How Power Works: The strange 'special' and not-so-special relationship

Each week I look at one major international event and try to explain the structures of power behind it — the actors, ideologies and assumptions shaping events.

The UK has refused to join Trump’s reckless war on Iran, though it is allowing US military aircraft to fly from bases in the UK. Trump is furious.

A UK/US divide like this is rare. This one may have significant long-term consequences. But why is the UK so dependent on the US and what will the results be of a serious split from the US?

The ‘special relationship’ is a tired cliché. But in some significant regards, particularly in security, the relationship is uniquely close. The nature of the relationship also explains the extraordinarily difficult position the UK finds itself in with Trump.

The collapse of the relationship, while very difficult to navigate today, offers opportunity as much as risk.

The Event

Trump’s anger with the UK for not providing sufficient support for America’s attack on Iran is for all to see. The insults, in particular to the Prime Minister, are coming thick and fast. News reports however quote unnamed officials who claim that the ‘special relationship’ continues more or less unaffected. Some use the metaphor of an iceberg - that what you can see is only a small part of the whole relationship. But the longer Trump’s fury continues, the more it will impact upon the relationship, in all sorts of material ways. Officials ultimately take their cue from, and are instructed by, their political masters. Despite the closeness of the relationship, at least until now, Trump has not excluded the UK from his universal 10% tariff on all imports (and it must pay 25% on steel). Slowly but surely, other more subterranean elements of the relationship will be eroded, some at potentially great cost to the UK (and the US).

Inside the System

Only when you are inside government, particularly the parts of it concerned with ‘national security’ (the Foreign Office, the Ministry of Defence, the intelligence agencies etc), does it become clear quite how extraordinarily close the relationship with the US is.

The media might refer to a close ‘intelligence’ relationship. In practice, this means that the US and UK share a great deal of top secret information, mostly so-called ‘sigint’ - the interceptions and decryptions of the communications of adversaries (and sometimes allies too). This is a remarkable quantity of high-value information. Inside the UK government, only those who have received extensive (and highly intrusive) security vetting are permitted to see this information. Sharing it requires a high degree of trust because any leak revealing that the US or UK is able to access or decrypt certain types of communication (say Putin’s mobile phone) will mean that the access is lost, sometimes forever. The US obtains its ‘sigint’ information through a variety of methods, mostly centred on the National Security Agency (NSA); for the UK, it’s the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), but also military and domestic sources like the FBI, MI5, police. The two countries also share information gathered from ‘humint’ - i.e. human sources aka spies - which tends to be the realm of MI6 and the CIA, but also the ‘domestic’ intelligence agencies, MI5 and the FBI, as well as police and the Department of Homeland Security etc..

The US contribution to the volume of information is far greater than the UK’s. The exact ratio is not public but has been estimated at around 9:1 i.e. the US provides ninety percent of the data, the UK, ten percent. So it’s a huge difference, explained largely by the discrepancy in resources that the US and UK respectively spend on their intelligence apparatus.

This intelligence is extraordinarily important. It provides potential forewarning of attack by enemies, details of their military capabilities, information about their political dealings and much, much more, often in more or less real time. The Wikileaks cables included the ‘intelligence requirements’ telegrams that individual US embassies sent back to Washington with details of what information they needed about the country or organisation they were located in or at. What struck me then was the extraordinary amount and breadth of information the US sought out and no doubt still does. We might tend to think of ‘intelligence’ as the movement of ships, deployment of troops or missiles, but it also includes negotiation briefs for trade talks, details of competing bids for commercial deals (particularly those of defence companies), the political views of individual officials, say at the UN or even in a friendly government (famously, the US monitored Angela Merkel’s cellphone when she was Germany’s chancellor; I’m sure the US also monitors the Prime Minister’s team - but they don’t share that information!). Almost everything is vacuumed up and then consolidated and analysed. Thanks to the likes of Palantir and Anthropic, those daunting tasks are now performed by AI, allowing the US/UK to boil down and understand vast quantities of data.

