Foreign Policy > United Kingdom

The Special Relationship Is Dead

The US and the UK are on the outs.

Kenneth R. Timmerman | April 5, 2026

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........

© American Thinker