PHOTO: Ben Wellings, adapted by Jeremy Newcombe from Steven Miller on Flickr and Matthew Hunt on Wikimedia Commons
In an exclusive interview with Pivot, Ben Wellings discusses the historical significance of the “special relationship” between the United States and the United Kingdom as further conflict looms in the Middle East. Deeply connected to the current politics of the ‘Anglosphere’, Ben Wellings analyses how the foreign policy of countries like Australia and the UK have shifted in reaction to the current Iran conflict and the foreign policy of the second Donald Trump presidency in the US.
Ben Wellings is an Associate Professor at Monash University’s School of Politics and International Relations. His expertise is around the politics of nationalism in the United Kingdom and Europe, as well as the politics of the Anglosphere. He has regularly given comments for national and international media such as the ABC, BBC and Al-Jazeera and has presented his research to the Australian Government and NATO.
Rahul: With the Iran war going on, the special relationship between the US and the UK has been tested in recent weeks and months. What are the origins of the UK-US special relationship and how influential has this relationship historically been in geopolitics?
Depending on various perspectives on this, either it is a product of the Second World War or it goes back to the English and British colonisation of North America. There are various ways different people of different political persuasions will interpret that, and I would say that the more on the right of the political spectrum you are, you’re more likely to see this [relationship] as part of a longer and deeper history than if you were on the left of the political spectrum.
For me, I would say it is a product of the Second World War — without discounting some of the longer links.
But you have to remember, of course, that the United States came out of a war with the United Kingdom in the late 18th century but actually Britain and the US fought a war in 1812 as well. The kind of close collaboration that we got used to during the Second World War and then in the Cold War could not really have been foreseen if we’d been looking at international relations at the end of the 19th century, when these countries almost went to war again over Venezuela. The American Civil War in the mid-1860s was another point of tension, when the Southern Confederacy was really pressuring the British to join on their side and there was a lot of support in British elite circles that this would be a way of balancing the growing power of the US by supporting a breakaway group. It never came to pass, but there were significant tensions at sea over various maritime incidents as well.
You couldn’t necessarily foretell that the US would join the British and the French in the First World War either, until German submarine warfare kind of scored an own goal and forced American opinion eventually. But then we had a period of isolation. When the special relationship really has some actual kind of meaning is after the Americans join the fight against Germany in 1941, and that lasts up until about the Suez Crisis in 1956, which is another low-point in Anglo-US relations.
PHOTO: UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill and US President Franklin D Roosevelt in 1941, UK Government on Wikimedia Commons
You might have heard the Suez Crisis referred to in the current context of what’s happening in the Strait of Hormuz. The Suez Crisis was a collusion between the British and the French and the Israelis to allow the British and French to retake the nationalised Suez Canal from General Nasser’s Egypt. The idea was that the Israelis would invade Egypt and then the British and the French would step in on the pretext of separating the warring parties but take over the Canal again — which is in their interests — but they didn’t tell the Americans. So again it’s not consulting your allies, particularly your key allies.
That was a low point and it seemed to underscore the fact that the British were the junior partner, because the junior partnership was developed in the Cold War context and in particular the British taking US nuclear technology from the US. On the one hand you can say that is an amazingly close relationship — that if you’re going to buy that kind of technology, then that suggests a kind of a closeness — and there is truth in that. On the other hand, it does mean the British depended on this — whatever “we” keep telling ourselves about the joint nature of this.
So, that is probably a long answer to say that I think the special relationship comes out of the Second World War. It’s pushed along by the Cold War. It’s pushed along by the War on Terror. But, at the same time as these events bring the United States and Britain close together, there are more recent trends that are pulling them further apart. And particularly in this decade. We’ve seen that the MAGA US is very soft on Russia and is suspicious of Ukraine, versus British alignment with Western European powers and Poland in saying that Russia is the main threat.
I think that the America First impulses and this sort of isolationism takes us back more toward an interwar US that is separate from, and not necessarily closely aligned with, Britain and the rest of Europe. So we might be seeing the special relationship move into where there’s nothing too special about it. There may not even be a special relationship depending on how things develop.
