Jilted. That’s how policy makers here in America feel now that British Prime Minister David Cameron has dubbed his country’s relation with the People’s Republic of China as “a very special relationship”, trumping the merely “special relationship”, the term used by Winston Churchill in 1946 to describe Britain and America’s close security and cultural ties. Britain also trumped the state dinner accorded Xi here in Washington by providing the iron-fisted leader of the People’s Republic of China bed and board in Buckingham Palace as a guest of the more benign head of state of the United Kingdom. So we enter what the chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne dubs a new “golden era” in relations between China and Britain – not a silver era, but a golden one, as in the stuff of which the Midas legend is made. For some reason, Britain, the world’s fifth largest economy, feels a need to woo Xi so that he will pour capital into Britain’s needy infrastructure, finance the nuclear plants Britain believes it must have if it is to keep its lights on, and do it the favor of using the deep, liquid capital markets of London – Beijing has none such — to help the People’s Republic trade its yuan and flog its financial paper.

The administration has been leaking to the press  its unhappiness at what one unnamed official calls Britain’s “constant accommodation” of China. That is understandable, but comes with ill grace. For one thing, Obama has its European allies on notice that America is “pivoting” to Asia, and away from Europe. One nation’s pivot is another nation’s abandonment. And the 21^st Century circumstances that justify our pivot surely equally justify Britain’s pivot from an America shrinking its international footprint to a China expanding its global each.