Rebellious Passage

Abstract

When people in the United States and the United Kingdom encounter the term "special relationship," several things often spring to mind: former colonial ties; English as a common language; cordial relations between presidents and prime ministers -Roosevelt and Churchill, Reagan and Thatcher, Clinton and Blair; and cultural exchange -Beatlemania and Motown to an older generation, and Michael Jordan, David Beckham, Beyoncé, and Adele to younger generations.A more malevolent relationship is rarely evoked. The decades since the 1940s have seen the forging of an unprecedented level of military and intelligence cooperation between Washington and London. Between 1955 and 1975, the Vietnam Warthe Vietnamese refer to it as the American Warclaimed the lives of between 1.3 million and 3.1 million people, depending on which side you ask. 1 British Prime Minister Harold Wilson refrained from criticizing this bloodbath at the time by reportedly saying, "We can't kick our creditors in the balls." Since the 1990s, London has repeatedly supported American intervention in the Arab-Muslim world during wars on Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and now Syria that have claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands people. 21 "Vietnam War Casualties," Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnam_War_ casualties 2 Some of us disagree that the world is a better place as a consequence of US global power supported by its junior partner in London. A British diplomat visiting Howard University several years ago seemed a little taken aback by my disagreement. The chaos and bloodshed in the Arab-Islamic world, the blowback in European cities, and the extension of the security state into the lives of American and British citizens over the past two decades suggest that the axis of good could not have got it more spectacularly wrong.