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8 April 2019

The Strange Death of a Special Relationship

ROBERT SINGH

The U.S.-UK special relationship is on life support—and Brexit may well pull the plug.

For American devotees of British comedy, from Monty Python to Ricky Gervais and Boris Johnson, the United Kingdom is a gift that keeps on giving. The long-running “Brexit” farce that began on “Independence Day”—the June 23, 2016 European Union referendum—is nowhere near closure. Whatever the eventual outcome of Phase I—the “withdrawal agreement”—we are not even at the beginning of the end of the omni-shambles.

But one outcome, alas, can be safely ventured: a “special relationship” between America and Britain will erode further. Although non-trivial forces of continuity remain, by accident and design Washington and London have passed an inflection point. U.S. strategic insolvency is well-advanced. The British version is effectively complete. As the Transatlantic alliance increasingly resembles a transactional association, some herald this more mature understanding. But its consequences for Britain’s rapidly collapsing role and influence as a great power, and the West as a cohesive geostrategic entity, are grave.


In his magnum opus on world order, Henry Kissinger approvingly quoted Nehru’s definition of statesmanship: “Whatever policy you may lay down, the art of conducting the foreign affairs of a country lies in finding out what is most advantageous to the country. We may talk about international goodwill and mean what we say. But in the ultimate analysis, a government functions for the good of the country it governs, and no government dare do anything which in the short or long run is manifestly to the disadvantage of that country.”1

Indeed. That, at least, is the theory. If a sound strategic principle is to do what your opponent least desires, the response to fraying U.S.-UK ties in Moscow and Beijing must be one of profound satisfaction. That alone should confirm the current moment as one of our least-finest hours. In a world of intensifying great power competition, the immediate task facing policymakers in Washington and London is damage limitation. The puzzle confronting future historians will be to explain how British and American statecraft allowed one of the most effective alliances in history to atrophy when the imperative for its revival was so urgent. What follows is an early accounting of what is being lost, and why.

London Calling

Atruth universally unacknowledged by diplomats, but insisted upon by International Relations 101, is that in an anarchic world there exists no such thing as friendship between sovereign nation-states. The United States and United Kingdom nonetheless forged an impressive facsimile after 1941, painstakingly forging trust, respect, and routinized structures of cooperation and consultation that brook few historical or contemporary comparisons. While no “golden age” existed (even FDR and Winston Churchill had fractious moments aplenty), the bilateral withstood inevitable tensions to emerge stronger and deeper.

Until now. With Britain channelling Groucho Marx by leaving a club whose members wish it to stay, the United States too will lose strategic depth. Brexit will damage the United Kingdom, the United States, and the European Union. As former U.S. ambassador to the EU, Stuart Eizenstat, noted:

The UK has been the United States’ prime supporter and kindred spirit on numerous US-EU issues. . . .With Brexit, the United States would lose a major supporter on a range of important trade and regulatory issues, where the UK’s more free-market approach mirrored ours more closely than most EU member states; on US sanctions regimes against Iran, Russia, and other countries; on data privacy and anti-trust matters; on counterterrorism, where the United States uniquely has an intimate intelligence-sharing relationship with the UK; and on national security issues, which bridge the EU and NATO, to which the UK also belongs.

Most Americans rarely think of Britain unless prompted by Hollywood villains or royal weddings. That the partnership’s decline has gone under the radar and not instigated five stages of grief is understandable. But complacency should not obscure how rare the peaceful transition of power from Britain to America was. Throughout the 20th century, Washington and London crafted a close, if imperfect, relationship that endured. The UK fought alongside the United States in Korea from 1950-53, Iraq in 1991 and 2003, Afghanistan after 2001, and against ISIS from 2014. Our close diplomatic coordination in the United Nations Security Council, NATO, the G20, and other bodies has had no equal. Intelligence sharing, nuclear cooperation, and defense liaison remain unparalleled. Commerce and culture cement our proximity. For seven decades, Washington and London have been a powerful force for mutual benefit and a more liberal global order—one that has proven an aberration in human history by ensuring the absence of great power war and the flourishing of peace and prosperity.

