‘Under tremendous strain’: CIA analyst turned spy novelist on a fraying US-UK alliance

There's a peculiar physics to alliances. They look solid, like granite monuments, but they're actually more like quantum states — stable only as long as nobody measures them too closely. The US-UK "special relationship" has always been a shared fiction, a story two nations agreed to tell each other and the world. Now, according to The Guardian's report on David McCloskey's new novel, that story is being stress-tested to the breaking point. And here's the wild part: the person doing the stress-testing in fiction is a former CIA analyst — someone trained to see reality without the comforting filter of narrative. McCloskey belongs to a rare breed: the spy turned novelist. He spent years inside the intelligence machinery, watching how nations actually behave when they think no one is looking. His fiction isn't escape — it's analysis wearing a narrative disguise. When a book depicts the "calamitous collapse" of the special relationship, it's worth paying attention, because intelligence analysts don't write fantasies; they write extrapolations. They've seen the classified cables, the private resentments, the back-channel betrayals. Fiction just gives them permission to tell the truth out loud. The article describes an alliance "under tremendous strain" — strained relentlessly by Trump, who has "gleefully sacrificed" the traditions that once held the relationship together. There's something almost thermodynamic about it: the special relationship was an energy reserve built on shared history, culture, and language. Entropy always wins eventually. But what makes this moment weird is the feedback loop. A former spy writes a novel about collapse; the novel becomes a lens through which journalists and diplomats interpret real events; the interpretation shapes decisions; the decisions bring the fiction closer to reality. The observer effect, applied to geopolitics. We tend to think of spy novels as entertainment, but they've always been a form of speculative science — thought experiments about power. What McCloskey is doing is running a simulation: if the special relationship collapses, what does the world look like? The Guardian's piece suggests we might find out. Whether the book is prophecy or warning doesn't matter much; either way, it's a map of a possible future, drawn by someone who once held a security clearance and saw the raw data. When the mapmakers are former spies, the maps deserve a second look. The strangest thing about the "special relationship" is that it was never written down. No treaty, no constitution, no formal alliance — just a phrase Winston Churchill coined and everyone agreed to believe. It's the most powerful ghost in modern geopolitics. And like all ghosts, it can be exorcised. McCloskey's novel, and the real-world strain The Guardian documents, suggest the exorcism might already be underway. For a science journalist, there's a dark fascination in watching a shared hallucination dissolve — especially when the person who predicted it used to work for the CIA. (Source: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/11/us-uk-special-relationship-david-mccloskey-writer)