Ever since 1941 the fundamental assumption of British foreign policy has been that the ‘special relationship’ with the USA is the foundation of our international security and status. Winston Churchill reimagined Britain as America’s ‘Ango-Saxon’ partner, and as ‘the bridge’ between North America and continental Europe. Huge numbers of US forces were based in Britain during the war; 10,000 US personnel, in several USAF airbases and intelligence stations, still remain. Access to US intelligence, nuclear missiles and defence technology is crucial to our defence and security. The UK has of course become more and more the junior partner in the relationship, but still – policy-makers have argued – sufficiently valuable to Washington to continue to give us privileged status.
What if the special relationship is now over? President Trump has said he looks forward to Germany becoming the leading power within NATO. London has been left as much in the dark on Trump’s latest plan for Ukraine as Paris, Berlin and Rome. Several generations after the shared experience of World War Two that created the special relationship, fewer and fewer Americans (in an increasingly diverse society) see themselves as part of an Anglo-Saxon world or feel any particular affection for Britain.
Trump, Vance and others on the hard right see Britain as a territory to be gained, a country to be converted to their vision of free market capitalism and ‘Christian nationalism.’ Money flows into Britain from US foundations promoting ‘traditional values’ and patriarchal society. The US ambassador in London intervenes in public procurement decisions to protest that our government ought to favour US companies. But there’s little sense of partnership, only repeated denigration of today’s British society and liberal values.
Tony Blair saw Britain as America’s privileged partner because we also played a leading role in Europe. Boris Johnson fantasised that we could regain a global role without Europe, only to find that we could not even send a carrier task force to the Pacific without support from other navies. The UK outside the EU remains of some importance to the USA, if we dared to remind Washington. We’ve just agreed to pay Mauritius £100m a year for the US base on Diego Garcia. The US benefits from intelligence stations and access to bases in the UK, Cyprus, Ascension Island and beyond. But US Administrations focussed on China and Latin America place less value on the sharing of other global assets. ‘America First’ advocates on the right of the MAGA movement are now denigrating Winston Churchill as a warmonger, who took the USA into war in Europe when he should have made peace with Germany. Even if the Democrats regain control of the Presidency this isolationist resurgence will block a return to Atlantic cooperation.
Which means that Britain’s security and foreign policy depend on the closest possible cooperation with our European neighbours. Russian ships surveying cables around our coast, Russian intelligence agencies supporting cyber-attacks and physical sabotage show that we are already caught up in the Ukrainian conflict as it spills over into hybrid war across the European continent. Yet the Labour Government’s response, as in so many other spheres, has been timid. The Commons Defence Committee has just published a critical report on the UK’s modest contribution to European security. The Lords European Affairs Committee has similarly published a critical report on the half-hearted attempt to negotiate a ‘reset’ of UK-EU relations. There is no alternative to partnership with the EU, unless we drift into becoming a satellite of the USA.
Nigel Farage, for all his former rhetoric about restoring British sovereignty, seems happy for Britain to become a US dependency. A headline in the Daily Mail last week summed up his stance: ‘Trump tells Farage he’s very upset’ about the BBC’s portrayal of his incendiary speech challenging his lost election. Farage was, according to the Financial Times, the guest of honour at the recent ‘launch party’ for GB News in Washington, attended by several members of Trump’s Cabinet. GB News’s interview with Trump, two weeks ago, was sycophantic, agreeing that Washington is safer than London and saying nothing about his legal attack on the BBC. Liberal Democrats are spot on in calling Farage Britain’s Trump.
Starmer in practice has moved much closer to France and Germany in response to the erratic and self-interested turn in US foreign policy. The Economist last week hailed the triumvirate of Starmer, Merz and Macron as key to an effective European response to US appeasement of Russia on Ukraine. But Starmer has not attempted to persuade the British public that European commitment is what we should now invest in, nor to think how to retain those elements of the special relationship that we still need. It’s not easy, either, to renegotiate a relationship with the EU when our partners fear that Reform might possibly become the next UK government. The French in particular want to drive a hard bargain on every dossier from fishing to defence procurement – on which they have long seen Britain as the main obstacle to French leadership of Europe’s arms industry.
There is now no coherent British foreign policy. Starmer is flying from one multilateral meeting to another without any overall sense of how we should reshape our relationship with other major states, let alone how to carry British voters with that shift. Our Liberal Democrat spokespeople have come out to argue that we have to rebuild mutual trust, and political and economic cooperation, with our European neighbours. But that will require a lot of hard negotiation, which our current government seems incapable of leading.
* William Wallace is LibDem peer, a former vice-chair of the Federal Policy Committee and convenor of the party's 1997 manifesto team.
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21 Comments
I am more optimistic about the UK’s relationship with the USA. For example, when Trump announced his tariffs, he placed 15% on the EU but only 10% on the UK. Had be placed 20% on the UK while only 15% on the EU, we would all conclude that we were out of favour, so the fact that he only placed 10% on the UK should be viewed as a positive.