These invaluable bilateral ties have been neither exclusive nor symmetrical. U.S. power relies on an unprecedented array of allies while Britain has engaged Churchill’s “concentric circles” of the Atlantic, Europe, and Commonwealth. U.S. support was a strategic necessity for post-imperial Britain but a choice for America. The sharp power disparity left Westminster utilizing what limited leverage it possessed in Washington, where the British presence is institutionalized in the Pentagon, National Security Agency, and intelligence community. But that entrenched security dimension permitted successive UK governments to neglect the wider relationships essential to enduring influence in Washington. Not least, Britain still lacks a professional lobbying arm, supportive interest groups, or a reliable media presence to pressure Capitol Hill.

Partly as a result, a stark asymmetry has arisen. British impact on America has been real, but episodic and limited. America’s reciprocal influence has been enduring, profound, and paradoxical—encouraging the UK role in the EU while enticing London into geopolitics that exasperated other EU states, to whom Britain represented an American “Trojan horse.” Britain may now be “first and foremost a European power.”2 But even with others, in their different ways, America and Britain have remained nations apart. In voting to leave the house but not the neighborhood, Brexit has doubled down on this abiding island identity. “America First” may not mean “America Alone” but Britain must now get accustomed to treating the EU as an object of foreign policy and in turn being a “third country” to Brussels. Thereby, the UK is increasing its reliance on U.S. goodwill even as it diminishes its allure as a partner.

The Odd Couple: R.I.P.

Surveying an alliance increasingly “in jeopardy” in these pages in 2010, Eric Edelman highlighted the strains on its “four pillars”: cultural leaders and political elites “committed to the notion that the English-speaking peoples have a special mission in the world”; a will to wage war together; the British nuclear deterrent; and close intelligence cooperation. Although the notions of “America First” or Britain leaving the European Union were then fringe ideas, the analysis was all too prescient. Britain’s utility to Washington is sharply diminished now that the four pillars are in even more parlous condition on both sides of the Atlantic. Their erosion begins at the top.

Disunited States

Transatlantic elites’ commitment to a shared mission in the wider world was the default setting for decades. Based on the intrinsic, not just instrumental, value of the world order they co-founded, Washington and London acted as its custodians. From enlightened self-interest and at enormous cost in blood and treasure, they committed to policing the global commons to uphold an international system based on the promotion of open societies and markets, democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.

No more. Both nations are unsure about their place in the world, their identity, and the benefits of deep engagement abroad. In three respects, a malign symmetry of parallel pathologies has eroded elite resolve to advance an expansive rather than narrow definition of the national interest—even if the closing of the British strategic mind is the more advanced.

First, by accident and design, recent Presidents and Prime Ministers have overseen decline. Leaders matter. In setting the diplomatic tone and foreign policy substance, they can sustain healthy cooperation or permit benign neglect. In the United States, Barack Obama’s Administration began a retrenchment that Donald Trump has advanced further. While the former was marketed as seeking to save the liberal order, not wreck it, the outcome has been similar. Allies such as Britain can no longer rely on an unpredictable America that seemingly devalues its strategic partners as, primarily, commercial rivals in a zero-sum economic competition.

As Thomas Wright noted, Trump has pursued a “predatory” policy to exploit London’s new vulnerability. After vocally backing Brexit, repudiating Obama’s comment that Britain would be “at the back of the queue,” and pledging rapid progress on a Free Trade Agreement (FTA), Trumpian reality has been different. The President helped to block an agricultural deal between London and Brussels in the World Trade Organization, sympathized with Putin during the Skripal poisoning, and intervened in domestic British politics. Rather than rolling over EU agreements to which the United Kingdom is a party to ensure an FTA allowing close relations between the UK and EU27, Washington hardball prevails. Nor can London anticipate much improvement. The U.S. foreign policy agenda remains not whether to retrench, but how far. Advocates of traditional American leadership will be on the defensive in 2020 in both parties. The path charted by Obama and Trump resembles more blueprint than interlude.

