<P> On 21 December 1988, Pan American Worldways' Flight 103 from London Heathrow Airport to New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport exploded over the town of Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 169 Americans and 40 Britons on board . The motive that is generally attributed to Libya can be traced back to a series of military confrontations with the United States Navy in the 1980s in the Gulf of Sidra, the whole of which Libya claimed as its territorial waters . Despite a guilty verdict on January 31, 2001 by the Scottish High Court of Justiciary which ruled against Abdelbaset al - Megrahi, the bomber, on charges of murder and conspiracy to commit murder, Libya never formally admitted carrying out the 1988 bombing over Scotland until 2003 . </P> <P> During the Soviet--Afghan War, the United States and the United Kingdom throughout the 1980s provided arms to the Mujahideen rebels in Afghanistan until the last troops from the Soviet Union left Afghanistan in February 1989 . </P> <P> When the United States became the world's lone superpower after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, new threats emerged which confronted the United States and its NATO allies . With military build - up beginning in August 1990 and the use of force beginning in January 1991, the United States, followed at a distance by Britain, provided the two largest forces respectively for the coalition army which liberated Kuwait from Saddam Hussein's regime during the Persian Gulf War . </P> <P> In 1997, the British Labour Party was elected to office for the first time in eighteen years . The new prime minister, Tony Blair, and Bill Clinton both used the expression "Third Way" to describe their centre - left ideologies . In August 1997, the American people expressed solidarity with the British people, sharing in their grief and sense of shock on the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, who perished in a car crash in Paris, France . </P>

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