This sharing of intelligence has another unannounced effect. It produces extraordinary trust and closeness between British and American officials, soldiers and diplomats. When I served at the UN for the UK, I treated my American opposite numbers almost as my own colleagues in the British mission. Every morning, I could assume that ‘David’ (let’s call him), the American at the US mission who covered Iraq, had seen the same intelligence information that I had, such as data about the French position at the Security Council when it convened to discuss our topic later that day. Knowing this, we could coordinate our positions over the ‘phone without needing to reveal whence we had obtained the information. The intelligence gave us considerable diplomatic advantage, but it also brought us close together.

There was also an interesting side effect which was that when I met Iraqi diplomats (I worked in only one of two British missions authorised to speak to Iraqis, with whom we then had no formal diplomatic relations), I knew that every word that the Iraqi mission reported to Baghdad about the meeting would be read by the Americans. So I was very, very careful to stick closely to the official line. If I strayed from it, I knew that within hours the State Department would have complained - loudly - to the British embassy in Washington who would then call me to remonstrate. My card would then be marked.

There was then and remains now an expectation, not unjustified, that the UK will go along with more or less anything the US chooses. ‘What is the US doing?’ is a default British instinct in all matters of foreign and defence policy. The US is the pole around which the UK rotates. It is not so much a ‘poodle’ relationship, much as I am fond of the term. Some British officials self-regardingly like to see the UK as a wily ‘Athens’ that whispers in the ear of the brutish and by implication stupider American ‘Rome’. But in fact the relationship is more child-like, that the child may roam but it is always aware of its parent’s location and wishes. It is a psychological habit as much as a practical dependence.

What People are getting wrong

For the defence and security establishment, the UK’s nuclear deterrent is the ‘crown jewels’ of Britain’s security. They call it ‘independent’. It only lives up to this claim in that, in theory at least, the UK could launch its nuclear missiles of its own volition. That is the limit of its independence, and it’s not negligible. But in all other ways that matter, it is not. The Trident D5 missile, which comprises the UK’s sea-based deterrent, is manufactured and maintained by the US. British Trident missiles are regularly shipped to the US where they join a common US-British ‘pool’ of missiles from which both countries draw. In a telling sign of dependence, a US naval officer supervises all British tests of the missile: they command the submarine - and British officers and sailors, including the captain - launching the missile. The UK plans to continue to use Trident for decades to come.

This dependence dates back to the 1950s when the UK agreed a cooperation pact with the US that established this extraordinarily close cooperation over the core nuclear deterrent, a relationship that is unparalleled and thus perhaps qualifying for the term ‘special’. This is not the limit of their nuclear cooperation. As I noted in a recent post, the UK, little noticed, recently announced that it would purchase an additional 12 F-35 attack aircraft to carry so-called ‘tactical’ nuclear bombs, the B-61 which is also American-made and, in this case, will be stored and controlled by the US. This capability will not in any way be ‘independent’. (It is also a significant addition to nuclear forces stationed in the UK.) In name, the weapons will join NATO’s own nuclear forces. But in practice, the US decides whether these bombs will be used, and the UK must also agree to launch the bombers. In this way, this capability is even less independent than Trident and, by the tactical nature of the bombs, is more likely to be used than strategic weapons, thus giving the US more decision-making power on the nuclear escalation ladder, where tactical use may incrementally lead to strategic use (a sequencing that is intrinsic to NATO nuclear doctrine).