Matters in Britain are no better. Less James Bond than Downton Abbey, successive Prime Ministers have presided over defense cuts and disinterest in the steps necessary to remain globally relevant. The Iraq War, Great Recession, and tensions over Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan, Iran, Russian money laundering, and more exacted a heavy toll. The botched Libya intervention in 2011 informed Parliament’s refusal to support military action in Syria in 2013. As important, with a new constitutional convention that the House of Commons must approve war, the prospects for UK action are weaker than when the decision was, through royal prerogative, exercised by the PM. David Cameron’s mistaken gambles compounded the insular turn by elevating his party’s welfare over the national interest. Hoping not to have to implement the promise of an EU referendum, the Conservatives won the 2015 general election (and hence could govern alone, rather than in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, whom Cameron relied on to veto a referendum). The miscalculated play then backfired further when a complacent Cameron lead “Remain” to defeat and his own resignation.

Cameron’s hapless successor, May, has played a bad hand poorly, calling an unnecessary general election in 2017 that she mistakenly believed would increase the Tory majority, only to lose it and govern as a minority administration with the support of Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionist Party. Despite voting to Remain, as PM she has never challenged the wilder Leave illusions that unbridled national sovereignty could return or that it would be easy for the UK to trade on WTO terms in the event of a no-deal exit. Instead, while some Brexiteers resemble Maoists during the Cultural Revolution more than pragmatic Tories, her deal offered continuing adherence to a plethora of EU rules but no say in shaping them. At a juncture when strategy is required, Washington and Westminster are preoccupied by tactics.At a juncture when strategy is required, Washington and Westminster are preoccupied by tactics.

Second, in each nation, a parallel but seismic shift has seen the rise of the nationalist Right and cosmopolitan Left. Long inhabiting the fringes of one or the other party, rarely have they achieved a simultaneous mainstream presence in both. The white working class and non-graduates are shifting rightward while big cities, graduates, and higher income brackets underpin the left. Neither bodes well for the U.S.-UK partnership’s long-term health. In the United States, Trump’s combination of vulgar realism and transactional nationalism has elevated short-term economic gains over long-term Transatlantic security. Nor can London expect favors from a Harris, Warren, or Sanders presidency focused on “nation-building at home” and social work abroad.

Changes in Britain augur equally badly. British party politics is broken. “Europe” has long divided both parties, causing intra-party strains that threaten to overwhelm inter-party tribalism. May will surely follow Margaret Thatcher, John Major, and Cameron to become the fourth Tory Prime Minister to fall victim to its lasting toxicity. But the United States also divides opinion. Even among Americanophiles, the imperial legacy survives. Erstwhile pro-American Tories are still apt to suggest in private that the only problem with America is its being populated by Americans. A powerful strain of Little England nationalism informs a party in crisis, the divisions within and between its commercial and nationalist wings leaving it struggling to articulate a serious strategic vision. Some elements crave splendid isolation, but the bulk is not isolationist so much as antipathetic to the fact of U.S. power and EU (read: German) ambition. From Cameron’s decision to join China’s Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank to May’s willingness to support the Franco-German “Instrument in Support of Trade Exchange” facility allowing Iran to circumvent U.S. sanctions, the fissures with Washington have grown from tactical differences to core strategic goals.

But if the Tories exhibit disarray, Labour offers an altogether more ominous contrast. George Orwell once wrote of leftists to whom, during WWII, “American troops had been brought to Europe not to fight the Germans but to crush an English revolution.” He added, “One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that; no ordinary man could be such a fool.”3 To understate, Jeremy Corbyn is no intellectual. But he does exhibit precisely the demented anti-American animus and conspiracy-thinking to which Orwell referred, while legitimating the vilest anti-Semitism. As Robert Shrimsley noted, “Under his leadership anti-Semitism and misogyny are indulged; brutal anti-western dictators are admired, while internal critics are bullied and abused.” In place of Atlanticist social democrats, unrepentant Marxist zealots with no love for the Labour Party now control it. In leading the racist Left, Corbyn, Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell, and their thuggish cronies are united by a visceral anti-Americanism that filters every international issue. The Communist Party of Great Britain chose, for the first time, not to field candidates against Labour in 2017’s general election: Corbyn would suffice, comrade.

Americans should be under no illusions. Institutionally anti-Semitic and reflexively anti-American, a Labour government would represent a clear and present danger to U.S.-UK relations. As Mike Gapes—former chairman of the Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs and one of eight MPs who left the party in February—observed, Corbyn poses “a threat to national security and international alliances.” In 2017, many Labour MPs told voters a Labour vote was safe since Corbyn couldn’t win. Those who recognize he is unfit to be Prime Minister but remain loyal increasingly resemble Republicans who reassured themselves that Trump would change in office. Nor is this a matter of one individual. The far Left controls party organization and moderates are leaving, being re-educated or removed. As one Labour MP privately confided to me, “How the hell did it come to this?”.

