I doubt this week’s royal visit by Charles III to Washington will do anything to change that. The first visit to the United States by a reigning monarch since 2007, it is to mark this year’s 250th anniversary of American independence — their repudiation of our Crown. The actual Horrible Histories version of these events was in the style of football commentary, naturally featuring George III. I think overall it manages to ridicule everyone equally. But wondering how they’d portray the meeting between Trump and Charles III brought home to me how differently Brits and Americans still feel about many aspects of the transatlantic relationship.

For a central theme of British history, over the period most frequently covered by Horrible Histories, was the tendency of British people to leave Britain and set up home literally anywhere else around the world. The aggregate result was, for a long time, a global empire comprising both extended-family settler states and also colonial holdings. Meanwhile the particular, ambivalent “specialness” of Britain’s relationship with America stems both from this common genealogical story, and also from America’s later role in bringing that empire to an end.

In its aftermath, Britain’s self-image and economic survival has been shored up from three directions: closer economic ties with Europe, vague ties of (sometimes) goodwill with a post-imperial “Commonwealth”, and a close, if subordinate, military relationship with the USA. For a long time, this trifecta afforded British grandees more than enough opportunities to think and act internationally, as if Great Britain were still a global imperial power. But as the long 20th century comes to an end, it’s growing increasingly clear that the settlement won’t hold much longer.

In extended families, there are always topics you shouldn’t raise over Christmas dinner. In this case, the most sensitive is the British Empire, and America’s role in dismantling it. This story has been sanitized over the generations, but my step-grandfather, an RAF pilot and Colditz captive, felt it viscerally and hated Americans. I never really understood why. Hadn’t they fought alongside us in the war? Perhaps, I wondered, it was because American soldiers had liberated him from Colditz before he could put his escape plan into action, and so spoiled his fun?

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It was only recently that I learned more about the punitive terms of US wartime loans to Britain, and the way US politicians demanded an end to Britain’s “imperial preference” trade protectionism as a condition of wartime assistance. From a US perspective, this was all robust realpolitik aimed at bolstering the US national interest. From a British one, it weakened Britain economically and helped foster the disintegration of the British Empire, which had been a US foreign policy aim from Woodrow Wilson onward. In this context, I’ve come to wonder if my step-grandfather, an upper-class Englishman, spoke that way about America because he understood that our cousins across the Atlantic had both aided Britain in the Second World War, and also played a key role in ending the empire he’d been raised to govern.

In turn, it was this same process of disintegration that later prompted the famous line uttered in 1962 by Dean Acheson, erstwhile US Secretary of State, about how Britain had “lost an empire and not yet found a role”. Acheson made the remark at a West Point Military Academy conference, in which he predicted that Britain would need to move toward Europe. This would be necessary, Acheson said, because seeking to expand our influence via the Commonwealth and “special relationship” with the USA wasn’t enough to make Britain a “power” in our own right. In particular, he thought, Britain had tried to carve out a role on the basis of “being the head of a commonwealth which has no political structure or unity or strength and enjoys a fragile and precarious economic relationship”. This role, he thought, was “about played out”, and what would most likely replace it would be closer union with Europe.

What Acheson left out of this is that British politicians came to believe we needed closer union with Europe because imperial preference had been forcibly ended, in favor of the GATT. The integration with Europe that Acheson predicted wasn’t realized until 1973, when Britain joined the Common Market. But by that point it was viewed as an alternative trading bloc to replace the erstwhile imperial one (a decision that would, in turn, have further negative consequences for British manufacturing).

Three years later, and one year after the referendum that confirmed Britain’s EEC membership, Elizabeth II visited the USA to mark the bicentennial of America’s independence from the British Empire. In her address, she cited the Commonwealth whose geopolitical force Acheson dismissed so brutally, as an example of the positive influence America had exerted on Britain. For, she said, America taught us the moral importance of freeing peoples to govern themselves. As she put it: “Without that great act in the cause of liberty performed in Independence Hall two hundred years ago, we could never have transformed an Empire into a Commonwealth!”

