Geoffrey Wheatcroft: What "Special Relationship"?
[Geoffrey Wheatcroft is the author of “The Controversy of Zion” and “Yo, Blair!”]
... This ["special"] relationship [between Great Britain and the United States] has always been a curious notion. Along with the even more dubious idea that Churchill popularized of a community of “English-speaking peoples,” it is sustained by make-believe and rewritten history. Americans don’t often use the phrase, but there was an almost comical exception when Senator John McCain visited England last year. “The special relationship between our two countries will endure throughout the 21st century,” he said. “I say that with total confidence because it’s lasted for 200 years.”
It has what? The senator’s “200 years” would take us back to the early years of the 19th century, or let’s say to 1812. What was special about the relationship that year was that the two countries were at war. Some of us take modest patriotic pride recalling the day that our brave lads burned the White House. And when he sings “The Star-Spangled Banner,” can Senator McCain have forgotten that it was a British rocket’s red glare?
For the next century the two countries were decidedly more often on bad terms than good. A large part of the British Army was stationed in Canada to protect it from its southern neighbor, and with good reason. Before the Civil War, Sir Robert Peel warned Parliament about the grave danger of an American war; during it, the secretary of state, William Seward, wanted to declare war on England and was supposedly restrained only by Lincoln himself (“One war at a time, Mr. Seward”); after it, there was a bitter dispute about a Confederate warship built in England.
In 1895 the two countries nearly went to war over a trivial border dispute in South America, and it was recorded at the time that in America a war with England would be the most popular of wars. And again in 1914: not only did Woodrow Wilson worry that he might need to intervene on the German side because of the British naval blockade but it was reckoned that more Americans would have wanted to fight against England than for it.
The two did quite briefly fight together in two world wars, but only Tony Blair, after telling a grieving New York six years ago that “My father’s generation went through the blitz; they know what it is like to suffer this deep tragedy and attack,” could have added: “There was one country and one people which stood by us at that time. That country was America, and those people were the American people.” He meant the blitz in the winter of 1940-41, when the United States was conspicuously neutral....
Read entire article at NYT
... This ["special"] relationship [between Great Britain and the United States] has always been a curious notion. Along with the even more dubious idea that Churchill popularized of a community of “English-speaking peoples,” it is sustained by make-believe and rewritten history. Americans don’t often use the phrase, but there was an almost comical exception when Senator John McCain visited England last year. “The special relationship between our two countries will endure throughout the 21st century,” he said. “I say that with total confidence because it’s lasted for 200 years.”
It has what? The senator’s “200 years” would take us back to the early years of the 19th century, or let’s say to 1812. What was special about the relationship that year was that the two countries were at war. Some of us take modest patriotic pride recalling the day that our brave lads burned the White House. And when he sings “The Star-Spangled Banner,” can Senator McCain have forgotten that it was a British rocket’s red glare?
For the next century the two countries were decidedly more often on bad terms than good. A large part of the British Army was stationed in Canada to protect it from its southern neighbor, and with good reason. Before the Civil War, Sir Robert Peel warned Parliament about the grave danger of an American war; during it, the secretary of state, William Seward, wanted to declare war on England and was supposedly restrained only by Lincoln himself (“One war at a time, Mr. Seward”); after it, there was a bitter dispute about a Confederate warship built in England.
In 1895 the two countries nearly went to war over a trivial border dispute in South America, and it was recorded at the time that in America a war with England would be the most popular of wars. And again in 1914: not only did Woodrow Wilson worry that he might need to intervene on the German side because of the British naval blockade but it was reckoned that more Americans would have wanted to fight against England than for it.
The two did quite briefly fight together in two world wars, but only Tony Blair, after telling a grieving New York six years ago that “My father’s generation went through the blitz; they know what it is like to suffer this deep tragedy and attack,” could have added: “There was one country and one people which stood by us at that time. That country was America, and those people were the American people.” He meant the blitz in the winter of 1940-41, when the United States was conspicuously neutral....