Third, it is difficult to uphold a foreign policy based on common interests and values when neither enjoys domestic consensus. Divided against ourselves, oikophobia—repudiation of the home—afflicts us both.4 Trust in the political class has cratered. We are separated not only by a common language but analogous cultural chasms, an activist Academy in thrall to “Grievance Studies” orthodoxies that scorn liberal democratic capitalism, and the “death of expertise.” As an era of entitlement displaces the age of Enlightenment, identity politics fuels left- and right-wing populisms that share deeply illiberal notions that demography is destiny. While America’s civic nationalism can perhaps withstand the pincer assault, the United Kingdom has no comparable foundation on which to rely. A December 2018 survey found 68 percent of Brits felt no political party “speaks for them.” One third deemed Islam “a threat to the British way of life.” As Brendon O’Neill noted:

Modern Britain is a nation that refuses to state clearly what its values are, and which in fact celebrates being ‘multi-values’. All value systems are fine, and none is superior to any other—that is the rallying cry of the multicultural era. . . .Britain has become divided, disjointed, split into various, often conflicting communities and value systems. Many of the people brought up in this climate come to feel dislocated from any idea of Britishness, and from the British nation itself, and some start to embrace narrow, eccentric and even quite hostile value systems.

Astonishingly, in the 2016 referendum campaign, foreign policy went almost unmentioned. Instead, the key reason for Leave’s victory was immigration, an issue met by the Remain campaign with silence. Myopically focused on economics, the Remainers dared not engage the topic. The vote became a vehicle for the expression of accumulated resentments about changes wrought to British life over decades. After all, if leaving was about “taking back control”, what were the most vivid expressions of its loss? EU subsidies and regulations on cheese? Or cultural shifts encompassing discrete matters from mass immigration to transgenderism? For millions, the Brexit vote was a Primal Scream of repressed rage against the established political class, not a prudential verdict on the utility of non-tariff barriers to trade in services.

It is not to romanticize the past to observe that a public life increasingly inured or actively hostile to its own history cannot long underpin a sense of collective identity and shared national endeavor. In the amoral sphere of international politics, strategic necessity, geographic differences, and asymmetries of power cannot be overcome by history and culture alone. But the latter can assist an alliance to endure. The more shared values wither on the vine, the more definitive other differences appear. Absent consensus on the ultimate purpose of statecraft, its resourcing must also suffer.

Land of False Hope and Former Glory

The inexorable decline of Britain’s operational capacity as a global power after 1945 was never commensurate with London’s reliable willingness to wage war by America’s side (Vietnam was the exception that proved the rule). That is now in question. Neither the British appetite nor capacity to project power is what it was, no matter the desperate PR efforts to pretend otherwise (the UK Defense Secretary recently endorsed “enhancing our mass and increasing our lethality”; Treasury officials described the speech as “idiotic”).

Even if the martial will returned, the British wallet is empty. According to the National Audit Office, the Ministry of Defence faces a £15 billion ($28 billion) black hole in its budget over the coming decade. The Rolling Stones can fill London’s Wembley Stadium; the British army cannot.The Rolling Stones can fill London’s Wembley Stadium; the British army cannot. Already smaller than at any time since the Napoleonic wars, it is struggling to recruit a shrunken target of 82,000 troops. The navy comprises just 19 destroyers and frigates, and six submarines. The resources expended on the Queen Elizabeth, one of two new aircraft carriers, precluded purchasing the necessary adjunct platforms to protect it. London can still offer niche functions, such as special forces. But rising budgetary pressures and future falls in sterling increasingly make defense a luxury good. To the extent the United Kingdom can serve as America’s deputy in policing the global commons, it will be in a desk job capacity: less frequent, more boutique, and often at a computer keyboard.

Moreover, British security remains inextricably tied to Europe while European defense depends heavily on the United Kingdom and France, the continent’s strongest militaries and only nuclear powers. But if Europe’s defense is to be inter-governmental it cannot be optimally developed within an EU framework post-Brexit. Britain is one of eight of NATO’s 29 members to meet the 2 percent of GDP target for defense spending and the second largest spender, after America. But even this is partly the result of creative accounting. British military readiness and interoperability remain unprecedentedly weak.

