The news that 'some Britons' are suddenly pondering a divorce from the United States regarding their long-vaunted 'Special Relationship' is about as surprising as a drunk realizing he’s been talking to a mailbox for three hours. This supposed geopolitical alliance, which has always been less of a marriage and more of a hostage situation involving a fading aristocrat and a trigger-happy debt-collector, is finally being questioned by the very people who have spent decades polishing its tarnished brass. The British public, or at least the segment of it that hasn't completely succumbed to the lobotomy of daytime television, is allegedly wondering if severing security and intelligence ties with the U.S. might be the only way to avoid being dragged into the next American-sponsored apocalypse. It’s a quaint thought, really—like a barnacle considering a life of independence from the whale it’s currently riding into a propeller.

Let’s be clear about the 'Special Relationship.' It was a term coined by Winston Churchill back when Great Britain still had a navy and the United States hadn't yet turned the concept of democracy into a multi-billion-dollar reality TV show. For the UK, it has always been a way to maintain a shred of dignity while essentially serving as Washington’s most loyal middle-manager. For the U.S., it’s a convenient way to have a permanent aircraft carrier in the Atlantic and a friend who will always nod sagely when it’s time to invade a country that most Americans couldn't find with a map and a flashlight. Now, with the U.S. oscillating between the terrifyingly incompetent and the aggressively delusional, the British are starting to realize that being hitched to a falling star usually ends with a crater. The UK’s security establishment is looking at the American political landscape—a landscape currently resembling a dumpster fire being extinguished with gasoline—and wondering if perhaps sharing their most intimate intelligence secrets with such a volatile partner is a bad idea.

On the American side of the Atlantic, the feeling is likely one of profound indifference. Most Americans couldn't tell you who the British Prime Minister is, mostly because they change with the frequency of a spin cycle, and the general consensus is that the UK is just a rainy theme park where people have funny accents and a weird obsession with a family of expensive, ornamental figureheads. The Right sees the UK as a socialist hellscape because of their healthcare system, and the Left sees them as a colonial relic. Both sides are, for once, accidentally correct in their disdain, though they lack the intellectual depth to understand why. To suggest that the U.S. would even notice a 'divorce' is to overestimate American self-awareness. It would be like a flea announcing it’s leaving a dog; the dog might feel a slight reduction in itching, but it’s still going to keep barking at its own reflection in the sliding glass door.

The intelligence ties, specifically the 'Five Eyes' alliance, are the last remaining glue of this crumbling edifice. This is the global surveillance network where both nations agree to spy on everyone else’s citizens because doing it to their own is technically frowned upon by those dusty documents they call constitutions. If the UK were to walk away from this, they would lose access to the vast, soul-crushing data-mining machine of the NSA. In exchange, they might gain a modicum of sovereignty, but what is sovereignty to a nation that has already sold its soul to global finance and its real estate to Russian oligarchs and Chinese state enterprises? The British security apparatus is terrified that if they break up with the U.S., they’ll be left alone in a world that doesn’t particularly like them, with an EU that is still laughing at the self-inflicted wound of Brexit.

The tragedy of this 'divorce' talk is that neither party is capable of surviving alone in any meaningful way. The UK is a vestigial organ of an empire that no longer exists, and the U.S. is a hegemon in its twilight years, screaming at the sun as it sets. The British desire to 'sever ties' is a desperate attempt to reclaim some form of agency, but they are too far gone. They have tied their military, their economy, and their very identity to the American project. To leave now would be to admit that the last seventy years were a slow-motion surrender of national character. Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to treat its 'closest ally' as a junior partner whose only job is to provide a veneer of international legitimacy to whatever chaotic whim the current occupant of the White House decides to tweet at three in the morning.

In the end, this isn't a divorce; it's a murder-suicide pact that has reached the awkward phase where both participants are checking their watches. The 'Special Relationship' was always a lie told by politicians to make the decline of the West feel like a heroic collaboration. Whether the ties are severed now or in a decade is irrelevant. The reality is that both nations are circling the same drain, one with a bit more pomp and circumstance, the other with more loud noises and bright lights. They will likely stay together until the very end, if only because neither can afford the legal fees to finalize the separation, and they’ve both forgotten who actually owns the furniture in the spare room of global relevance. Humanity’s capacity for self-delusion remains its only truly infinite resource.