President Trump arrived in London on Dec. 2 for the 70th anniversary summit of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). He was also right on time for Britain’s high-stakes general election. The vote that will decide the future of Brexit — and in a real sense the futures of both the UK and the EU — takes place in just a few days, on Thursday.

This confluence of events posed a tricky issue for British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Well before Trump’s arrival, much was made over the president’s intentions: Would he wade into domestic, UK politics as he rather gleefully did during his state visit over the summer? Would he endorse Johnson, or might he criticize Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn, just as he called Mayor of London Sadiq Khan a “stone cold loser”?

Johnson worried that he would. Common wisdom holds that Trump is deeply unpopular in the United Kingdom. (While this may be true, polling and media may also exaggerate the anti-Trump sentiment. Trump almost certainly has hidden support, in the UK as in the US, from those who stay silent for fear of reprisal.) Perhaps most worrisome, from Johnson’s point of view, was the Corbyn narrative that Trump plans to co-opt the National Health Service (NHS) in a new, post-Brexit, free-trade deal. This is so much scaremongering — Trump’s desire to see a rebalancing of drug prices across national borders, and to make these prices fairer for Americans, hardly represents an attempt to take over the NHS.

But no matter. Johnson did not want added risk or uncertainty in his campaign and so kept his distance from the visiting Trump. While the prime minister and president held a bilateral meeting at No. 10 Downing Street, no photo-journalists were allowed to cover it, and there was no joint press conference with the two leaders.

All of this could look like growing distance between America and Britain. In truth, and as Johnson knows, Trump feels closer to the United Kingdom than any president in modern history. His mother is from Scotland, and he owns property there. Most important, he supports Boris Johnson’s cardinal policy and the defining issue of the Conservative Party’s campaign: Britain’s withdrawal from the EU.

The president views British politics almost as an extension of his own, domestic politics. He likewise goes after his “opponents” in Britain just as he does his opponents in the US. For Trump, UK politics is a “family matter.” While this fact may be inconvenient for Johnson in the short term, it could pay crucial, long-term dividends for the future of the US-UK alliance, otherwise known as the special relationship.

It may be true, as David Reynolds recently argued in the Wall Street Journal, that after Brexit, Britain will no longer play the same “transatlantic bridging role” between the US and continental Europe. But it does not follow, as Reynolds implies, that Brexit will “weaken the special relationship.” To the contrary, Trump and Johnson both sense the high potential of a post-Brexit world: a bilateral trade deal between America and Britain could form the cornerstone of an ever-closer alliance, enhancing existing security and military cooperation between the two nations.

Another leader who senses this is French President Emmanuel Macron. Macron’s recent comments about “the brain death of NATO” appear defensive in nature. He knows that, after Brexit, the US and UK stand to make their alliance stronger, and thus NATO stronger, too. Trump, in his insistence that NATO member states contribute the required 2 percent of GDP, has already made NATO richer. And Macron knows, in a post-Brexit world, that the center of gravity in European security affairs will rest with the US, the UK and NATO under their leadership — not with Brussels and, by extension, Paris.

Johnson may be keeping a strategic distance from Trump for now. But if the Conservatives win on Thursday, as current polling suggests they will, a renewed and more consequential special relationship can emerge. The stakes in Britain, and for the world, have rarely been higher.

Augustus Howard is a research associate at Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Cambridge and a JD from Duke University School of Law. He has also served as a law clerk on the United States 11th Circuit Court of Appeals.