Brexit also has adverse implications for the U.S.-UK partnership’s third and fourth pillars. The prospects for UK nuclear disarmament look weak. Parliament heavily voted to renew the Trident deterrent in July 2016. May also offered a robust refusal to endorse a no-first-use declaration. But questions remain over the creaking infrastructure, expense, utility, and politics. Although Corbyn has been a lifelong proponent of unilateral disarmament out of step with his own party, the credibility of a British deterrent would cease with him in power. An equally serious threat is the potential breakup of Britain, if Scotland votes for independence in a new referendum that the Scottish Nationalist Party will push—another voluntary act of self-harm that could raise profound logistical issues as to the viability of relocating the nuclear submarine bases.

Finally, Brexit will inhibit UK security cooperation with EU states. The “Five Eyes” consortium remains a vital source of continuity but cannot alone compensate for Britain’s strategic confusion, downsized military, and pending exclusion from key EU data flows. Moreover, Five Eyes is not a foreign policy-making institution or platform for reviving a larger role.5 And if a Corbyn premiership ever came to pass, all bets are off. One U.S. intelligence expert suggested to me that “deep state” agency-to-agency cooperation would continue apace, with selective denial of information to unreliable superiors. But Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of MI6, noted of Seamus Milne, Corbyn’s closest adviser, that “anyone with his sort of background could not be let anywhere near classified information. That means Corbyn could not make the judgments and decisions a PM has to make unless he stopped consulting him.” Denying security clearances to officials in Number Ten Downing Street would be a first. But the Dear Leader may circumvent the problem of intelligence-sharing by acquiring an entirely new set of exotic “anti-imperialist” allies from Tehran to Havana.

Three Futures

Churchill once remarked that, “Sometimes when Fortune scowls most spitefully, she is preparing her most dazzling gifts.” Prior obituaries of the U.S.-UK partnership proved premature. Perhaps the current difficulties too shall pass?

Three possibilities lie ahead.

Strategic estrangement looms if either America or Britain re-embraces an assertive internationalism while the other abandons engagement through necessity or choice. Despite “America First” and its less abrasive Democratic Party echoes, the most likely candidate to downsize is London. As Lawrence Freedman noted, one response to Dean Acheson’s famous jibe about Britain losing an empire but not finding a role is to abandon any pretense of the latter, “to retire from greatness and lead a quieter life.”62 Rather than resurrect a lost past, we can adopt the Bhutan option of a robust Gross National Happiness index and hope for the best. If the choice lies between becoming a British Dubai or Caracas-on-the-Thames socialist dystopia, a wholesale downscaling of ambition may prove reassuringly bespoke for a quaint nation of no geopolitical consequence.

National pride might reject departing the world stage for life as an understudy. Some Brexiteers embrace “Global Britain” to reclaim a leading role and “independent voice.” But the nations with whom we share values do not necessarily share our interests. Potential strategic partners with large populations, growing economies, and geopolitical heft are not in the “Anglosphere” that Brexiteers reflexively favor: Brazil, China, Indonesia, Iran, Japan, Mexico, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey. But the Anglosphere, even with India alongside the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, is not even an association, still less a trading bloc or alliance. Moreover, multiple bilateralisms do not a genuine multilateralism make. Nor is the United Kingdom equipped to act as some global hub, even were a global orientation the same as global power. Capabilities need to match commitments. In leaving the European Union, London risks a credibility gap and further reputational damage if its aspirations prove fatuous. A slogan is not a policy and an independent voice is of minimal value if it is never heard.

A second possibility, strategic retreat, might see both America and Britain adopt reduced roles regarding their functional and geopolitical interests. Rejecting a forward-leaning role in multilateral institutions or regional power balances might permit tactical marriages of convenience but eschew institutionalized cooperation. “Conscious uncoupling” could envisage a more narrowly geo-economic foreign policy while eschewing interventionism. Such a path of restraint would accept a spheres-of-interest approach, one that conceivably could seek to accommodate Moscow, depart the Middle East, and focus fully on Asia. But mercantilist trends in the United States point to deliberalizing trade. And if Brussels and Washington leave London adrift, necessity may compel seeking a new patron for an economy whose high-value manufacturing and services sectors rely on deeply integrated markets. Just as Paris might offer a superficially attractive new European suitor for the United States, so Beijing might offer a commercial lifeline to cash-strapped, isolated Brits—accompanied by stringent terms and conditions.

