trained for combat and sent to Europe. Until then Britain was still, as a practical matter, on its own.
The British had been at war for more than three years and assumed the role of senior partner in the alliance during the first few years after Pearl Harbor. They possessed the most ships and aircraft, had learned the hard lessons in how German blitzkrieg tactics could be overcome, and by far had the greater number of trained and battle-hardened men under arms. The Americans were amateurs at all levels, and their British counterparts let them know it. When General George C. Marshall, the U.S. Army Chief of Staff, asked for a landing in France in 1942, the British Combined Chiefs in Washington let him know that it would end in catastrophe and politely, if with condescension, turned him down. When the British wanted the first Anglo-American seaborne invasion to be in French North Africa, not in France proper, they got their way. When Stalin and Roosevelt demanded a second front in 1943, Churchill pushed instead for invasions of Sicily and the Italian mainland and got his way. Churchill clearly preferred an Allied landing in the Balkans rather in France to face the Germans where they were strongest, but in this he did not get his way.
By the end of 1943 the weight of Western Allied power had shifted from the British to the Americans. The vast tank factory complexes in Detroit and giant aircraft factories on the West Coast were producing more of the tools of war than almost the entire rest of the world combined. England played host to three million GIs and enough vehicles of every type imaginable to cover the rural landscape of southeast England. It was commonly said that the barrage balloons were all that was keeping the island from sinking into the sea. Churchill was no longer in a position to dictate grand strategy. The rich Americans with their abundance of fresh manpower were keen to land in France, while the British, who had lost seven times as many men in World War I, were haunted by memories of the Somme and Ypres, where they had lost an entire generation of their youth. They could not afford to lose another generation. Britain was at the end of its rope, scraping the bottom of the barrel for manpower with virtually every person in the country between 16 and 60 either in uniform or engaged in war work of some kind or other. Churchill reluctantly abandoned his dream of a Balkan front and accepted the idea of a Normandy invasion in the spring of 1944, but he was never happy with the idea.
The D-Day invasion of 6 June 1944, which most Americans mythologize today as a largely American undertaking, was in reality more of a British operation than an American one. Two-thirds of the 150,000 men who landed or were dropped into Normandy that day were British or Canadian, and two-thirds of the ships and aircraft were British. Normandy was the last great triumph of British arms. All that came after reflected the growing American strength and numbers. By the end of 1944, there were five U.S. armies in Western Europe and Italy and only two British, one Canadian and one French. The Americans fielded more men and aircraft than all the other Western allies combined and supplied almost everyone else with everything from artillery shells and vehicles to uniforms and chocolate bars. Field Marshal Montgomery, commanding the 21st Army Group on the left flank of the Western Allied advance, found himself denied by Eisenhower the free rein to race for Berlin and instead was assigned to drive for the Baltic ports to cut the Russians off from occupying Denmark. His armored and mechanized divisions were increasingly equipped with Detroit-built Sherman tanks and the ubiquitous American jeeps and deuce-and-a-half trucks.
In May 1945 Britain was the least of the Big Three powers, with only a fraction of the industrial and military power of the United States and the Soviet Union. It was a tired nation, possessing the world’s greatest empire that it could no longer afford and acting like a great power when it clearly no longer had the wealth to be one. Roosevelt had come to see the postwar world as a co-dominion in which Russia and the United States, perhaps with China, would maintain the peace. The dying American president had always loathed the British Empire as an affront to his Wilsonian ideas for national self-determination, and he let Churchill know it during their conferences at Teheran and Yalta, demanding freedom for India and Britain’s African and Asian colonies. There is no record of Roosevelt ever being the least critical of Stalin’s brutal subjugation and cruel tyranny over millions of non-Russians in the Soviet empire. Churchill was shunted aside at these later wartime conferences as Roosevelt gave in to most of Stalin’s demands on such things as Berlin being inside the Soviet Zone of Occupation, the Americans stopping at the Elbe and Czech frontier, the annexation of eastern Poland, allowing the Russians to liberate Prague and Vienna as well as Berlin, and all the Balkans north of Greece being a Soviet sphere of influence. Roosevelt died on 12 April 1945 before be could make any further concessions.