Rahul: You briefly alluded to the rise of MAGA in the US. Has the special relationship already degraded before Iran? Was the relationship already on thin ice before this current conflict?
Yes is the short answer.
But there are always people who questioned whether a close relationship with the US after the Second World War was in Britain’s interests. Now, I would say that was a minority position, but a significant minority, or significant figures, have put that forward.
For example, the left wing of the Labour Party in the UK has always been sceptical about supporting the US, particularly during the Cold War when it was so obviously opposed to left-wing movements. Obviously the left of the Labour Party was sensitive to that. You can even find occasional figures on the right — it’s far less common, but they are there in that some influential figures on the right also think that Britain should be on its own; that “we” didn’t need to be with Europe but “we” didn’t need to be with the US either.
Although it’s generally true that NATO membership was never as contentious as EU membership, you can find people that hold to that view. I think that something like the Iraq War — when the UK under the Labour Blair government aligned with the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 — that put a lot of people off the special relationship. What I would say is that the current issues with the US-Israeli attack on Iran is that the interests of the UK and the US were diverging already. And it comes with some things like “What’s the purpose of NATO?”; if there are institutional or treaty-based vehicles for that kind of collaboration.
NATO is of course bigger than the US-UK special relationship, although as one of three nuclear powers in NATO, Britain is very important in that regard. I suppose the point is that recent events are exacerbating longer-term trends.
Jeremy: How has the conflict in Iran further degraded the special relationship? Is it just temporary or more permanent?
PHOTO: Keir Starmer and Donald Trump at the White House in 2025, The White House on Wikimedia Commons
The thing that we have to consider is the lack of support the UK has given to the US. Now that frames it in a way that sounds like they should give support, and some people in the UK on the conservative side of politics are saying that they should have given this kind of support.
There’s something here about the capriciousness of Trump which is slightly different to MAGA. There’s the way that the president, on the one hand, thinks. A few months ago, he thought Britain was really good, and that’s partly because Trump was given a state visit, and King Charles is going to visit Washington soon. That level of diplomacy is trying to overcome much deeper rifts and I think it’s kind of interesting [to watch].
Keir Starmer is not popular in the UK, but one thing he is popular for is standing up to Trump. There’s some way that the public recognises the work that he is doing in managing that relationship, and by that relationship we mean the US-UK relationship that underpins it.
To your question about “is this irreversible”, or, let’s imagine that a Democrat came in, would it all be able to be repaired? Possibly. But, like I said, the trend of the US wanting NATO partners to spend more on defense has been there for quite some time. It was there under Obama. I think it’s also about Britain’s position vis-a-vis the EU and European partners. There may just be that the confrontation with Russia is pushing the UK more towards European perspectives than Anglo-US ones. So I think that maybe the trends are in that direction, we’d have to get quite a radical change in the US to swing things around from where they are now.
Jeremy: We’d like to bring this further to the Anglosphere. Can we get a brief introduction to the Anglosphere, its impact on modern day geopolitics, and do Anglosphere countries like Australia and Canada view it as largely symbolic or more determinative in their relationships?
The Anglosphere is an idea on the right of politics that has been growing since about 1999. It has been particularly influential in the 2010s in giving politicians on the right of politics an alternative world in which to imagine themselves operating in — in particular in the UK because it suggested there was a trading future outside of the EU for the UK. And Brexit I would say is one of its chief successes in as much as it was part of an elite project, if not a mass concern, during that whole effort to get the United Kingdom to leave the EU. So, it typically consists of — or in its early formulations this century — five countries: the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand. Sometimes other English-speaking countries are thrown in — India, Singapore in particular — so it’s very malleable. It’s still popular if you read the thinking right-wing press, in The Spectator and other outlets like Quadrant in Australia. It’s important there and people generally accept it to be a self-evident truth: the central claim of the Anglosphere is that the world is safer and better when English-speaking countries act in concert. It’s very tied to free trade. So, the kind of tariffs, the America First ideas and so on have disrupted the Anglosphere.