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I wondered, on reading this, whether she intended the ironic subtext. We might also wonder if the point when the empire disintegrated is also the one where British monarchs became slightly ridiculous, as well as historically important. Either way, we very much do have the USA to thank for the Empire having become a Commonwealth. Indeed, when it was formed, the point of the Commonwealth was mostly to give the formerly imperial British monarch somewhere to visit, other than bits of the British Isles. As critics pointed out at the time, including Acheson, as a group it was never cohesive. These days, at least some of its members are so far from friendly they’ve taken to voting via the UN for Britain to send them money.

But is it time to revisit our wider alliances? In its current form, the Commonwealth has proved too internally contradictory to be supportive; but America’s rival internationalist body, the UN, itself now also feels a relic of the past. This year, Trump withdrew US funding and membership from multiple UN-affiliated organizations, and this is hardly the only recent indicator that the postwar age of internationalism is coming to an end. History is back, sometimes horribly so.

Meanwhile Britain is, to put it mildly, not well-placed for balance-of-power games. We import too much of our food and energy, and our military is down to three men and a popgun. Everyone in Europe hates us for Brexit, and everyone in Britain hates Trump for tariffs, Greenland, Iran, petrol prices, and killing the housing market, to name but a few. This is all further complicated by a Net Zero commitment that has left Britain deeply reliant on China, a fact we don’t really talk about: we just wave through the London super-embassy with the secret underground rooms a few feet from important data cables full of sensitive City messages.

But we’ve come back from worse. On the occasion of Elizabeth’s 1976 visit, to mark a major anniversary of this most testy and rivalrous of special relationships, we were as gravely in the doldrums as we are today. Then, as now, we had Belfast car bombs, failing utilities, and an overwhelming sense of government sclerosis. Our transatlantic cousins had would-be Presidential assassins too: security for the Queen was beefed up in the wake of two attempts to murder President Gerald Ford in 1975.

And yet eventually the sclerosis ended. A few years later, a radical government was elected and (even if improvements were unevenly distributed) the country changed. So for those on either side of the pond now tempted to paint Britain in shades of disaster: it wasn’t all over then, and I doubt it is now. Likewise, notwithstanding the “No Kings” boomers and their fears of Orange Caesar, I fully expect the American republic to survive its 250th anniversary as much a republic as ever.

But not everything is the same as it was in 1976. In Britain, we are militarily much weaker. Every indicator is that this will matter as time goes on. But there are deep historic reasons to feel nervous about closer military cooperation with Europe. There are also more recent, Iraq and Afghanistan-shaped ones for feeling nervous about leaning too far toward America. With this in mind, I wonder if we haven’t been too quick to forget about, or dismiss, the friendship of our other cousins: those who, like America, had their roots in Britain’s imperial expansion and have since become polities in their own right.

Britain will surely continue to need and feel a deep kinship with America, one that goes well beyond bare political calculation. But as postwar history attests, we also sometimes have divergent interests, not just in the distant past of 1776 but in the present era too. So in the short term we must hope that Charles III has the wit and grace to adapt to his new role as emollient regal vanguard for Britain’s new small-power politics, and that in this role he inclines more toward important than slightly ridiculous.

Meanwhile, though, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand all remain within the Commonwealth. These are also globe-spanning special relationships and deep ties that Britain might benefit from reinforcing. As history rumbles back into gear, sometimes horribly, we might all be relieved to ease the pressure on the American special relationship, by remembering there are other branches of the extended family too. Even if that that sometimes means getting into trouble with the cousins Down Under as well, for making songs about them escaping from prison disguised as kangaroos.

Back then, after all, the United Kingdom was a fairly prosperous, settled nation, and would soon be on the winning side of the Cold War. As for Nigeria? A dictatorship with some crude oil. Now, of course, everything has changed. As Elizabeth’s son welcomes Bola Tinubu today, it’s Nigeria, not Britain, that holds the best cards. Indeed the UK’s long-term prospects feel rather uncertain — precisely why courting Nigeria, and countries like it, is so important to its future.