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Prime Minister Winston Churchill with King George VI, Queen Mary, and the princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret, on the balcony of Buckingham Palace waving to tumultuous crowds as the German surrender is announced on 8 May 1945. It was the zenith of the British Empire with more human beings living under British administration than at any time in her history. The British Empire had been at war for six years and this was her greatest victory, a triumph of arms and perseverance. But this was a hollow victory, for in joining the United States and the Soviet Union in demanding the unconditional surrender of her enemies, Britain had drained her remaining wealth and suffered too much physical, material, and moral damage in a war that lasted too long. Within two decades the world’s largest empire that had spread British justice, values, and traditions around the world would be gone forever. Its disappearance has left much of the world in a state of chaos, corruption, and war.
Britain emerged from World War II victorious but with her finest hour behind her and grim days ahead. American Lend-Lease came to an end the day the war ended, and the debts came due. The British people had suffered and sacrificed for six long years, the only Allied great power to be in the war from the beginning to the end. Her people wore threadbare clothes and lined up for rationed food, a system that would not entirely end until 1951. Large numbers of Britons fled abroad to the United States or the Dominions in an attempt to find a better life, including the mother of this blog writer. The great British historian A.J.P. Taylor wrote in his brilliant 1961 book The Origins of the Second World War that “though the object of being a great power is to be able to fight a great war, the only way of remaining a great power is not to fight one, or to fight it on a limited scale.” Britain had fought two great wars in a 30-year period, and the cost of them in terms of blood and national treasure had knocked her from the ranks of the great powers. At least 750,000 in World War I and another 400,000 in World War II of her best and brightest young men had died in battle, the future leaders of the Empire who could never be replaced. Their absence from the life of the British nation is felt even today. Britain has never been the same place since the wars of the last century. Not just her wealth and the Empire were lost, but also her sense of greatness.
Winston Churchill had famously said that he had not become the king’s first minister to preside over the dissolution of the British Empire, but he would have little to say about it. The British people turned out the conservatives from office only a month before the surrender of Japan and elected a Labour government that promised national health care, the creation of a welfare state, and nationalization of private industry, particularly the coal mines, the steel industry, railroads, and oil and gas production. This ambitious socialist agenda that went into effect under Prime Minister Clement Atlee resulted in decades of economic stagnation and mismanagement. It would not be reversed until Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher instituted a policy of privatization beginning in 1979, but the irreparable damage had already been done. Britain’s aviation and automotive industries, once the most innovative in the world, lost their place in a world dominated by American, German, and Japanese private sector technological and scientific development. The British pound lost more than half of its value against the American dollar.
The high cost of a welfare state dictated deep cuts in national defense and the sharp diminution in British military power around the world. Once more the reality of dependence on the Americans for national survival was resentfully accepted. The Empire that had been won over four centuries by Drake, Hudson, Clive, Cook, Amherst, Wolfe, Raffles, Wellington, Wolseley, Gordon, Stanley, Kitchener, and so many others was lost in the blink of history’s eye. India was partitioned and granted independence with Pakistan in 1947, and the rest of Asia soon followed. The African colonies, which encompassed a third of the continent, were lost in the 1950s and early 1960s. It was all gone by 1965 except for Hong Kong, which was still leased from China for another 30 years; Gibraltar; and a scattering of lonely islands in the South Atlantic and the Pacific, the most notable being the Falklands group off the Patagonian coast of Argentina, inhabited by a few thousand very British sheep farmers. Welfare states may provide free university education, subsidized housing, and rationed health care for all, but they are incapable of holding on to empires or maintaining navies with global reach.
Churchill returned to power with the Conservatives in 1951, an old man without the energy or stamina to halt the decline, if such a thing was even possible. He had warned the world at Fulton, Missouri, in 1946 that “from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the Continent,” well before U.S. President Harry Truman was ready to acknowledge that the wartime alliance with Russia was over and that a Cold War for the very survival of the West and all it stood for had begun. No one had done more to forge the special relationship than Churchill, and no one was more committed to the trans-Atlantic partnership in the Cold War. That alliance with the United States during five decades of Cold War did give Britain a sense of purpose and a clearly defined role in the world. Churchill met with Eisenhower in 1952 in Washington, and it seemed like old times between the wartime leaders. Both countries were fighting in Korea to stop the Communist offensive in Asia, and both had been among the original 10 signatories of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which had been formed in April 1949 to contain the Soviet Union in Europe. The special relationship was reaffirmed for the postwar period.
