There have been few people more famous and instantly recognisable than Queen Elizabeth II, who served as Britain's longest-reigning monarch from 1952 until her death in 2022. Yet her role within Anglo-American relations has been largely under-explored. This is strange on many levels, not least because her life progressed in tandem with the birth, evolution and maturation of what is commonly termed the modern Anglo-American special relationship. We argue that Queen Elizabeth II's importance to Anglo-American relations progressively increased as a result especially of developments in media and its consumption, the growing significance of soft power and Britain's relative decline. The Queen enjoyed exceptional reach within American audiences, as well as offering a compensatory source of continuity with a bygone age and maintaining an image at least of the United Kingdom and United States as familial equals. This argument is developed in three sections. We begin by investigating how expanding media coverage, changes in the monarchy's public relations strategy and royal visits to the United States enhanced American affinity for the British monarchy, and how this in turn led the American and British governments to understand and exploit the Queen's influence. We then use the royal visit during the American Bicentennial to demonstrate how the Queen's role in Anglo-American relations matured at a crucial juncture in the mid-1970s and helped the special relationship's transition from experiential memory to received memory. Finally, we illustrate how the Queen, as well as the tactics and messaging embraced by the American and British governments during the Bicentennial, served subsequently in Anglo-American diplomatic pageantry.

This article argues that British handling of the Trump administrations has evidenced the under-recognised value of Britain's monarchy in promoting the Anglo-American special relationship. Traditional British approaches of seeking close leadership relations and public American endorsement of special relations have delivered mixed results and carried abnormally high political risks. The House of Windsor has consequently been enlisted to the cause with unusual intensity. This owes to three key reasons. First, Trump's ego and admiration for the monarchy enhance the latter's ability to provide an additional means of building diplomatic bridges and promoting a public narrative of special Anglo-American relations with the President and his administrations. Second, British royalty help reinforce Anglo-American cultural connection, popular American fascination with the House of Windsor enabling it to emphasise traditionally shared values to, and raise Britain's profile with, domestic US audiences. Finally, British royalty complements assiduous government cultivating of Trump and his administrations but also lessens political risk in close government association with a President deeply unpopular in large swathes of Britain.

The Anglo-American special relationship is in part at least a discursive construct. Its public face is co-produced by British and American officials through speech, sign and symbol with an intent to influence strategically international and domestic opinions. Much less scholarly attention has been paid to this than to Anglo-American functional cooperation. This article consequently examines how a metanarrative of continuity has been maintained since World War Two whilst Britain and the US have also subtly evolved the public face of the special relationship to suit their particular interests and to preserve its credibility. The analysis shows how Churchill crafted the original model of special relations, how Britain and the US have not always agreed on the public representation of the special relationship but nevertheless reconstructed it discursively, and how the narrative of special relations has acquired socio-cultural resilience.

The Conservative Heath government dropped the term special relationship from the vernacular of Anglo-American relations. Britain's usefulness to the US was in question, too, epitomised in the April 1975Wall Street Journalheadline of 'Goodbye Great Britain'. Yet the succeeding Wilson and Callaghan Labour governments were determined to revive Anglo-American relations. This article argues they achieved more to this end than hitherto acknowledged through how they managed Anglo-American relations. Particular attention is drawn to resetting the tone of relations, strategies of engagement of American officials to control fallout from British retrenchment and a discursive modernisation of the special relationship.

This article argues that British soft power is a hitherto under-recognised factor in explaining the survival and changing character of the Anglo-American special relationship during the so-called long-1970s. First, the long-term interpenetration of UK and US soft power became a shared resource that British and American governments used to cohere their bilateral relations and provided for a 'common cast of mind' that facilitated high levels of policy congruence. Second, the particular international and domestic political changes that occurred during the long 1970s elevated the relative importance of soft power and thereby gave the British, within American calculations of mutual utility, a means of offsetting, in part at least, the relative decline of their hard power capabilities.

This article investigates Anglo-American handling of their bilateral relations regarding whether to extend diplomatic recognition to the Yemen Arab Republic following a coup in 1962. Hitherto this issue has been cast largely within a narrative of relative British decline and/or deepening malaise in the special relationship. This article develops two principal counterarguments. First, the British viewed the crisis as a challenge to their intent to stay in, not retreat from, the Persian Gulf - which the Americans welcomed. Second, the special relationship worked relatively effectively. London and Washington made policy concessions in the interests of their cooperation in Yemen and the wider southern Arabian Peninsula. Bilateral policy friction was largely contained and negotiated within lower echelons of the British and American governments; Kennedy and Macmillan managed their exchanges amicably throughout.

This article assesses the unsuccessful attempt by US President Barack Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron to rebrand the ties between their countries as ‘the essential relationship’. The failure of that initiative revealed the enduring attachment of ordinary Britons to the notion of a UK–US ‘special relationship’ regardless of how accurately it reflected the changing reality of the two nations’ interactions.

