While Nile Gardiner, the former aide to Margaret Thatcher who now heads the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at the Heritage Foundation, fulminates at length that “Brits feel betrayed by Biden’s Afghanistan fiasco. Our ‘special relationship’ is on ice,” in his Fox News opinion column two days ago (a would-be obituary on Biden’s presidency “sinking faster than the Titanic“), the British centuries-old imperial voicepiece, The Economist, is more sanguine. The Economist is still confident that Britain’s deep penetration of U.S. policy-making institutions since World War II, especially of the “intelligence community” and military, will win the day.
Yes, ties have been weakened by “the Afghanistan debacle,” but the “special relationship” has survived other such shocks, Suez included, The Economist reminds. Even now, “behind the headlines, diplomats on both sides insist that relations are still close…. Sir Simon Fraser, a former head of the Foreign Office now at Flint Global, says structural co-operation in intelligence, security and military matters remains as deep as ever….