1st thoughts. Farage wins in 2029. NHS, BBC privatised. We become an offshoot of the USA like Porto Rico and follow USA’s every move, even when not in our interest. Europe eyes us with suspicion. We are entering a crossroads.
What might be the similarities and diferences between our special relationship with the USA and those of Israel and France?
There isn’t a special relationship. The USA does what it does for its own interests.
That ‘Special Relationship’ is just a term banded about by political commentators & the press … Ultimately it’s meaningless jargon.
@Jenny Smith – Trump and his MAGA movement hate the EU with a passion and supported Brexit, so we were always likely to get a slightly better deal than them to “prove” we are better off outside.
Nonetheless what we ended up with wasn’t as good as initially advertised, eg on steel.
Is the USA agreement reliable?
Is the USA still a democracy?
@ Steve Trevethan. No, to both questions.
“Is the USA still a democracy?”
Good question
We have no business sending “a carrier task force” to the Indo-Pacific. We should look after our local area of the North Atlantic and the Greenland Iceland gap.
> “Is the USA still a democracy?”
We will definitely find out in a couple of years when Trump is supposed to leave the Whitehouse…
William,
I recall clearly Peter Hennessy saying to me in the early 1990s that whatever ‘special relationship’ the UK and US had during the WW2 years and even the cold war had long since evaporated; it had become, in his words, simply what the US unilaterally chose it to be, and no more. Even then, other EU states such as Germany and France had become equally as important to US political relations as Britain. Our departure from the EU has since removed even the tenuous argument that Britain was America’s ‘friendly voice’ within the multi-lingual EU. Of course, many of us still have good friends across the Atlantic who share our values and hopes, and those friendships will undoubtedly continue, but sadly that can no longer be said of the US as a whole. While some aspects of intelligence and security sharing certainly continue, these are undoubtedly dependent upon the US’s willingness to see them continue, and it has been clear for many years that that willingness could be removed as any time – and they are removed whenever the US government decides that they are not to the benefit of the US (rather than to the benefit of both sides of the arrangement).
the UK also needs to break culturally with america, and revive British values
The effective withdrawal of USA from a leading role in NATO and the defence of Europe makes it more and more essential that we rejoin the Customs Union and the Single Market and strengthen the ability of Europe to defend itself!
We absolutely cannot trust Trump he is clearly pro Putin and having undermined USA democracy he shows no interest in protecting democracy anywhere else.
Since the threat of Tariff Reform pre WW1 it was Americas first foreign policy objective to see the dismantling of the British Empire. I have alway been sceptical about a special relationship with the USA. They have invaded Commonwealth countries without any reference to the UK. They did allow Thatcher to retake the Falklands – but our victory in that campaign was highly improbable – a real long shot. It was another Lions led by Donkeys episode we now learn- as the truth begins to emerge about that conflict . Americans come to the UK buy up UK companies and clear off back to the USA with the order book. They then close down the UK arm of their operations. This is illegal in the USA and we can’t do the same there. We never saw a penny of the Fanny May Freddy Mack money back here in the UK even though that was principally insider trading and highly illegal. John Foster Dulles treatment of Anthony Eden during the Suez Criss was an act of deliberate vengeance on Eden by Dulles, ending Edens government here in the UK. I just do not see this special relationship in practice. The downfall of Midland Bank in the USA and Nat West in the USA along with the way the TSB lost all their money in the USA shows exactly what kind of relationship we had even before the Fanny May Freddy Mack scandal .
So long as the USA celebrates July 4th each year, the UK is always going to have some kind of special relationship with the USA — it just may not be the one we want.
Henry Kissinger, famous quote, “America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests,” may not be exactly the words he used but the sentiments are more apt now than ever before..
Expats: Your quote was originally from Lord Palmerston, in the Commons in 1848: ‘We have no eternal allies, and we have no perpetual enemies. Our interests are eternal and perpetual, and those interests it is our duty to follow…’ But I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Kissinger re-used it. There WAS real friendship among the generation of Americans who were stationed in Britain in WW2 and the Brits they worked with – I met some of them when a student there in the 1960s, But that generation (on both side) has long gone.
“Is the USA still a democracy?”
As long as there are people in power who can be thrown out by voters, the answer is “yes”.
A more productive question is ” “Is the USA still a liberal democracy?” See Orban’s illiberal democracy”.
Democracy can be viewed as a continuum as some annual surveys show. It is a constant challenge to retain and improve a country’s democracy against authoritarian pressures. A vibrant, well informed and influential society seems to be the best defence against its decline.
“There is now no coherent British foreign policy. Starmer is flying from one multilateral meeting to another without any overall sense … (of how we should reshape our relationship with other major states)”
Yes. Because he’s Starmer. You can substitute “any policy” for “foreign policy”, and the comment is still correct!
Starmer learned how to function as the DPP. Your minions run a succession of criminal cases past you. There are rules. You apply the rules as an efficient technocrat. End of story. Now Keir, let’s do Labour politics. That’s going to be just the same, innit?
Sadly, no other current party leader is really able to show Starmer a more effective way to function.
I would strongly consider voting for a party that stood up to America in real terms and distanced the UK from them.