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The US-UK “special relationship” is usually dismissed as a figment of British imagination. The joke goes that the relationship is so “special” that only the British know it exists.
In fact, that’s wrong. Leaders in both countries do treat the relationship as special. However, Maga leaders conduct that relationship not with the actual UK but with an imagined version of a long-lost Britain. That means they are forever disappointed by the country’s present incarnation. Meanwhile, British leaders force themselves into contortions of America-pleasing.
After losing the empire, the UK eventually found a role as the US’s wingman. The policy (to paraphrase Dutch comedian Arjen Lubach) was “America First, Britain Second”. That instinct helped prompt some of the worst British political errors. In 2003, Tony Blair took the country into America’s war in Iraq. Then Brexit was driven partly by the fantasy on the British right that a fabulous American trade deal would make up for losing the European single market. (That fantasy ended in self-parody, with the UK signing a “trade deal” with the state of South Carolina.)
Keir Starmer was so desperate to keep the relationship special that he made the noted political operator Peter Mandelson ambassador to Washington despite Mandelson’s unbroken links with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Washington-pleasing is even more instinctive on the British right, which in every American war starts cosplaying D-Day. Reform’s Nigel Farage initially advocated joining Trump’s unplanned, illegal and self-harming war with Iran.
Maga’s version of the special relationship is more consequential. The anti-immigrant movement privileges the earliest, least-hyphenated American settlers, who are disproportionately British. In the US census of 2020, 46.6 million people claimed partly or entirely “English” origins, more than for any other white ethnicity.
Elon Musk loved his Liverpudlian grandmother, Donald Trump’s mother grew up a Gaelic-speaker on a Scottish island, and vice-president JD Vance identifies as “a Scots-Irish hillbilly at heart”. The shared language allows them to follow British events, or at least selected sources about British events. That makes them more emotionally invested in Britain than in, say, India or Japan.
Most diasporas cultivate nostalgic notions about the “old country”. One former British spy chief explains that Trump and Musk are attached to a bygone white UK. Today’s multicultural country dismays them. The ancestral homeland has become a terrible warning, redeemed only by royals and storied golf courses. Maga leaders mourn the imagined fall of London, where Trump says crime has gone “through the roof”, under a “terrible, terrible mayor”, Sadiq Khan, who is supposedly plotting sharia law. Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon believes “England is heading to a civil war”, an outcome that Musk calls “inevitable”, or that perhaps has already begun. The mogul, who elegises a lost Britain of “lovely small towns” populated by people “like Hobbits”, relentlessly attacks today’s imposter nation. By contrast, he has mostly left Germany alone since writing an article urging Germans to vote far right.
British loss of superpower status prompts further accusations of decline. No matter that it would be fairer to assess the UK as a modern country that’s given up suppressing others and become a fairly decent global citizen. After it refused to join a US war, Trump complained about “our once Great Ally, maybe the Greatest of them all”, which didn’t immediately let him use its base on Diego Garcia to attack Iran, and whose leader was “not Winston Churchill”. This seems disproportionate attention to pay to a country with a smaller army than Poland, a smaller navy than France and lower military spending than Germany.
As Maga supports European far-right parties, you would expect it to be focusing on France, where the far right is favourite to win the presidency next year. But French affairs are conducted in French, and French far-right leaders speak little English, limiting hobnobbing opportunities. Instead Maga leaders spend much more time with Farage — the first British politician to meet president-elect Trump in 2016, months before prime minister Theresa May — and cultivating the still more extreme Tommy Robinson. Maga thought-leaders Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones conducted respectful interviews with the former football hooligan, while Musk advised “the English” to “ally with the hard men, like Tommy Robinson . . . or they shall surely all die”.
Britain should wish for a less special relationship.
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