"So this is what the 'special relationship' amounts to, is it?"
Yes, actually, that's exactly what it amounts too.
WWII left the UK virtually bankrupt so they sent a team of academics to ask the USG for a bail out.
Instead they got a $5Bn loan payable over about 50 years and a level of arrogance from the dept of prep school Aholes State Dept that sent the Foreign Secretary an enthusiastic supporter of the plan to build a UK A bomb :-(
But the clusterf**k that turned the UK into America's permanent b**ch was something often forgotten today. The Suez Crisis of 1956.
That said the UK has managed to barter some access into the US Intelligence and defense communities by virtually handing over it's specialist knowledge whenever they've requested it, including improving reentry warhead design and materials ("Gaslight"), helping them work out how the passive microwave bug found in the US Embassy in Moscow worked ("The Thing"), making speech channels work at 2400 bps with 1950's technology (in the 1950's) and a GCHQ researcher developing Public Key Cryptography before it was published in the open literature.
History. If you don't know it, you'll probably repeat it, over and over again.