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There is no greater manifestation of British military capability than her independent nuclear deterrent. Since 1998, when the last of Britain’s WE177 H-bombs and tactical nuclear weapons were dismantled, more than a decade after the Royal Air Force retired its last strategic bomber, the Vanguard-class ballistic missile submarine has been her sole means of nuclear retaliation. Each of the four Vanguard-class boats, the last of them launched in 1999, carries 16 Trident II D-5 ballistic missiles with a maximum of 48 and minimum of 40 warheads in the 100-kiloton range on each boat. One of these submarines is on patrol at all times while the other three are refitting or in homeport. Parliament has just voted overwhelmingly build the next generation of British Trident ballistic missile submarines to replace the aging Vanguards by 2030. In the 21st century nuclear weapons will still matter.
Britain became the third nation to join the nuclear club in October 1952, detonating a nuclear device in the Great Australian Desert. A nuclear deterrent made Britain somewhat less dependent on the American strategic umbrella and a more equal partner in the alliance with perhaps more freedom of action in the future. While facing manpower reductions and regimental amalgamations with each successive Ministry of Defense White Paper, the British Army remained a very busy institution throughout the postwar period. Engaged in counterinsurgency operations in Malaya, Kenya, Cyprus, Borneo, and Aden, the elite units of the British Army fought these small wars with a relatively small footprint, training indigenous forces to do most of the fighting and keeping casualties to a minimum. Most of the time they were successful, as contrasted with the American effort in Vietnam with its enormous footprint and heavy casualties that wore down the will of the country to win. It was a case of the British using skill and training to offset weakness and the Americans misusing their wealth and firepower like a rich man on a losing streak in a casino who does not know when to quit the roulette table.
The bulk of the maneuver forces of the British Army served with the British Army of the Rhine (BAOR), actually a single corps, defending the north German plain along with a Dutch, Belgian, and two West German corps, in the Northern Army Group (NORTHAG) of the NATO forces. If one bright morning the Warsaw Pact had rolled the dice and made a shock attack toward the Channel, the BAOR would have stubbornly held the NATO left flank until they were inevitably overwhelmed, probably within a week, and annihilated by the Soviet blitzkrieg. Still, it was a tripwire that was never crossed, and the BAOR was disbanded in 1994 when the threat seemed to be gone forever. Throughout the five decades of Cold War, Britain remained America’s most dependable and effective ally, supporting the United States almost all the time in international forums. Winning the Cold War was the high point of the special relationship and the pinnacle of its success, the great legacy of Winston Churchill.
Margaret Thatcher, the daughter of a grocer and the most successful prime minister of the postwar years, had restored some sense of national pride to the British people in the retaking of the Falkland Islands from an Argentine invasion force in June 1982. Her controversial and sometimes unpopular privatization reforms led to an economic resurgence for Britain after decades in a rut, although her economy and GDP growth were still not as robust as that of West Germany and the United States. Under Prime Minister John Major Britain signed the Maastricht Treaty in 1992 and joined the European Union (EU), opting out of the single currency that came into effect in 1999 and remaining with the pound sterling. British prosperity continued through the end of the century with few dissenters among either the Conservatives or the Labour Party skeptical of Britain’s marriage with Europe after five centuries of being outside Europe. The Bush 41 and Clinton administrations supported with enthusiasm Britain’s decision to become part of Europe in the immediate euphoric period in the decade after the end of the Cold War. Of what need was there of a special relationship between the trans-Atlantic powers when the world was at peace? It was all going to be a New World Order and a glorious future lay ahead for all.
The glorious future and the New World Order came to sudden and horrific end on 11 September 2001. After 9/11 Britain’s integration into the EU was sidelined and the special relationship was reasserted by both the Bush 43 administration and British Prime Minister Tony Blair in the misnamed War on Terror, the equivalent of declaring a war on aircraft carriers after Pearl Harbor. The reality still not fully accepted by either London or Washington is that it is a war against radical Islam, but neither power wants to risk offending Muslims at home and abroad. For the fifth and sixth times in a hundred years, British and American servicemen fought together as allies in major conflicts, with Britain losing 645 lives during 15 years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq and the Americans losing more than 7,000. Not that these conflicts and troubled occupations were ever popular on the British street where Tony Blair was disdained for being in lockstep with the Bush administration. In the end both leaders left office with historically low approval ratings. The special relationship that had linked the trans-Atlantic powers since 1941 was strained in war-weary Britain. Only the ever-present fear of terrorism remained.
