Recalibrating US-UK Relations
First published: January 24, 2025
Recalibrating US-UK Relations
Donald Trump’s inauguration this week throws into question once again the quality of relations between Britain and America. In reality, the so-called special relationship between the two nations has always been in motion. It has constantly been subject to recalibration and bouts of troublesome tensions, if not always visibly so since the treaty that ended the War of 1812; the last time they came to serious blows.
Frankly, although the US State Department declares that America has no closer ally than the United Kingdom, the relationship has often not been all that special. From the end of the Revolutionary War in 1783 to the present day, at a political and diplomatic level, the relationship has often been marked by moments of discord, misalignment, and even outright antagonism.
In the 19th century, consider the Oregon border dispute in the 1840s over which nation should control the American north-west; then Britain’s drawn-out dilemma over which side to support in the Civil War. The Suez Crisis in the 1950s marked the first serious rupture after WW2. Then there was the falling out over the Vietnam War when Harold Wilson persistently refused LBJ’s requests to send in British troops. Even the famed love-fest between Reagan and Thatcher was strained over US troops’ unannounced invasion of Grenada in 1983, a Caribbean island over which Britain had recently ceded dominion — though Queen Elizabeth II remained head of state.
More recently, British distaste for Trump’s brash populism and perceived unsuitability for high office was embarrassingly apparent in his first term when a derisive note back home from the then British ambassador to Washington was made public. Now Trump is back, no less of a demagogue, buoyed by experience and a trifecta at the polls that more or less handed him Congress, the Senate and the White House. Compare that with the cautiously centrist Keir Starmer in London, struggling day by day to build confidence in his government and not appear flat-footed, despite comparable electoral success, and to secure better trade terms around the world.
But, as I highlight in my new book, Brits Who Shaped America, the closeness of UK-US relations has more to do with its people than its governments or ambassadors; particularly some outstanding individuals who bridged the geographic and cultural divide in the nineteenth century to bring about lasting change.
One such person was the British businessman turned international statesman Richard Cobden. He is mostly remembered for his tireless campaign in the 1830s and ‘40s to overturn Britain’s Corn Laws, which imposed harsh tariffs on imported grain on the eve of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. While the tariffs favored English landowners and farmers by keeping domestic grain prices artificially high, they also put the price of bread out of reach for the growing numbers of urban poor.
That Cobden’s victory took as long as it did reflects in large part that international trade, free of both tariffs and government interference, was an entirely foreign concept to the most developed nations before the Corn Laws’ abolition in 1845.
Cobden’s advocacy, combined incidentally with a great admiration for the American experiment, was a game changer, and it heralded a period in the mid-nineteenth century of relatively tariff-free trade between Europe and the United States. It coincided with Great Britain’s zenith as an industrial and naval superpower when it had the power to call the terms and control the seas. British and continental businesses wanted to do business and invest in America, while America also needed exports and inward investment if it was to survive and thrive.
While the free trade era was short-lived, we can see in the arguments that enabled it the genesis of the international trade agreements that prevail today. Now, though, the US-UK power dynamic has clearly flipped and Keir Starmer’s government faces the delicate task, post-Brexit, of trying to negotiate better trade terms both with America and the European Union. It will be a minor miracle if he pulls it off.