A third option could see renewed strategic partnership. To the extent that London and Washington still share a strategic vision and the structural remnants of networked leadership, cooperative rather than conflictual relations remain part of the Transatlantic muscle memory. Diminished utility may spur Britain to a strategic rethink to prove its worth to America. In turn, Washington may exact a price: a clear U.S. alignment rather than a “global” vocation for which London has neither the resources nor a reservoir of international goodwill. The United States is Britain’s single largest national export market. A generous FTA could revitalize our wider engagement.

But two impediments exist.

First, Britain’s trade relationship with the European Union remains to be determined, a matter potentially years in the making. Two-thirds of UK global trade is with the European Union or nations with whom London has a free trade deal through EU membership. As Brits are learning the hard way, trade negotiations are marathons, not sprints—tough, unsentimental endurance tests. Any welcome flexibility to strike trade deals with 65 million Brits is counterbalanced by the lost clout of offering access to a market of 450 million Europeans. Even now, UK efforts to secure agreement for independent tariff schedules at the WTO are being held up by 19 nations, including Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, unhappy with the agricultural quotas they have been offered under a provisional deal.

Second, concerns that Washington will press an unacceptably hard bargain threaten a serious rupture. U.S. trade negotiating guidelines enshrine as major objectives securing access for agricultural products to UK markets and eliminating“practices that unfairly decrease U.S. market access opportunities or distort agricultural markets to the detriment of the United States.” Washington wants a mechanism “to take appropriate action if the UK negotiates a free trade agreement with a non-market country” (i.e. China). It also seeks access to UK government procurement markets while maintaining federal “buy America” programs and ruling out British access to U.S. state procurement markets, an issue that helped doom U.S.-EU trade negotiations in 2015.

If London accedes, it will forfeit substantial UK exports to the EU. Reinforcing scare stories about “chlorinated chicken,” environment secretary Michael Gove has stated that he will not accept “U.S. food standards” for Britain. U.S. demands for non-discriminatory treatment by state-owned enterprises and full market access for pharmaceutical companies stoke popular fears of a rapacious American threat to Britain’s secular religion, the National Health Service. Any FTA would require congressional approval. And even in the area of services, negotiators will need to accommodate the European Union’s regulatory reach. Unable to rule the waves, Britannia may be unable to waive the rules and instead “remain firmly anchored to the old continent.” The EU got the mutiny, but neither London nor Washington will necessarily obtain the bounty.The EU got the mutiny, but neither London nor Washington will necessarily obtain the bounty.

Without Britain, the EU “project” is ever more a matter for pessimism. But that is cold comfort to anyone concerned about the West’s collective security. Like a dead state walking, Little Britain will require decades to recover from Brexit’s psychodrama—not only the rupture but also the aftershocks on politics, Parliament, the party system, and public life. Redolent of “stab in the back” sentiment during Weimar—when resentful Germans blamed decadent elites for betraying the German army in World War I—one of two new neuralgic influences promises to plunge British politics into post-Brexit purgatory: a nationalist cry of “betrayal” if we remain within the EU’s regulatory orbit; and, if we do not, a cosmopolitan cri de coeur over our lost European promised land. British misfortunes will be attributed to this one decision, not the multiple fissures and strategic myopia to which it gave anguished expression.

Melancholic as it may be, it behoves believers in close U.S.-UK collaboration to be realistic. The alliance has a rich past but no reliable future. America and Britain have aligned closely in times of serious security threats, on joint projects of generational scale. It is a tragic indictment that today’s shared external threats—not just to our states but to the liberal democratic model—are not yielding the renewed coalescence they demand. Whether Britain’s pending geopolitical relocation is a molehill or mountain, marginalizing or liberating, the United Kingdom will be more exposed, with less to offer a restive Washington displaying ever greater leadership fatigue. Rome wasn’t burnt in a day. But the Transatlantic omens are troubling. A strategic partnership of the first order is on life support and dying a strange, untimely death.

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