“There are two tragedies in life,” the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw once said. “One is not to get your heart’s desire. The other is to get it.” It’s easy to see King Charles III, the longest-serving heir apparent in British history, as a tragic figure. The king waited 73 long years to ascend the royal throne. Now three-and-a-half years into the job he craved his whole life, Charles faces myriad challenges: poor health, advancing years, estrangement from his California-dwelling son, and the Epstein-sized scandal enveloping his younger brother. And now this. What should have been a pinnacle moment in his reign — a state visit to America with all the pomp and ceremony that Washington can muster — has morphed into something much more serious: a high-stakes diplomatic mission to save Britain’s most important alliance. It’s hard for Americans to appreciate the importance of the trans-Atlantic relationship in Britain. While Pete Hegseth cracks jokes about the once “big, bad Royal Navy,” Brits have long known the state of the nation’s armed forces is depressingly underpowered. But this never much mattered, given the endlessly touted “special relationship” with the United States. Images of FDR and Winston Churchill sharing cocktails; Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher locked in embrace; Bill Clinton and Tony Blair as the West’s bright young things; form part of a postwar national mythology. The bond is unbreakable, Brits have told themselves for 80 years. No nation is closer to the U.S. This special relationship — partly real, partly imagined — has allowed an entire generation in Britain to grow up feeling untouchable, safe under the impenetrable shield of the U.S. military umbrella. When anti-Brexit campaigners tried to warn in 2016 that leaving the EU would be a risk to national security, they were laughed out of town. Europe doesn't keep us safe, the Brexiteers said, convincingly. That job belongs to NATO — the most successful defensive alliance in modern history. Sure enough, Britain voted to leave the EU in June 2016. Donald Trump was elected president four months later.It’s taken another decade of turmoil to bring us to this point, but NATO now looks holed below the water line. It’s a “paper tiger,” Trump has said repeatedly over recent weeks, dropping hint after hint that he may no longer adhere to NATO’s central tenet — that an attack on any one of its members is an attack on… [TheTopNews] Read More.
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