20 years after Iraq war, is the US-UK relationship still special?

Biden similarly punctured London's ambitions for its defence minister, Ben Wallace, to be nominated as the next Nato secretary general.

While the president's stopover in London was interpreted as a mark of friendship for the US' longstanding ally, the relationship has evolved in recent years.

With power dynamics and priorities shifting on both sides of the Atlantic, is the relationship still 'special'?

'Special' relationship develops amidst Soviet threat

UK-US ties have been romanticised somewhat, especially on the British side, and in reality, relations have been close, but complex.

The term 'special relationship' was first coined by Winston Churchill in 1946, but Britain and the US have not enjoyed consistently close ties since the Second World War. 

In fact, Churchill used the term during his famous 'Iron Curtain' speech in the US when he was no longer British prime minister because he wanted to persuade the Americans to return to the UK and Europe having withdrawn after the defeat of Nazi Germany.

The growing threat of the USSR — which Churchill was keen to highlight — prompted an American U-turn, ushering in a revival of London and Washington's earlier wartime alliance.

This included: extensive intelligence sharing via the UK-USA Agreement (known as Five Eyes as it included Australia, Canada, and New Zealand); widespread defence cooperation including purchasing and supplying equipment; and the hosting of over 100 US military bases on British soil by the end of the Cold War.

While these defence and intelligence ties remained constant after the late 1940s, the strength of the relationship ebbed and flowed as leaders and policy priorities changed in both London and Washington.

Ruptures emerge

The first rupture came in 1956 when President Eisenhower strongly opposed Prime Minister Anthony Eden's invasion of Suez, demanding withdrawal and refusing to financially support the pound when the resulting crisis prompted a plunge in value.

This prompted Eden's fall, and his successor, Harold Macmillan, was determined to remain closely aligned with the US. The next rupture came in the 1960s when Britain declined Washington's request to send troops to Vietnam, despite vocal support.

Ties did not revive during the 1970s, with Britain less valuable to the US after its power declined after decolonisation and its economy struggled.

For the UK — which had joined the European Economic Community in 1973 — some politicians, including Prime Minister Edward Heath, suggested London would do better to align itself more with Brussels than Washington.

Thatcher-Reagan usher honeymoon period

This changed in the 1980s when Margaret Thatcher's ideological and personal closeness to Ronald Reagan contributed to yet another revival.

Despite several foreign policy disagreements — notably on Grenada, Iceland and the Falklands —  the special relationship appeared back on track, culminating in military cooperation, alongside other states, in the 1991 Gulf War.

Personal relationships between prime ministers and presidents have not been the only factor in determining the strength of the special relationship, but they certainly influenced matters.

Thatcher's successor, John Major, for example, struggled to connect with President Bill Clinton, while his opponent Tony Blair, who became premier in 1997, forged close ties with both Clinton and Bush.

In contrast, Gordon Brown, who followed Blair, struggled to build personal ties with Barack Obama, who famously presented the Scot with a bland gift of 25 DVDs when they first met.

However, Obama warmed up more to David Cameron. This may have reflected improved personal ties or changing geopolitical priorities. During Brown's premiership, Obama was focused more on domestic matters after the 2008 financial crisis and had less need for Britain's military muscle than Bush after declaring his determination to step back from the Middle East.

However, by the time Cameron was in office (2010-16), the 'Arab Spring' uprisings had sucked the US back into the region, and Britain's military expertise was once again of value for interventions in Libya, Syria, and Iraq. Once again it was the combination of personal relations between leaders and policy priorities that impacted the 'specialness' of US-UK ties.

Brexit, China, and Ukraine

In recent years one major change in circumstances and priorities that raised serious questions about the special relationship was Britain's decision to leave the EU after a referendum in 2016. In Britain, many of those who campaigned to leave were staunch supporters of the US-UK alliance and hoped that divorcing Brussels would facilitate even closer alignment with Washington.

Key to this would be a US-UK free trade agreement, which Brexiteers hoped, among other things, would give British companies access to US markets while providing UK consumers with cheaper American agricultural goods.

Donald Trump, who succeeded Obama soon after the Brexit referendum, seemingly entertained this possibility, promising a "massive" trade deal. A vocal supporter of Brexit, Trump's time in office held out the possibility that Britain's departure from the EU might indeed lead to increased US-UK closeness.

This appeared even more likely when Boris Johnson became prime minister in 2019 as he enjoyed close personal ties with the president. The latter even referred to his counterpart as, "the British Trump."

