U.S.–Britain Relations

No country shaped the United States more than Great Britain — first as the empire it was born inside, then as the enemy it fought to leave, and finally as the ally it would stand beside in the twentieth century's largest wars. The American relationship with Britain is the story of a colony that broke violently from its parent, spent two generations as a wary rival, and then drew so close that statesmen on both sides began calling it a "special relationship." Few reversals in diplomatic history are so complete.

The rupture came first. Thirteen colonies that had fought alongside British regulars in the French and Indian War turned against the Crown a decade later over taxation and self-rule, and the American Revolution made independence a fact that the Treaty of Paris confirmed in 1783. The wound did not heal quickly. The young republic and its former ruler clashed again in the War of 1812 — British troops burned the new capital, including the President's House — before the Treaty of Ghent restored an uneasy peace and, with it, the beginnings of a durable one.

Through the nineteenth century the two settled their quarrels at the negotiating table rather than the battlefield. They divided the Pacific Northwest peacefully in the 1846 Oregon Treaty, arbitrated disputes left over from the Civil War, and gradually discovered how much they shared: a language, a legal tradition, and a growing web of trade and investment. Britain remained the dominant world power and America the rising one, but the rivalry cooled into something closer to partnership as the century turned.

The twentieth century sealed the bond. The United States entered both World Wars on Britain's side, and the Lend-Lease Act of 1941 made America the "arsenal of democracy" before it had fired a shot. Out of that wartime cooperation came the NATO alliance and a postwar order the two powers built together. The relationship has had its strains, but no other ally has been so consistently close — the product of a history that began in rebellion and ended in alliance.