In conventional arms too, the UK is highly dependent on the US. The aircraft that will comprise the large bulk of the RAF’s attack capabilities for decades to come is the American F-35, of which the UK, like most NATO countries with the exception of France, is buying hundreds. This systems of this highly sophisticated aircraft use many millions of lines of computer code which is regularly updated by the US manufacturer, much in the way you might update the software on your PC or Mac. It is rumoured that this reliance gives the US the opportunity to install a ‘kill code’ into the F-35s if it wishes to disable them. Obviously, this has been strenuously denied, but it does not on the face of it seem totally implausible given the reality that this aircraft is completely run by computer, from moving its control surfaces (ailerons, tailfins etc) to controlling what the pilot can see (the million-dollar pilot’s helmet is equipped with a screen that gives the pilot 360-degree vision, including beneath the aircraft).

This dependence on US intelligence and weapons, including Britain’s nuclear deterrent, is understood across the British government and defence establishment (it may not be so well understood by the public). There has been no significant policy effort to reduce that dependence. It would take many decades and huge expense to replace the American capabilities upon which the UK relies. In the case of the nuclear deterrent and intelligence capability, it’s arguable whether the UK would ever be capable of replacing them, given the massive costs involved. As a result, the UK is very highly incentivised to echo American foreign policy decisions, in almost every realm but is also extraordinarily vulnerable to the whims of the White House.

What to watch

The Iran conflict may pass and, with its end, Trump’s hostility to Europe may also be forgotten (he seems to have a goldfish memory, though not, perhaps, when it comes to revenge). It may instead endure, and his antagonism only intensifies and is increasingly reciprocated as the costs to the rest of the world mount. The situation is more or less entirely unpredictable. As of today, continuation of the war seems the safest bet.

As for the relationship with the UK, I think something has been broken, forever. Alignment with the US was a deep-seated and almost unconscious assumption of Britain’s security and foreign policy for many decades. No more. Trump may go but the Brits, like the rest of NATO, will be aware that his like may return: Vance’s toxic behaviour, from his repulsive treatment of Zelensky to his antagonistic speech in Munich, reinforces this anxiety. It must be understood that Trump represents a deep shift in American politics and culture. He may have helped exacerbate the trend, but he is above all a manifestation of it rather than the sole cause of it. This shift was evident before Trump showed up. There will be no return to the status quo ante.

The deeper forces

The UK’s subservience to US policy is particularly obvious in the Middle East, where the UK helped Israel during its genocide in Gaza both with weapons supplies (in fact of F-35 parts, some of which the UK manufactures) and military intelligence (an RAF aircraft orbited over Gaza until the very end of Israel’s assault). Its acquiescence, in all the practical terms that actually matter, in Israel’s programme of settler occupation in the West Bank and Jerusalem also closely tallies that of the US (though US policy has now transformed to active support of Israel’s territorial expansion, in Lebanon and Syria now as well as Palestine). Likewise, its purely rhetorical and hypocritical references to international law.

The Iraq War of 2003 is perhaps the most salient example from recent history, where the UK collaborated with the US in a ‘war of choice’ to which there were plausible alternatives and which was justified by lies. The times when American policy has been swayed by the UK or the Europeans are few - Kosovo in 1999 and Libya in 2011 - and in both cases the ‘western’ intervention was ultimately decided, led and dominated by the US.

This is why today’s breach over the attack on Iran is so unusual. It carries consequences both good and bad.

One immediate and bad consequence is that any chance of influencing the maniac in the White House has presumably now evaporated. This cannot be good either in Iran or Ukraine or perhaps even Greenland. In Iran, I think there is now a not-negligible risk that Trump may use nuclear weapons in his boiling frustration to get Iran to capitulate, thus to grant him ‘victory’. He has talked loosely about using nuclear weapons in the past. His latest social media posts suggest a worrying lack of mental balance. Whatever we think about Starmer or the cringingly unctuous Rutte, we need all the restraint upon Trump that can be mustered. If Trump does use a nuclear weapon, it will then be much likelier that Putin will use one in Ukraine (or, for that matter, China on Taiwan). The taboo on the use of nuclear weapons will have been broken forever. The consequences are horrifying.