For much of the post-Cold War period, Britain and its Western allies could sort the world into two broad zones: stable and unstable. In the stable countries, money was safe, governments were predictable and the future discernible enough for long-term bets. In the unstable places, governance was erratic, investment risky, and violence never far off. This mental mapping had real consequences, shaping where capital, attention and diplomatic respect all flowed.

Nigeria long sat on the wrong side of that divide. With Marxist-Leninism just about still a going concern, the anti-communist Babangida was an important friend to have, likely explaining the 1989 state visit. At the same time, though, Nigeria’s economy was taken far less seriously. Through the Eighties and Nineties, after all, the country lurched through coups, aborted transitions and IMF austerity schemes, while its politicians acquired a reputation for predation and volatility. As late as 2016, David Cameron was filmed describing Nigeria as a “fantastically corrupt” country.

Over recent years, of course, our neat ideas of stability and corruption have started to collapse. A major war has raged on European soil for four years now, with the Baltics and Poland fearing for their very sovereignty. The Gulf, long an oasis of affluent calm, suddenly looks much less secure. America, hitherto the chief guarantor of Western stability, is now a country whose Capitol can be stormed by an angry mob, and whose president can levy tariffs or launch foreign adventures overnight. As for Britain, one-in-three Britons now believe civil war could occur here in the next decade.

This does not mean that Britain or America are “just like” Nigeria. But it does mean that disorder, or at least the serious prospect of it, is no longer something that simply happens over there. That in turn changes the relative position of countries like Nigeria. Their problems hardly vanish, but they no longer look like uniquely disqualifying flaws in an otherwise ordered world. Now, Britain’s Business and Trade Secretary Peter Kyle says that “the UK and Nigeria share a belief in the power of enterprise, innovation and education” — with a new strategic partnership between the two countries promising a flourishing of finance and fintech jobs.

To be clear, Nigeria still remains a difficult, exasperating country, whose promise has long been squandered by its own elites. Tinubu himself is hardly the personification of clean government, with allegations of corruption trailing him throughout his career. In this, Nigeria’s president shares much with the country’s broad political class. For instance, a court in London is currently hearing bribery charges against Diezani Alison-Madueke, Nigeria’s former petroleum minister, who supposedly spent £2 million at Harrods gotten from industry figures keen on government contracts.

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Meanwhile, though wealthier now than they were in 1989, most Nigerians remain poor, even as the state struggles to deal with a plethora of jihadist terrorists and criminal gangs. Kidnapping for ransom is so rife that it’s become a multimillion dollar industry of its own. The country’s size and natural resources have often made outsiders assume its eventual success is somehow inevitable. It never was — and isn’t now.

Yet it’s also true that Tinubu’s government, in power since 2023, has done something previous Nigerian administrations long avoided: embarking on reforms that acknowledged the country’s economic model was bust. Oil rents, import dependence, the sheer hustle of its citizens — none of these make an advanced economy. The broad direction of Tinubu’s changes, including lifting fuel subsidies and generally liberalizing the economy, have won praise from the IMF and World Bank. This matters not because their approval is all that matters, but because many Nigerians agree that the old system was unsustainable. The year before they were removed, the fuel subsidies consumed a quarter of Nigeria’s budget.

What many Nigerians rightly complain about is the brutal way in which Tinubu’s reforms were implemented. For instance, the sudden removal of fuel subsidies has drastically raised costs, with some basic staples now costing two or three times what they used to. That’s a big deal in a country where poor households spend up to 70% of their income on food. In other words, then, measures that look rational on an IMF spreadsheet can feel like punishment to regular citizens, especially if they’re already distrustful of their rulers. With 8-in-10 Nigerians expressing little to no trust in Tinubu’s government, he certainly has his work cut out for him.

