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The Anglosphere is by far the oddest creature in today's great power jungle. The UK and the major English-speaking dominions of the former British Empire -- united by a shared tradition of English Common Law and the individual political and economic freedoms that flow from it -- are easy to overlook. However, allied with the US, the Anglosphere's institutional and geographical heterogeneity belies a practical geostrategic closeness that Brussels cannot begin to match.

Indeed, the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada act together so often that this most obvious of alliances is rendered almost invisible to the eye. The Anglosphere alliance is simply the most important foreign policy reality that no one is talking about.

In all of the major geostrategic contests in the last tumultuous century -- the First and Second World Wars and the Cold War -- much like a bickering Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, who nonetheless always came out shooting together, all the Anglosphere countries found themselves on the same side in every single contest. This record of strategic closeness is unparalleled, and it is not an accident.

Beyond marching in geostrategic lockstep on the big things, the Anglosphere economies are tightly bound together, while Anglo-Saxon economies have tended, over the past generation, to be more dynamic than their European counterparts, growing year-on-year at a much more robust rate.

The five already invest very heavily in each other's economies, which are densely interlinked. For example, the UK is the largest investor in US companies, with foreign direct investment amounting to $540bn. Likewise, the US is the primary investor in the UK, with accumulated stock of nearly $750bn.

Beyond geo-strategy and economics, in terms of intelligence matters the Anglosphere is already a superpower. The 'Five Eyes' amounts to the largest intelligence sharing consortium in the world. The US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have openly and automatically shared signals intelligence since 1956, in turn targeting the Soviet Union, global terrorism, and now the rise of China.

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