Plain English

JD Vance just let the cat out of the bag - to the Americans the 'special relationship' with the UK is not only not special, it's laughable.

Many of us have long suspected this to be the case but it's helpful to have it finally confirmed for the avoidance of any doubt by someone at the heart of the US administration. Vance obviously believes his role as Vice President is to act as an agent provocateur, sowing alarm and discord amongst former allies the better to wrong foot them. He demonstrated this in his castigation of the assembled delegates at the recent Munich Security Conference and again in the Oval Office last Friday at the car crash of a meeting with Volodymyr Zelensky. 

Now, he's upset the US' two major European allies, Britain and France, by suggesting that they haven't had relevant battle experience in the last thirty or forty years to enable them to support Ukraine against Putin's aggression. When it was pointed out to him by aggrieved politicians on both sides of the English Channel that they had, in fact, stood firm with the US in Iraq and Afghanistan after 9/11, at great cost in terms of lives and materiel, he pulled back, saying he had never named the countries he was alluding to. This was highly disingenuous, of course, and fooled no-one - who else could he possibly have meant? But we are living in the post-truth era - as witness Trump's social media platform, Truth Social, apparently so-called without a trace of irony - so this is to be expected.

However, in blurting out an uncomfortable truth about the real nature of the Transatlantic alliance Vance may finally, if inadvertently, have cut the Gordian knot that has tied the UK to the US for too long. Meanwhile NATO, as we've known it since its founding in 1949 (in Washington DC by the way) is rapidly unravelling and how it might reinvent itself, with or without the US, has suddenly become a hot topic, with an irritated Canada joining European leaders in standing up to Trump's bullying. Doing so will be costly but it's long overdue.

In my opinion sustaining the fiction of a special relationship with the US has been especially disadvantageous to the UK for decades and should have been ditched as long ago as the Suez Crisis in 1956, when the US shafted Anthony Eden and the UK in order to claim its global superpower status. Unfortunately, Thatcher and Reagan's love-in, and later the Bush-Blair bromance, kept the comatose pact on life-support. The UK's pathological Euroscepticism did the rest. 

Had we thrown in our lot wholeheartedly with the European project we would almost certainly have had a European army, and possibly a European state, by now. How differently things might have played out had we done so. Instead, the US played us like a fiddle with their cunning divide-and-rule strategy. Successive UK Prime Ministers have been suckered into believing in the specialness of our supposedly unique ties. But let's be frank, we were mortal enemies from the Revolution of 1776 who managed to patch up a pragmatic alliance post-Independence, but with little love lost on either side. Hell, the Brits even burned down the White House in 1812! Ah, those were the days...

Collectively, European nations have military personnel numbering around 2.6 million, twice the size of US combined services. What they currently lack is the integration to work together collaboratively as a united force but that could change rapidly as Trump and Putin continue on their chosen trajectories. NATO forces have just concluded joint manoeuvres, 'Steadfast Dart 2025', in Romania, Bulgaria and Greece, with 'Joint Viking' Norwegian winter exercises, including allied soldiers, running until 14 March. Europe is discovering its common ground in response to hostile external actions and rhetoric.

The common bond between the US and UK is supposedly the English language but even that, as Oscar Wilde pithily observed, divides us. It no longer represents a shared heritage, having evolved very differently on opposite sides of the Atlantic since the seventeenth century, but rather has become the cause of much misunderstanding. In 2025, it is barely mutually comprehensible and our idiosyncratic usages are as liable to sow confusion as foster unity. 

Culturally, we have much more in common these days with Europe than with the US and the fact that the EU, despite the UK's departure, still uses English as an official language in its deliberations leaves the door open for us. The US is rapidly becoming unrecognisable and uncongenial. As Californian rapper, Kendrick Lamar Duckworth, put it in his infamous 'diss' track last year (albeit in a very different context) "they not like us".

They really aren't, you know.

Popular posts from this blog

A knight's tale - creative non-fiction

England - 1088 'What's a king without a kingdom?' 'A man, sire. And a man fights for what's his.' The king had been thinking aloud and the thirteen year-old lad's unexpected reply to his rhetorical question caught him off-guard. It was a bold response but, rather than being angered, he felt chastened by it. It was profound coming from one so young and junior in his service though prompted, he knew, by genuine love and loyalty rather than impertinence.  At a moment of grave peril so early in his new reign he valued candour, a commodity in short supply at court. He had followed his father, the Conqueror, as King William II less than a year earlier and now faced widespread rebellion. At such a time he could ill afford self-pity, much less self-doubt. He blamed himself for allowing a brief moment of self-indulgence in front of his page.  Since receiving the devastating news at Eastertide of his brother Robert's challenge the lad had been his closest companio...
Read more

Looking to Africa - long read

As I sit here on an island just off the coast of North-West Africa I can't help pondering the future of that vast and seemingly unknowable continent, so near and yet so far. I'm writing this in Tenerife, one of the eight Canary Islands forming an archipelago off the coast of Morocco and Western Sahara - tantilisingly close and yet a world away from the 'mainland' of continental Africa. As an Autonomous Community of Spain, the Canaries form an outpost of the European Union (EU). Yet, despite their proximity to Africa, their outlook, politically, culturally and economically, is resolutely European. Africa may as well be Mars, though only a narrow gulf of the Atlantic Ocean separates these offshore islands from their continent. I say resolutely European but that resolve may, little by little, be weakening. There is a growing sentiment, especially, though not exclusively, amongst young Canarians, that they have been sold a pup. True, the economy is superficially buoyant, du...
Read more

On old age

"The fact is that when I come to think it over, I find that there are four reasons for old age being thought unhappy: First, that it withdraws us from active employments; second, that it enfeebles the body; third, that it deprives us of nearly all physical pleasures; fourth, that it is the next step to death."  Writing his essay,  De Senectute (On Old Age), in 44 BCE, Marcus Tullius Cicero went on to refute these four supposed reasons in characteristically robust and forthright manner. Cicero wasn't one to sit about moping in his own old age; he remained actively engaged in the political life of the Republic whose survival, in the face of tyranny, he championed so fiercely.  Cicero was nine years younger than I am now when he met his untimely end yet he considered himself already an old man; or, rather, his society judged him to be so. His second point about age enfeebling is more germane. Physical decline had not yet impacted him but, six years on from my retirement, I ...
Read more