Putin will be emboldened in other areas too. Given the degraded state of Russia’s army, it seems unlikely that he will attack other neighbouring states, such as the Baltics, at least for now. But he will see the opportunity in Trump’s rejection of his erstwhile allies in Europe and his wavering commitment to NATO’s guarantee of mutual defence. He may wish to grab that opportunity before Trump departs the White House. That said, even without the US, the Europeans can muster many hundreds of thousands of troops, even before the defence build-up in which they are now belatedly engaged, prompted by Trump. Even Putin may not wish Europe-wide war. But thanks to Trump, this risk is already present and intensifying.

Longer term, it is far better for the UK, as for the rest of Europe, to be unshackled from its dependence upon the US. In return, it will enjoy, at last, independence in its foreign policy. This does not mean it cannot be aligned with the US: there may be many areas where it may choose to be. But at least it will be a choice, not an unavoidable obligation. It may (may) for instance free the Europeans to do what needs to be done on Israel/Palestine, where the only policy solution to Israel’s unrestrained violence and expansionism is sanctions.

More broadly, it would be great if the UK could move beyond the simplistic binary choice of the US or ‘Europe’ that is now yet again being debated as the relationship with the US collapses. Of course, it makes much sense for the UK to rejoin the EU and strengthen its defence relationships with the continent. But it is surely now time for some calculated imagination in designing a future British foreign policy. How precisely should democracy and human rights be advanced - the ultimate guarantors of our and others’ security and global peace? How do we get past the invidious choices between supporting repressive regimes, like Egypt or Saudi Arabia, and regional stability in the Middle East, or elsewhere? How do we stop nuclear weapons proliferation, the threat of AI etc etc? It’s a long list of issues, notable for how little of it is today being addressed or even debated as we deal with the day-by-day nightmare of Trump.

More deeply still, what does it even mean to be a ‘nation state’ in a world shaped by unprecedented mass migration, porous borders, racial heterogeneity at home and cultural homogeneity in the world, while we all face global, shared problems, above all climate warming? In every policy realm (and indeed in geographic terms too), the division of the world into arbitrarily-created units called states and the inscription of lines on a map called borders seem to exacerbate not resolve problems, not least by creating a mental framework of competition and amoral national self-interest, when such a framing serves the autocratic and nationalist, and when every one of our problems is, in reality, indivisibly shared and can only be addressed by international cooperation of which we need much, much more.

With the weakening of the transatlantic alliance, American influence and power will also surely decline, just as the relationship with the UK may never fully recover. In this way, Trump has accelerated the relative diminution of American power that was already underway thanks to the rise of China and others. It’s genuinely hard to say what that may mean long term. The kind of shameless and lawless aggression in the Middle East of the attack on Iran and the Iraq War, which in turn feeds the demon of terrorism thus creating a self-perpetuating cycle, will, one hopes, diminish along with America’s ability to recruit allies to such destructive causes. It is not only in British minds that US support for Israel’s genocide, more under a Democrat president than Republican, as well as this needless war, will severely undermine the reputation and thus sway of the US. The ‘Ugly American’ of the Vietnam era, and his brazen but self-righteous imperialism, is paraded today with utter shamelessness, but he was always there. Before Hegseth there was Blinken, and before him, Rumsfeld. Ask the Palestinians what difference they see between them.

For now, the UK, like many countries with perhaps the exception of China, is living through a nightmare, which is of course so much worse if you are Iranian, Lebanese or Palestinian or Ukrainian, for that matter. A bomb has detonated in the middle of Britain’s foreign policy calculations, in almost every sphere, as it has in everyone’s. But it would be wise to think about the world Trump is now making in the longer term, a world without the psychic domination of America’s reputation as the world’s ‘policeman’ or Europe’s ‘indispensable ally’. No one, ultimately, is indispensable. And that absence, for some still unthinkable, is rapidly becoming reality and, with it, comes possibility.

That is, if we get to the longer term.

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