ABSTRACT
Fans of Minnesota Public Radio’s Prairie Home Companion are certainly familiar with a place where ‘all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average’. It is called Lake Wobegon, and exists only in their imagination, as well as that of host Garrison Keillor, whose weekly tales from this fictional community are punctuated with the words quoted above. For legions of analysts of American foreign policy, there is another locale not unlike Lake Wobegon that also fills the imagination. It is called America’s alliance network, and it too is a place in which ‘above-average’ entities abound. These entities are known as ‘special relationships’, the most commented among them, of course, being the one between the United States and the United Kingdom, the direct or indirect subject of several of this volume’s chapters.
