You don’t hear much about US-British relations these days. American tourists may give England an afterthought as gateway to the slightly inefficient theme park called Europe. But, as Christopher Hitchens puts it, “The time when (the world) could have been governed as an Anglo-American condominium is long past – even when one remembers that this fantasy of Rhodes and Kipling was still being deliberated at Fulton in 1946.”
It’s been long suggested that the apposite “special relationship” has Britain playing Greece to America’s Rome – the robust US as tempered and annealed by the philosophic ministrations of the wizened ex-superpower.
This casting, however, is embraced by neither actor as America shrugs disenchantment at post-colonial Britain while Britain chooses fealty to German-dominated Europe over allegiance trans-Atlantic. Some hint that England is being Gallicized by the seductive influence of CHUNNEL-born wine and cheese.
I’m not sure what’s left that’s special about the relationship.
Perhaps there is British pride to be taken in the US-Canada-Australia entente; the rambunctious colonial children now grown up and bonding sufficiently to give paws to the old lion. And there still flutters the Union Jack, saluting its progeny past and present, remaining defiantly itself.
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