However, no real progress was made on a trade deal, and many commentators noted a contradiction between Trump's vocal support for Brexit and his 'America First' economic policies, suggesting his promises were mostly hollow.

Moreover, Trump's defeat to Biden in 2020 torpedoed any such hopes, with the new administration repeatedly stating that such a deal was not a priority. In fact, Biden's election transformed Brexit from a potential asset to a liability in the eyes of the White House.

Unlike Trump, Biden was a multilateralist and feared that Britain's departure from the EU weakened the Western alliance, especially as the years after 2016 had seen increased hostility between London and Brussels.

A UK outside the EU was of less value to Washington and Biden initially chose to prioritise his ties with Germany and France over his traditional UK allies.

This was further impacted by personality.

Biden, of Irish descent, was appalled that Johnson seemed blasé about his Brexit deal potentially undoing provisions in the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that had finally ended Northern Ireland's decades-long 'Troubles'.

Read more: Fragility of peace evident ahead of Biden's Northern Ireland visit

Related to this, Biden seemed not to get on with Johnson personally, nor did the president reportedly think much of Britain's short-lived next premier, Liz Truss, whose brief time in office initiated economic chaos.

Another major shift has been in US geopolitical priorities in favour of a focus on confronting China. While this began under Obama, it accelerated under Trump and has continued under Biden.

Britain's distance from the Pacific makes it less relevant to the US and that may have influenced the relative marginalisation of London. The UK has made efforts to become part of the conversation on China, most significantly committing to the AUKUS defence agreement with the US and Australia.

Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has also recently gone beyond the US' European allies in his willingness to condemn China, calling it, "the biggest threat to global security," most likely to win favour with Washington.

However, London knows that whereas its proximity to Eastern Europe and the USSR made it a vital ally during the Cold War, its distance from China means that should the Washington-Beijing conflict escalate, it will rarely be at the centre of decisions.

Ukraine war injects life into flailing relationship

For that reason, a further geopolitical shift, the outbreak of the Ukraine war, has injected some unexpected life back into the special relationship. The conflict once again puts Europe at the top of Washington's agenda, and the White House has had to invest more in its European alliances, including Britain.

Johnson — despite his hostility to the EU and Biden's scepticism — was one of the earliest Western leaders to call for extensive military assistance for Kyiv. This prepared the groundwork for improving the UK's ties with both the EU and the Biden White House.

In a sign that personality remains a key component in UK-US ties though, Sunak then built on this with his own innovations. As well as currying favour with Washington with the AUKUS alliance, he agreed a new framework with Brussels on Northern Ireland, alleviating both Biden's fears of UK-EU animosity and a collapse of the Good Friday Agreement.

Read more: Brexit: The grown-ups are back in charge

Sunak has clearly had some success in cultivating personal relations with Biden and Johnson, as demonstrated by the fact that the July meeting was his sixth with the US president since he became prime minister less than a year ago.

Sunak's pragmatism after years of Brexiteer idealism seems to have won Biden over. As one US diplomat told CNN, "Sunak showed us he was someone we could do business with."

Deeper ties

Sunak's improvements in the relationship should not be overstated. He has clawed the relationship back from the nadir of the Brexit era, but they are far from the highs of the Blair-Bush or Thatch-Reagan years.

However, this ebbing and flowing has actually been a feature of the 'special relationship' since its inception. At times, geopolitical circumstances and priorities have shifted Washington and London closer, at others kept them further apart, while the complimentary or contradictory personalities of presidents and prime ministers have further impacted the relationship.

While today it might be easy to forecast that Britain's relative decline in the wake of Brexit might suggest the special relationship will continue to decline, it remains highly plausible that a new, currently unforeseeable, change in circumstance or the coming to power of two leaders with a strong rapport revives ties once more.

Yet, behind all this high politics, deeper institutional and cultural links have been maintained throughout. The intelligence and defence agreements signed in the 1940s have never been abrogated, despite occasional turbulence in the alliance, and British and American personnel remain embedded at multiple levels in each other's defence institutions.

Meanwhile the Five Eyes intelligence network, alongside several other instances of intelligence sharing, remains a key pillar of both states' foreign operations.

At a cultural level, shared language and heritage have seen widespread cultural exchange such as music, education and film more frequently than in most other countries. That said, there is always something of a power imbalance.

While Britain has no other state ally that shares this level of defence, intelligence and cultural exchange, the US has several. Indeed, while it may be 'THE' special relationship for Britain, it is only one of several special relationships for the US.