Your idea sounds remarkably similar to a couple of proposals put forward by Reginald Brentnor and Robert Conquest. Brentnor suggested that, had the US and the UK simply made real adherence to a basic standard of human rights and free economics as the criteria for UN membership, the Cold War might have ended in 1953 with the death of Stalin, and the new Russian regime cleaning up their act in order to get in on the action.
Conquest has suggested that the US and the UK form a loose association as a counterweight to the EU, and to explicitly base that association on the two nation's common cultural heritage (shared concepts of law, property rights, economics, art, historiography, et cetera).