PHOTO: The five states that constitute the ‘Anglosphere’ as a geopolitical concept, created by Rahul Deepak Kumar on mapchart.net
Your question was about whether other countries see it as symbolic. I don’t think they see it as symbolic. It’s kind of ideational. It’s more about assumptions of the way to order international and domestic politics. It comes with a whole sort of dose of slightly hubristic notions that the English-speaking people invented the modern world, through the spread of Empire and so on, and, on balance, it was a good thing that they spread free trade and everyone on balance got better off.
So, it had its heyday in that period of neoliberal globalisation, sometimes called ‘Anglobalisation’ for that reason, in the 2000s — the first two decades of this century. People in Australia like Tony Abbott are a key proponent of this, and so if you imagine that wing of the Liberal Party — it wouldn’t be a contentious thing to say it exists. But other people don’t believe it exists. I think that it has perhaps more validity in shaping decisions in international relations than perhaps was given credence. But nonetheless, it’s very much a kind of an ideational construct of what is itself the transnational right — these members of different political parties in different countries — they talk to each other, they go to each other’s conferences, they share policy ideas, they share tactics and so on. So it’s actually quite a rich ecosystem.
If we go back to the opening question about the special relationship, there is kind of a truth that English-speaking countries happened to sort of think in quite similar ways. America in the 19th century was separate to this because this was a conversation within the settler-colonies of the British Empire, and so a lot of it is about the British Empire and the British Empire being succeeded as the global hegemon by the United States in that interwar period. In terms of its ideational genealogies though, it has links with something called Anglo-Saxonism, which was a sort of 19th century racialised way of understanding why certain countries seem to be more powerful than others. And it also links to something Winston Churchill dubbed the ‘English-speaking peoples’, and this is kind of where Australia and New Zealand and Canada would come into this, but at its core was the special relationship. But also what’s merging is something called CANZUK — the idea of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK having things in common, which the war in Ukraine is kind of bringing into focus a bit: that actually US interests are not aligned here but the other four are. And that whole middle-power diplomacy that we see Mark Carney leading — his speech at Davos, his trip here, his speech to the Parliament — that all plays into that. So the Anglosphere is very much ideational rather than actual — it does have kind of an institutional expression in the ‘Five Eyes’ intelligence sharing, but it’s a malleable concept and it shifts and changes and it’s undergoing quite a bit of change in this decade.
Rahul: That was really interesting. And it was interesting you mentioned CANZUK as well and how these countries have interests which are divergent to the US, which leads me to my next question. How do Australia and the UK see themselves in the face of a more hostile ‘America First’ USA? We saw Keir Starmer’s organised coalition of 40 countries aiming to open up the Strait of Hormuz, which includes Australia but notthe USA interestingly enough. Is this representative of a change in British and Australian attitudes regarding Anglosphere thinking and attitudes toward the US?
What’s novel — that I’ve observed over the last week in Australia — is that leaders are not lining up to support the US in some kind of military action. And I think that impulse is not as politically ingrained in the UK as it is in Australia, but nonetheless, it’s kind of there in heavy doses. So on the one hand, you might say, “yes, you know, we can see that divergence”. But then the other thing to mention is AUKUS, because AUKUS is currently locking those three countries in very closely. So if we assume that Britain and the US are willing and capable of delivering submarines at some stage to Australia, this kind of locks these countries in.
So what I’m thinking at the moment is that there are three kinds of sub-Anglo spheres that are emerging.
There’s a MAGA Anglosphere, which is supportive of radical right politics in Europe. It’s a very much civilisational kind of discourse [around], and they don’t really say this outright, but white people being replaced by either black, brown or Jewish people. So that kind of puts us back into the Anglo-Saxonism kind of Anglosphere.
There’s the CANZUK Anglosphere, which, for reasons that you’ve just outlined, does seem to be emerging in certain areas.
And then there’s the AUKUS Anglosphere, which is the one that looks more like what people on the right of politics thought the Anglosphere would look like in the 2010s. In some sense, the announcement of AUKUS was like the high point of Anglosphere achievement in the first two decades of the 20th century. Then the war in Ukraine started to pull these countries’ interests in different directions.
