How the United States Exerts Power Over the UK

This article is adapted from the preface to The Racket: A Rogue Reporter vs. the American Empire, second edition, by Matt Kennard (Bloomsbury, 2024).

Four years after my book The Racket was first published, I started my own media outlet with historian and journalist Mark Curtis. It was a departure from what I had focused on before — the consequences of US imperialism around the world — because this new publication, Declassified UK, would cover British foreign policy.

Britain handed the mantle of world domination to the United States after World War II, and the received history is that it then retired from any kind of imperial role. I found out pretty quickly at Declassified that this was a misunderstanding. The truth is the empire never died. Britain merely became a “junior partner” to the US hegemon.

London’s adjunct status did not mean it was insignificant, however. The City of London’s role as the world’s financial capital that spreads neoliberalism around the world and the UK’s vast network of military bases, alongside its corporate giants like BP and BAE Systems, showed Britain still served a critical imperial role for its senior partner.

But a more interesting realization for me came when I started to look at the institutions that make up the US empire and their role in Britain. I had spent years looking at what institutions like the CIA, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), or the US military were doing in the Global South, where their power was exercised against often-weak states. A lot of this work is documented in The Racket.

But I saw quickly that the infrastructure of the US empire that had colonized so much of the world had seemingly colonized my home country, the…