The Special Relationship Is Dead

American Thinker 

Remember how we used to think of France?  “Lafayette, we are here!” are the words attributed to General Pershing on July 4, 1917 at Lafayette’s tomb, not long after the Yanks arrived in Paris.

After World War II, NATO was headquartered in the Paris suburb of Saint Germaine-en-laye, where, incidentally, my youngest daughter was born.  General de Gaulle evicted us in 1966 when he pulled France out of NATO.  President Lyndon Johnson reportedly asked him if he also wanted us to take the graveyards full of the American dead who had fallen in Normandy and Bastogne.

That special relationship never fully recovered.

Nixon and Pompidou tried to revive it in 1972, when they signed a (still) secret nuclear weapons assistance pact.  I called it a “second marriage” in my book The French Betrayal of America, and it ended in divorce in 2003, when French president Chirac preferred Saddam Hussein’s oil to his erstwhile American ally.

So yes, Special Relationships can definitely die.  So can alliances as big as NATO.

British prime minister Keir Starmer has repeatedly huffed and puffed in recent weeks about not joining the war with Iran, initially denying us the right to use the massive U.S.-U.K. air base on Diego Garcia that was built with U.S. taxpayer dollars.

He ultimately relented, and we moved B-2 Spirit bombers to the Indian Ocean.  That shortened their flying time to Iran from thirty-six hours to just under six.

Then, on March 20, Iran launched two 2,500-mile-range missiles toward the Chagos Islands.  One of them failed mid-flight, and the other was shot down in the upper atmosphere by an SM-3 Standard missile fired from a U.S. warship.

Those missiles showed not only that Iran could hit Diego Garcia.  They could also hit London.

Since then, Prime Minister Starmer has not stopped wetting his pants.  Not a day goes by without some slavish pandering aimed at the Iranian mullahs, and Muslims in general.

As I pointed out earlier this week on London’s GB television, Starmer appears to believe that because the Iranians have not yet launched missiles against London, the U.K. is safe.

He appears to believe that if he slavishly tells the Iranians twice a day that Britain will not send warships to help the United States reopen the Strait of Hormuz, Britain will be safe from Iranian attack.

Of the twenty thousand targets hit in Iran since the war began, not a single one was taken out by the Royal Air Force or the Royal Navy, and Keir Starmer likes to remind the Iranians of this every single day.

He is truly the mouse that roared.

The U.S. and the U.K. once extolled our “special relationship.”  Not only did we go to war together, repeatedly, but we also shared secrets.  At one point, the U.S. and the U.K. shared intelligence they wouldn’t dream of giving to Israel, even when it related to WMD threats to Israel from the likes of Saddam Hussein.  You can ask Jonathan Pollard about that.

The U.K. and many other NATO allies have helped us in the past to defend international shipping from Somali pirates.  As recently as December 2023, in Operation Prosperity Guardian, they helped us keep open the Red Sea by attacking the Houthis in Yemen.

Of course, at the time, Donald Trump was not in the White House, and Britain had a conservative prime minister, Rishi Sunak.

President Trump is understandingly furious with the U.K. and our NATO partners.  No, the U.S. has never formally requested NATO assistance against Iran, but gee, you’d have thought some of our NATO “allies” might want to join an effort to free the world of a terrorist threat menacing us all.

Well, you would have thought wrong.

Besides Israel, which is our full partner in this war, our best ally to date has been Nichervan Barzani, president of the Kurdish Regional Government in Iraq.

On March 17, Trump had special envoy Tom Barrack make a special request to Barzani.  Would he consider reopening the Kirkuk-Ceyhan pipeline so Iraqi government oil could flow to Turkey and from there to world markets?

That pipeline is a sore subject for the Kurds.  They closed it down over three years ago because Baghdad was cheating them out of the oil revenues they were constitutionally pledged to divide between them.

Put simply, Baghdad stole the oil from the Kurds and pocketed the proceeds, without so much as a thank-you.  (Kirkuk officially remains a “disputed territory,” claimed by both Baghdad and Erbil, but the Kurds consider it to be historically part of the Kurdish region.)

But Barrack told Barzani that the request to reopen the pipeline was coming directly from President Trump, and so Barzani immediately agreed.  The very next day, Iraq started sending 250,000 barrels of oil per day through that pipeline to world markets.  It was just one of many mitigating acts President Trump has taken to keep oil prices from skyrocketing.

Has the U.K. increased its oil production in the North Sea?  Nope.  In fact, it has been shutting down oil platforms, replacing them with wind and solar.  Has the U.K. considered perhaps a waiver on its renewable energy policies in view of rising oil prices?  Or perhaps just to help an ally?

No again.  The U.K. and our NATO “allies” have been banging their tin pots for years to get the U.S. to pay for their war in Ukraine.  During his first term, President Trump helped to rearm the Ukrainian army, supplying them with Javelin anti-tank missiles starting in 2018.  Thanks to those missiles, the Ukes were able to smash the initial Russian armored column that was heading toward Kyiv in February and March 2022.

Altogether, we spent an estimated $350 billion to help our NATO allies defend Ukraine against the Russians.  And they won’t even send us a few minesweepers to help reopen the Strait of Hormuz so NATO can buy oil?

The president is understandably furious with the U.K., NATO, and our European “allies” — so much so that he has floated unilaterally withdrawing from the alliance.

Chuck Schumer was quick to tell the media that Democrats would never give the president the two-thirds vote in the Senate he needs to withdraw from a treaty organization.  But the president already secured a legal opinion in 2020arguing that as president, he has executive authority over treaties and can indeed withdraw without Senate approval — and see y’all in court for the next twenty years.

The Special Relationship is dead, and not because of Trump.  Yes, alliances can die, too.