Rahul: You talked about AUKUS, which was a really big domestic political issue, certainly here in Australia. What is the Anglosphere’s impact in the domestic politics of these countries? The Anglosphere, like you said, is a fundamentally conservative concept. Do you want to elaborate on that? Particularly, in domestic politics, what role does it play in, say, Reform UK or One Nation in Australia or MAGA in the US?
If you go to Angus Taylor’s speech on immigration on Monday (13 April), there was a big Anglosphere dose in that: “If you come from a liberal democracy, then you know, you’re our kind of person.” That made me sit up and think.
In terms of Reform and One Nation, because they’re sort of the radical right element of this, I would expect them to be taking their cues from MAGA. This is what I mean about there being different Anglospheres. There’s almost a centre-right that is getting pulled into the radical-right Anglosphere. There’s the MAGA Anglosphere, which is all about replacement and civilisational erasure, and that kind of headspace, which actually aligns with Russia a lot, in a funny way.
So particularly in Europe, if you’re on the radical right, you tend to support Russia. Think about the election in Hungary on Sunday (12 April). The reason that’s a big deal is because Viktor Orbán’s gone, and he got support from the MAGA presidency and Vladimir Putin, and sent his support back the other way as well. But I do think there is space for CANZUK. The centre-left don’t like the concept because of its racial connotations, but I wonder if what’s happening in the Strait of Hormuz is actually pushing centrist or centre-left governments towards some kind of closer collaboration. But that kind of CANZUK Anglosphere is going to be heavily aligned with European middle powers as well. So that might dilute the overt Anglosphere parts of that, and again, be driven in large part by Britain’s relationship with the EU.
But of course, you can see Australia signed a free trade agreement with the EU. That was years in the making, and then the breakthrough was you just need more like-minded allies.
In terms of domestic politics, these ideas that get shared around mean that a lot of the culture wars that we have that play out are taken from other English-speaking countries. There’s been a certain commonality of ideas on the left that are critical of the legacies of colonialism and imperialism, and ongoing structures of racialised domestic order.
Jeremy: It’s great that you mentioned those things Ben, because that also leads into our next question, which is that it has been said frequently that the Anglosphere is the only reliable defender of the liberal international order. You’ve mentioned Ukraine, for instance, as an inflection point. What do you think of this idea of an Anglosphere defender in the current age of Trump, who has displayed quite a bit of hostility to the liberal order?
I think that the idea was hubristic, and it relies on a very partial reading of history. It also raises the question of how great was the Anglobal order anyway, and who benefited from it. So you can always find critiques there. Of course, the idea that Britain and America are always on the side of right, is going to be heavily challenged. That’s not just to endorse views from Moscow, but a standard post-colonial critique of that kind of power would raise questions about that, ditto feminist critiques as well. Such claims should be treated with immense caution.
Ben Wellings
Ben Wellings is an Associate Professor at Monash University’s School of Politics and International Relations. His expertise is around the politics of nationalism in the United Kingdom and Europe, as well as the politics of the Anglosphere. He has regularly given comments for national and international media such as the ABC, BBC and Al-Jazeera and has presented his research to the Australian Government and NATO.
Rahul Deepak Kumar
Rahul is a 3rd year Arts/Global Studies Student, specialising in journalism and international relations. He is very interested in learning about global trends that occur on a grassroots level and how this impacts wider political structures. In particular, he is interested in post-colonial and constructivist approaches as an alternative method of understanding and analysing international relations. Rahul is also the 2026 Pivot Editor-in-Chief and thoroughly enjoys reading and editing analyses of global affairs.
Jeremy Newcombe
Jeremy is a final year Law and Arts (Economics) student. His fascination with international affairs is one shared by many: a desire to untangle the incorporeal social, political, legal and economic dynamics governing the world we have inherited. A particular interest of his is understanding the real effect of domestic and international legal systems upon the behaviour of international actors.