As the US marks 250, does the special relationship still exist – or is the UK just irrelevant?

The gap between America and Britain has grown economically as Trump asserts ‘the UK is dying’. Culturally, however, it’s a different story

On 1 June 1785 John Adams travelled to London to become the first US ambassador to Britain, in which capacity he was to meet George III. By his own admission, Adams trembled at the encounter. After all, it had been less than a decade since he helped Thomas Jefferson write the Declaration of Independence denouncing the king as an absolute “tyrant” who had “plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people”.

A trepidatious Adams trudged through the London drizzle to St James’s Palace, where he presented his credentials to King George. He bowed three times, then declared he would be “the happiest of men if I can be instrumental in recommending my country more and more to your Majesty’s royal benevolence”.

Adams’ brief speech was a lesson in self-abnegation on behalf of a people who had not only defeated the British just two years previously but had lost 25,000 combatants in the effort. Despite the bloodletting of the Battles of Long Island and Camden, the torturous winters of Valley Forge and Morristown, Adams still had it in him to lavish praise upon the vanquished enemy.

Two hundred and fifty years later, that melding of opposites – innate supremacy in victory, joined with obsequiousness towards Britain’s old world traditions – is still very much in evidence in the US. The duality has a new champion in Adams’s successor by 43 and 45 presidencies: Donald Trump.

The president did not bow once to King Charles and Queen Camilla on their recent state visit to Washington (Charles got a brisk handshake, Camilla a peck on the cheek from Melania). In every other respect, Trump’s display of fawning would have made even Adams blush.

Welcoming the couple to the White House, Trump invoked that well-worn phrase “the special relationship”, and said that in the centuries since independence “Americans have had no closer friends than the British”.

Yet, almost in the same breath, Trump has repeatedly ridiculed the current UK prime minister, Keir Starmer. He has belittled him as “not Winston Churchill”, over his refusal to engage British forces in Trump’s war with Iran.

With Starmer’s upcoming departure from office and likely replacement by Andy Burnham, Trump has bestowed pity on a country that in his hyperbolic view is on life support. “The UK is dying,” he memorably said.

As America marks its 250th birthday, such conflicting emotions towards what Jefferson called the “mother country” remain unresolved. Is Britain America’s best buddy? Or is it a joke, that small island somewhere across the pond withering into irrelevance?

In his framing of the 250th anniversary, Trump has emphasised two things. First, and foremost, he has presented the milestone as a celebration of his own greatness.

Second, less predictably, he has been eager to remind Americans of their prowess in defeating the British in 1783. His ode to the subject, six giant “freedom trucks” traversing the country telling the story of the war of independence, is an elaborate exercise in rubbing Britain’s nose in it, on 18 wheels.

The timing of the trucks and their paean to America’s founding victory is perhaps fortuitous for Trump, given that the president has led the country back into a war that he appears incapable of winning or ending. “It’s very nice when you can show that Uncle Sam has beaten off John Bull,” said David Reynolds, an historian at Christ College, Cambridge and author of America: Empire of Liberty.

Reynolds added, though, that Trump’s gloating lacks important historical context. “If you ask the question, which Trump doesn’t, why America won the war of independence, it’s because Britain lost control of the Atlantic against a coalition of enemy states, in particular the French and Dutch.”

Awkward truths aside, there’s another question being asked at the 250th: does America even care about the UK? For Simon Johnson, a Nobel laureate in economics at MIT who was born and raised in Sheffield in the north of England and has spent the past 41 years in the US, the prevailing attitude among Americans towards his old home is indifference.

“I think the US is a bit oblivious,” he said. “They don’t pay a lot of attention to the UK.”

Johnson has been reminded of that disengagement in recent weeks by the confusion surrounding the World Cup among his American friends. “Why does Scotland have its own team?” they say; “Is there a British soccer squad?”

He puts such lack of awareness about the outside world, the UK included, down to American exceptionalism and the insularity it invokes. But as a professor in entrepreneurship, Johnson thinks that the concept of exceptionalism can sometimes be overblown.

Take the current space race, which is commonly presented in the US as the work of individual billionaire tycoons like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. In fact, space exploration has been revived through what Johnson calls a “massive public-private partnership, supported with massive Nasa subsidies, anchored by the state”.

And that makes it much more comparable with similar approaches in the UK. “There are definitely parallels with the UK, which has very good public-private combinations looking for creative solutions.”

The gap in perception has only grown in recent years as America has relatively outperformed Britain on basic economic indicators. Both countries have suffered greatly from the fallout of the 2007 financial crash, which Johnson believes is behind much of the political grouchiness in America today.

But in the two decades since, the US has pulled away from the UK. While per capita GDP, according to World Bank figures, continued to rise in the US from $48,000 in 2007 to $85,000 in 2024 (in today’s dollar value), in the UK, compounded by Brexit, it stagnated, rising from $51,000 to just $53,000.