Yet if Tinubu’s reforms succeed, Nigeria’s strategic position offers reasons to cheer. Aside from the country’s transition to democracy, the country’s GDP has also jumped eightfold since 1989, while its population has tripled to around 230 million, roughly 60% of whom are under 25. This makes Nigeria one of the youngest nations in the world, in sharp contrast to the aging societies of Britain and the wider West. That youthfulness offers both opportunities and risks in a land where some estimates put youth unemployment at around 50%. Fail to create enough jobs and the government is in trouble.

Nonetheless, Nigeria’s youthfulness remains a strategic fact. And besides, it has other strengths Britain can only dream of. Alongside the crude oil reserves it’s long been famous for — especially helpful given events in the Middle East — Nigeria also enjoys significant deposits of lithium, beryllium, zinc and other metals critical to technology supply chains. Britain needs access to critical minerals to power its renewable, high-tech and defense industries, even as it actively seeks to “full-proof” its supply chain over the years ahead.

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Britain has more basic reasons to cultivate economic ties with Africa’s most populous nation too. Since 2008, its GDP per capita growth has fallen to a sluggish 0.46% per year, hardly enough to cover the galloping rise in living costs. The country’s long-run economic story is hardly cheering either. In that context, a fast-growing market of over 200 million people looks less like a realpolitik ally — and more like an opportunity. Britain and Nigeria already do about £8 billion of trade a year, and British ministers have spent the last two years pushing new agreements in legal services, finance, education and energy. And why not? This is precisely the kind of fast-growing, English-speaking market Britain cannot afford to dismiss.

The feeling is mutual. For decades, and despite being such a vast oil producer, Nigeria imported much of the refined petroleum it consumed: its own state-run refineries barely functioned. Now, though, Aliko Dangote, Nigeria and Africa’s richest man, has built one of the world’s largest oil refineries in Lagos, spearheading investments in steel as part of a broader industrialization push. These are the most serious recent attempts to drag Nigeria up the value chain, and Britain can prod things along with targeted investment.

All the while, Nigerian immigration to the UK, reckoned to be around 300,000 over the last five years, means that the country’s cultural influence has blossomed too. Afrobeats stars now fill arenas and top music charts the world over, while the Nigerian diaspora is helping shape British society from KSI to Bukayo Saka — to Kemi Badenoch.

Altogether, then, it’s clear that Britain needs meaningful relationships in the rising global south, relationships based on more than postcolonial guilt, paternalism or nostalgia. In our increasingly dangerous geopolitical age, friendship is not ornamental. Rather, it shapes supply chains, diplomatic leverage and investment decisions. Britain can no longer simply announce its importance everywhere. It has to work out where history, language, and diaspora networks give it a real foothold, then build out from there.

Nigeria is one of those places. And while some on the fringes of British politics — both the radical Right and Left — are uncomfortable with that fact, Nigerians themselves seem far more relaxed. As a 2020 Ipsos survey of young Nigerians found, Britain’s people, government and institutions are the most trusted among foreign nations. Tinubu’s office has described Nigeria and Britain as sharing a “special bond”, while many wealthy Nigerians send their children to British universities, maintain homes here, and consider London a serious place to do business. Nigerians who live or spend most of their time in Nigeria itself have little time for the performative anti-colonial waxing some British-Nigerians indulge in here.

That, in turn, should prompt a change in British sensibility. A mature relationship with Nigeria cannot be conducted as though London still dispenses order while Nigeria merely receives it. The old imperial habit — part condescension, part nostalgia — is now not only unattractive but also impractical. If Nigerians are prepared to engage Britain as an equal, Britain will have to learn to reciprocate.

Whitehall is already learning these lessons in its dealings with countries like India, where capital, demography and strategic leverage increasingly matter more than inherited assumptions of rank. That is likely to become one of the century’s governing patterns: former imperial subjects, or once dismissed peripheries, gaining influence as Western states lose their monopoly on confidence. The sensible response is neither sentimentality nor resentment, but realism.