[special relationships] will oceania turn out to be the bloc of choice

You've obviously read this:

The government has sold its last remaining shares in the Aldermaston Atomic Weapons Establishment in Berkshire to an American company. The move means Britain no longer has any stake in the production of its Trident nuclear warheads.

Liberal Democrat defence spokesman Nick Harvey said:

"The whole argument used for Britain having a separate weapons establishment is that this is required by the non-proliferation treaty, as technology sharing is not allowed."

Is this such a horrendous move? After all, the UK does not act in the foreign theatres in an independent fashion. More often than not, it is through NATO and the special alliances. On the nuclear issue:

The Amsterdam Treaty states in Article J.7 that "The policy of the Union in accordance with this article shall not prejudice the specific character of the security and defense policy of certain Member States and shall respect the obligations of certain Member States, which see their common defence realized in NATO, under the North Atlantic Treaty and be compatible with the common security and defence policy established within that framework."

There is, in fact, a deep rivalry between the EU and NATO:

The lack of cooperation is evident in Brussels, where NATO and the EU have separate headquarters eight kilometers apart. On the military level, the two organizations have competing rapid reaction forces. They compete on foreign aid missions, sometimes racing each other to the destination. They maintain separate military planning headquarters. Taxpayers foot the double bill.

The countries at the center of this competition, analysts say, are Britain, which wants to preserve and strengthen NATO, and France, which wants the EU to grow into a more robust defense institution, independent of NATO.

The construction of NATO:

Originally consisting of 12 countries, the organisation expanded to include Greece and Turkey in 1952 and West Germany in 1955. However, then, as now, the alliance was militarily dominated by the United States.

In April, 2008:

President Bush advanced his plans Thursday to build a controversial missile defense shield in Eastern Europe by winning the unanimous backing of NATO allies and sealing a deal with the Czech Republic to build a radar facility for the system on its soil.

This set the cat among the pigeons - there is a souring of relations which manifested itself in the Poettering snub of President Klaus in the European Parliament and in the Declan Ganley matter. Europe is divided between the power bases of the EU itself, NATO and the U.S.A., a major player in its own right within European member states.

Digressing for the moment, it's old news that the EU parliament wants to silence dissenting voices but I also read, in the last few days, a proposal to prevent the UK from legally opting out of the European Union, should they wish to. I can't find corroboration anywhere for that one but it seems that 19 Labour MEPs plan to vote for that.

If that were so, it is yet more evidence that the socialistic EU is more than a little paranoid about Britain's further shift towards the U.S. - the warheads stake which opened this post is testimony to Britain's comfort in seeing U.S. strategic interests as not greatly different from our own.

Britain's ties to Europe are geographical and through the royal bloodlines but its ties to America are more "family like". Family members do fight but ultimately, when faced with a common foe, do close ranks. The U.S./British relationship has had its moments:

The United States put heavy pressure on the United Kingdom to dissolve its Empire, and this dissolution took place (due to post-war economic exhaustion, British public opinion and other factors, rather than U.S. pressure) in the 1947-1960 period.

... but it has ultimately stood firm. This special relationship has come under scrutiny on both sides of the Atlantic:

The U.K. International Development Secretary has recently proposed a change in the current relationship between the United States and the United Kingdom. He accentuated on the need for "new alliances, based on common values". He was verbal against "unilateralism" and called for an "international" and a "multilateralist" approach to global problems.

... and:

In candid comments that will embarrass Mr Bush and Mr Blair, [Kendall Myers, a leading State Department adviser, suggested] America "ignored" Britain [on Iraq], and he urged Britain to decouple itself from the U.S. He asserted that the "special relationship", a term coined by Sir Winston Churchill in 1946, gave Britain little or nothing.

"It has been, from the very beginning, very one-sided. There never really has been a special relationship, or at least not one we've noticed." The result of the Iraq war would be that any future British premier would be much less cosy with Washington than Mr Blair had been, and the Prime Minister's much vaunted view that Britain was "a transatlantic bridge" was now redundant.

Mr Myers said Donald Rumsfeld's comment before the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 that America could go it alone without Britain had been a clarifying moment.

It remains to be seen how non-President-elect Obama redefines the relationship but such comments as the above are era specific and the overall history has been one of strong economic and undoubted cultural ties between the two, when all is said and done.

It was probably no accident that in Orwell's 1984, the blocs were:

The novel does not render the world's full history to 1984. Winston's recollections, and what he reads in The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism by Emmanuel Goldstein, reveal that after World War II, the United Kingdom fell to civil war, becoming part of Oceania. Simultaneously, the Soviet Union encompassed mainland Europe, forming the nation of Eurasia.

The third super-state, Eastasia, comprises the east Asian countries around China and Japan. Mentioned also is an atomic war, fought mainly in Europe, western Russia, and North America. It is unclear what occurred first: the civil war wherein the Party assumed power, the United States' annexation of the British Empire, or the war during which Colchester was bombed.

The hostility to the U.S. in Britain is as nothing to the hostility to the EU [read the comments as well]. There is life after the EU and Britain should look to re-integrating with its two strategic partners, the U.S. and the Commonwealth. Look at the trade figures alone and it's not as if we wouldn't trade, bilaterally with EU member states - it would go back to an EEC model in that respect.

Don't forget the Chinese in all of this:

[T]he news that CIC is putting $5 billion into Morgan Stanley gave a new perspective to Chinese involvement in the West’s largest financial institutions. The sheer scale of the Morgan Stanley deal was striking. And over the past few months, investment from the Far East has become almost commonplace. In contrast to the protectionist fervour that forced a Dubai company to sell several American ports that it acquired through the takeover of Britain’s P&O, there has been barely a murmur of opposition to this trend.

There is a definite unilateralist voice in America - this article decrying the financial ownership of the country by foreigners:

As www.economyincrisis.com notes, US Government statistics indicate the following percentages of foreign ownership of American industry:

* Sound recording industries - 97% * Commodity contracts dealing and brokerage - 79% * Motion picture and sound recording industries - 75% * Metal ore mining - 65%

... and so on and don't forget the SPPNA, which is due to kick off in 2009.

All that having been written though, I'd still say that blood is thicker than water and the most natural allies for Britain are still the U.S. and the Commonwealth. Within the UK, the problem would be the Scots and Welsh, for whom EU supported devolution would suddenly lose one of its main funding sources - British contributions to the EU.

The Scots and Welsh would then have a clear choice - remain with an ailing EU or rejoin the UK. With 83% of the UK English, they'd be in a bit of a quandary.