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

‘I think the US is a bit oblivious … They don’t pay a lot of attention to the UK.’ Illustration: Guardian Design / Getty Images View image in fullscreen ‘I think the US is a bit oblivious … They don’t pay a lot of attention to the UK.’ Illustration: Guardian Design / Getty Images 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”. View image in fullscreen Keir Starmer picks up UK-US trade deal papers dropped by Donald Trump at the G7 summit in Canada. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA 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 memor