The same pattern can be seen in military power. Though a Ukraine effect has seen Britain boost its military spending, the US will still pump almost 10 times as much into its armed forces this year – $921bn compared to $94bn in the UK.

“Anybody can see that the UK doesn’t have the clout in the US that it used to, that’s a fact of life,” Reynolds said. “There’s been a growing sense of British subordination, of Britain on the slide into close to diplomatic marginality.”

On the cultural level, though, the historian thinks there’s a different story to be told. “There’s an assumption that, yes, the Americans have the power, but we have the savior faire. As Lord Halifax supposedly told Lord Keynes in Washington in 1945, ‘It’s true they have the money bags, but we have all the brains’.”

The idea that, culturally, Britons are punching above their weight is something that Joanna Coles has reflected on since she moved to the States in 1997. Her transatlantic journey took her from Otley, West Yorkshire in the UK to the Guardian’s offices in London and New York, and from there through a role as chief content officer of Hearst Magazines to her current position overseeing the the Daily Beast, which she co-owns and where she is head of all content.

Coles points to Hollywood as a case in point. She ranks Christopher Nolan, whose The Odyssey will be a summer blockbuster, as “the most influential and important director in Hollywood right now, bar none. What’s interesting about him is the scale of his ambition. He’s taking the mantle from Spielberg.”

Then there’s a younger generation of British talent starting to make waves. Emerald Fennell, with Saltburn and Wuthering Heights already under her director’s belt, appears unstoppable, while on the acting front Coles name-checks Florence Pugh, Benedict Cumberbatch, and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (Rad)-trained Cynthia Erivo, “who has erupted as a huge star”.

There’s a similar argument to be made about the small screen. Two of the recent monster shows from HBO had British creators, Jesse Armstrong’s Succession and Industry from the duo Mickey Down and Konrad Kay. UK-born John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight continues to hold a special place in the hearts of late-night viewers.

Coles puts the arguably disproportionate importance of British cultural figures in the US partly down, paradoxically, to the UK’s diminutive size. “Britain is a small country whose cultural industries have always looked outwards. Ambitious British talent has long understood that success often means crossing the Atlantic.”

There’s also something about the centuries over which Britons have been drilled to use words as instruments – or weapons. She thinks of Prime Minister’s Questions, the weekly parliamentary brouhaha when politicians mercilessly hurl verbal lances at each other.

“Look at broadcasting, look at theater. Britain has an unusually dense ecosystem of elite universities, world-class drama schools, the BBC, and a national culture that prizes wit, irony, and storytelling which all play well over here.”

You could say the same about the US media, which is having something of a British moment as the country turns 250.

Coles’s digital news site, the Daily Beast, was founded by one of the powerhouses of British cultural influence in America, Tina Brown, who single-handedly imported a generation of UK talent into America when she edited Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. Even the title of the Daily Beast is drawn from an Evelyn Waugh novel, Scoop, which satirises Fleet Street, the spiritual London home of the British press.

Other Britons have been entrusted with some of America’s most revered media titles. There’s Emma Tucker, who has shaken the dust off the Wall Street Journal as editor-in-chief, boosting both its vitality and its must-read relevance in the age of Trump.

There’s John Micklethwait, bestowed by Michael Bloomberg with leadership of Bloomberg News. And Keith Poole, hired by Rupert Murdoch in a similarly weighty role over the New York Post group.

As the Guardian has reported, Bari Weiss, the contentious anti-woke editor-in-chief of CBS News, has gone on a recent fishing expedition to the UK in search of new on-air and journalistic talent. Should David Ellison, the technology tycoon who controls Paramount, complete the merger with Warner Bros Discovery, and as expected place CNN at least partially under Weiss’ control, that could set up an illuminating clash between Weiss and CNN’s chief executive Mark Thompson, the former director general of the BBC.

It’s not that the injection of British talent is always successful, far from it. Jeff Bezos placed the fate of one of America’s most venerable titles, the Washington Post, in the care of Will Lewis, a former editor of London’s the Daily Telegraph and later chief executive of Dow Jones.

Lewis’s stint as publisher of the Post was, as NPR’s media correspondent, David Folkenflik, recalls, “as disastrous as I could imagine. It’s not that Lewis screwed up everything he touched, but to a lot of people it sure felt like that.”

The paper is still reeling from the hundreds of employees who were laid off under Lewis in February, followed days later by his abrupt, and unlamented, departure.

For Folkenflik, an anglophile who spent part of his childhood in the UK and has written about the British phone hacking scandal in his book Murdoch’s World, the prevalence of so many Britons across the US cultural landscape tells us less about British talent than about America’s confidence levels as the country stumbles into its big birthday.

“At a time of ideological uncertainty, when our standing is shaky and our groundings unclear, it’s not surprising to me that our institutions look east,” Folkenflik said. “They are in search of that aura of clarity that the Brits have from a distance – whether or not it holds up.”