While seeking the potential upside in the new relationship, May's successor would be wise not to overestimate the UK's ability to shape US power, nor be blind to the fact that Trump's "America First" outlook may ultimately care little for core UK interests, despite his avowed
Anglophilia.
Interestingly enough, not only did the two share a translocal feeling of solidarity with Jews in distress but also a certain sentimental
Anglophilia, a deep-seated feeling that justice is not a universally held value but one of the noble virtues of Britain as they imagined it--a place of genteel tradition, fair play, stable parliamentary institutions, liberal values, and empire.
Such attitudes led eventually to a strong sentiment of
Anglophilia within America's WASP elite, reflected in such educational institutions as Groton School, which produced such elitists as FDR, Sumner Welles, Dean Acheson, Averell Harriman, and numerous Bundys, Morgans, Whitneys, Dillons, and lesser Roosevelts.
First, some wild speculation: Maybe the level of
Anglophilia among Americans has risen quite a bit since 2011.
Historically, Arianne Chernock, assistant professor of modern British history at Boston University, notes that "
Anglophilia" is nothing new to America.
Anglophilia in Somaliland is vanishing for the UK's ignorance of the close ties between the two nations.
Thus Claudia Johnson, eminent Austen scholar and, more than once, revered JASNA plenary speaker, refers at length in her pioneering 1997 essay, "Austen Cults and Cultures," to what she calls the ludic enthusiasm of these amateur reading clubs [like JAS and JASNA], whose "performances" include teas, costume balls, games, readings, dramatic representations, staged with a campy
anglophilia in North America, and a brisker antiquarian meticulousness in England, and whose interests range from Austenian dramatizations, to fabrics, to genealogies, and to weekend study trips, in no particular order and without any agenda-driven priority.
For those who suffer from
Anglophilia, it's comforting to know that you don't have to travel across the Atlantic to get your Britain fix.
(81) See Elisa Tamarkin,
Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
She belongs to the German group of politicians that tend towards
anglophilia, not francophilia.
Anglophilia - admiration for Britain and British customs