Abstract The Macmillan government's dilemma over whether to grant diplomatic recognition to the Yemen Arab Republic (YAR) following a coup in 1962 was finely balanced. Hitherto, though, the literature on this specific issue has neither reflected the complexity of issues with which the British government was confronted nor offered a satisfactory explanation of its ultimate non-recognition of the YAR. Some scholars suggest that London was immediately and consistently opposed to granting recognition; others attribute the decision to fear of Nasserism and a determination to maintain Britain's colonial interests in the Persian Gulf. This article contends differently. Drawing upon newly declassified information it first reveals in fuller detail the array of issues and interests that the Macmillan government was confronted by and sought to balance. It then proceeds to demonstrate that the Macmillan government was not unwaveringly against according recognition to the YAR and that whilst important, the influence of the Aden Group and its sympathisers in government was not decisive. Instead, irresolution within the government resulted in an event-driven policy that arrived ultimately at non-recognition of the YAR by default rather than by design.

Affiliative bonding between British and American publics has long been a source of both stability within Anglo-American relations and of legitimacy for British and American government cooperation. Yet hitherto relatively little attention has been paid to how public diplomats encourage these sentiments through influencing processes of remembering and forgetting the Anglo-American past. This is particularly important as their licence to do so is evidently increasing as generational change progressively confines to history experiential memory of the zenith of Anglo-American cooperation during World War Two. To explore how public diplomats draw particular memories into the present to support current objectives/narratives, this article combines memory and diplomacy studies in an analysis of bilateral summit meetings between US Presidents and British Prime Ministers. These meetings are chosen because they provide excellent opportunities for officials to refresh continually the popular myth of special Anglo-American relations by manipulating ‘figures of memory’ in their invocation of the ‘past present’.

At the time of writing, US President Donald Trump is embattled in the White House, Theresa May gambled and lost her government’s working majority at the June 2017 General Election, BREXIT is mired in confusion, Trump has pronounced trade wars a ‘good thing’ and transatlantic relations are unsettled. Now is, therefore, a fascinating — if uncertain — time to consider the state of Anglo-American relations. This article argues that concern for the special relationship arising from Britain’s forthcoming loss of influence within the European Union is overstated and obscures a more important consideration - namely the economic capacity of post-BREXIT Britain to continue ‘paying the price’ of special access to and cooperation with Washington. It also argues that whatever Washington does or does not do during BREXIT negotiations will be an important factor in how Britain emerges from the Union. The terms of British departure are the province of Westminster and Brussels but proactive American shaping of the environment in which BREXIT is negotiated and effected could strengthen British prospects significantly. Conversely were the Trump White House to neglect or mishandle the BREXIT process it would risk greater instability in transatlantic relations and the further erosion of America’s most capable and reliable ally.

ABSTRACT The 1960 Belgian Congo crisis is generally seen as demonstrating Anglo-American friction and British policy weakness. Macmillan’s decision to ‘stand aside’ during UN ‘Operation Grandslam’, especially, is cited as a policy failure with long-term corrosive effects on Anglo-American relations. This article recasts this decision as a shrewd manoeuvre in extremely tight circumstances, balancing multiple interests and preventing an open breach with Kennedy’s Congo policy. Moreover, ‘stand aside’ facilitated subsequent Anglo-American cooperation in the Congo, which this article demonstrates by examining events beyond December 1962, where much of the current analysis peters out.

This chapter is premised on the belief that an important element of the origins and distinctiveness of the UK-US special relationship lies in the way in which Anglo-American political elites and media constructed it over time through language. It explains the Sinews of Peace speech as a historical marker for the subsequent discursive construction of a modern Anglo-American special relationship. By combining diplomatic history with Corpus Assisted Discourse Analysis (CADS), the chapter examines through government and media texts how notions of special Anglo-American relations were subsequently evolved discursively. Focusing in particular on Winston Churchill's role in the articulation and mediation of a special relationship, it demonstrates how political and media elites in early 1950s began to articulate and culturally embed the notion of a unique Anglo-American relationship. The chapter also adopts a broad analytical framework of Corpus Linguistics. Corpus Linguistics is, the study of language based on use of large collections of texts and of computational tools to interrogate them.

Winston Churchill's personal diplomacy combined indefatigable self-belief, a quest for political and strategic advantage and a commitment to peace and freedom – provided the conditions were right. Churchill was convinced that key individuals could shape positively international relations. This chapter examines an under-recognised contribution of his personal diplomacy, namely his development and use of regularised summitry between UK prime ministers and American presidents. When examining Churchill's personal diplomacy in the context of the post-WW2 Anglo-American special relationship, it needs first to be considered what imbued that diplomacy with such elite power and popular resonance on both sides of the Atlantic. Churchill's management of the war effort was inconsistent and even the impact of his oratory on the British people's will to fight has been questioned. Churchill, of course, got his opportunity to change this pattern of Anglo-American exchange when he led the Conservative Party to General Election victory in October 1951.