Islamic terrorism, both lone wolf and overseas directed, has been the face of the enemy for the people in Western societies since 9/11. It has changed the way we live, the way we travel, and the way we conduct our business at home and abroad. For the first time in almost two centuries, the enemy is among us, not in some distant land fighting our uniformed combatants, and with minimal planning and a pittance of cost, that enemy commits random mass murder and has done so since 9/11 in London, Boston, Chattanooga, San Bernardino, Fort Hood, Paris, Brussels, and Nice. And what was inextricably linked with the threat of terrorism was the problem of mass immigration across porous borders and from countries that were immersed in radical Islamic theology.
The Brexit vote of 23 June 2016 was for the majority of British voters all about immigration. While Britons and Americans, whose jobs have been lost through globalization, would like to have their jobs back, more importantly they want their countries back, the countries they had before the tidal wave of Third World immigration that has continued without much letup since 1970. The vote split the British electorate almost down the middle, dividing the country by generation, religion, ethnicity, class, and region, and between rural and urban. The political leadership of both the Conservative and Labour parties urged the people to vote against Brexit, and even President Obama weighed in to warn Britons that they would be at the back of the queue in any future trade agreement if they voted to leave the EU, another indication of how the special relationship had deteriorated. It was a clash between British nationalists fearful of losing their traditions and culture and Eurocentric multiculturalists fearful of losing the urban prosperity that came with free trade and free movement of labor across EU open borders. The narrow victory at the polls of the pro-Brexit cause shocked British elites in politics, the media, and entertainment, and led to a sharp fall, at least temporarily, in the dollar value of the British pound. In the United States the same kind of people who voted for the Brexit in the United Kingdom are the supporters of Donald Trump.
What comes next for Britain? The new prime minister, Theresa May, and her foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, will be engaged for the next couple of years disengaging from the EU. Like most divorces, it will be contentious. They will have the more important and even more difficult task of unifying a bitterly divided country, much as the next American president will have in the United States. After Brexit it will be Britain alone on an independent course, perhaps with another independence bid by Scotland, where support for the EU remains strong. The Americans, racked by serious social disorder and a national debt approaching $20 trillion, are no longer allies on which Britain can completely rely for her security. The United Kingdom may well come full circle at the end of the second Elizabethan era, returning to what it had been at the beginning of the first Elizabethan era, just England and Wales and, for the foreseeable future, Northern Ireland.
Can the special relationship with the United States survive when the percentage of Americans of European descent sharply declines with falling birth rates and the percentage of Americans of Latin American, Asian, and African ethnic origin grows with each successive election cycle? Ties of blood, history, culture, and language are the things that made the special relationship in the first place, and without them England will mean no more to a 21st-century American than Denmark or the Netherlands, albeit with ballistic missile nuclear submarines and a bigger economy. It was symbolic that one of Barack Obama’s first acts as president was to return a bust of Winston Churchill from the Oval Office to the British Embassy, which had presented the Churchill bust as a gift to his predecessor. The message was plain: that the white imperialist Winston Churchill is not one of our heroes and has been supplanted by such racial identity and revolutionary heroes as Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Saul Alinsky, Malcolm X, and Chairman Mao, all revered by the Obamas, and the Obamas are not alone.
Free from the regulations and extraterritoriality of the EU bureaucracy in Brussels, Britain enters a new era of her long history, more than 1,600 years after the Roman legions pulled out to defend Rome itself from the barbarian migrations crossing the Alps into Italy. Their way of life, future prosperity, and national security are in the sovereign hands of the British people once again. The EU and the Americans may not always be there for them in the post-Brexit era. Sovereignty in a globalist world is not an easy path. Britain should heed the advice of the 19th-century prime minister Lord Palmerston, who famously wrote, “Nations have no permanent friends or allies; they have only permanent interests.” It will be up to British statesmen and voters to determine what those interests will be in the 21st century. The United States cannot, will not, and should not try to do it for them.
Ray Lyman worked for Paladin Press for more than 20 years, during which he authored Paladin’s popular line of military history calendars. Another function he so ably filled was chief historian and fact checker. In the days before Google, Ray was our go-to guy on any historical, political, military, or current events question. Through this column, Ray is simply resuming that role for Paladin.