Please don't underestimate the immense value of a common language (despite G.B. Shaw's famous quotation!) in the hallways of politics and diplomacy. Nuance and idiom are better understood when both parties are speaking their native language. In the U.S., Americans, who are famously and woefully uneducated in any other languages (over 90% of native-born white Americans speak only one language with any fluency), are forced, as were their ancestors, to seek rapport with those who also speak their language. In international diplomacy, there is a perennial distrust of those with whom one cannot smoothly converse. Famously, interpreters in one-on-one conversations will pose a yes-or-no question on behalf of a speaker, to the other individual. And after perhaps a 30-second or more interaction, will turn to the questioner and say, "He says 'yes.'" Well, no, of course he didn't say "yes." He sought clarification, or posed a different response subjected to condensation by the interpreter. Not uncommon.

So, the Americans and their UK cousins, working around accents and idioms, were able to carry on much smoother and understandable deliberations and compromises, than either group could accomplish with any other nations (outside the Commonwealth, who unsurprisingly also remain our closest allies). Once again, famously, the 8000+ mile border between the U.S. and Canada, which has gone unguarded for over two centuries, is unprecedented in world history.