What does it mean to celebrate 250 years of friendship between the Netherlands and the USA — when friendship has rarely been a simple thing?

That is the question at the heart of this closing lecture in the yearlong series A Firm Peace and Sincere Friendship?

The Netherlands and the United States share the longest unbroken diplomatic relationship in American history. Two and a half centuries. Through wars, revolutions, and continents remade. But longevity, it turns out, is not the same as harmony — and the history between these two nations is more surprising, more contested, and more instructive than the commemorative version tends to suggest.

Ian Kenny takes three moments as his guide. John Adams arrives in Amsterdam in 1780, representing a republic most of Europe has yet to take seriously, and leaves two years later with recognition, credit, and the beginnings of something that would outlast empires. And after the Second World War: American investment helping rebuild a shattered Netherlands, while American foreign policy placed real pressure on Dutch decisions in Indonesia, the relationship generous and demanding in the same breath. In the 1980s and 1990s, large parts of Dutch society pushed back hard against American military choices, even as the economic and strategic bonds between the two countries quietly deepened.

What these moments share is not a simple story of alliance or antagonism, but something more interesting: a relationship that has had to be renegotiated, again and again, by people navigating genuine disagreement. The friendship in the title was never guaranteed. It was worked for. 

Which raises the question the lecture ends with, and leaves open: what is being worked for now? The lecture will be followed by a conversation with Kenneth Manusama and the public about where the relationship stand in 2026; and what, if anything, can be taken for granted.