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“A friend who bullies us is no longer a friend. And since bullies only respond to strength, from now onward, I will be prepared to be much stronger. And the president should be prepared for that.” Thus spoke Hugh Grant, playing the British prime minister confronting the US president in a famous scene in the romcom Love Actually. Real-life British prime minister Keir Starmer has attempted to stand up ever so slightly to the current bully in the White House over the latest US war in the Middle East. Despite the British government’s right-royal efforts to flatter Donald Trump ever since he was elected US president, his response to Starmer’s little attempt has been a torrent of contempt. So the reality is not Love Actually. It’s Contempt Actually.
Asked about the British government’s subtle distinction between defensive strikes in the Gulf, which it now supports, and offensive ones, which it doesn’t, Maga ideologue Steve Bannon tells the New Statesman’s Freddie Hayward: “That’s diplomatic bullshit. Fuck you. You’re either an ally or you’re not. Fuck you. The special relationship is over.” Ah, the “special relationship”! It must be 40 years since I first heard former West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt say: “The special relationship is so special only one side knows it exists.”
An American critic of Trump recently asked me the obvious follow-up question: “Why does your government keep grovelling?” More fundamentally, we must ask why so much of official Britain, and especially its security establishment, keeps clinging for dear life to the United States, behaving for all the world like someone stuck in an abusive personal relationship.
To be fair, a lot of other European leaders have spent much of the past year sacrificing their dignity as they suck up to Trump, condoning his trashing of everything that liberal Europe has stood for since 1945. Mark Rutte, the secretary general of Nato, would beat Starmer to win Private Eye’s premier satirical medal, the OBN (Order of the Brown Nose). The reasons for this sycophancy are obvious: Europe’s dependence on the US for supporting Ukraine, for our own security in Nato and, to a significant degree, for our prosperity. But there’s a particular, rather pathetic desperation about the way the British cling to Uncle Sam.
The explanation? History, of course. The US founding fathers grew up thinking of themselves as Englishmen. From 1776 to 1917, when the US entered the first world war, this was, as the historian Robert Saunders nicely puts it, not so much a special as a peculiar relationship. The US defined itself historically against Britain, but there was a mutual fascination. Following the brief but important military alliance in 1917-18, and the subsequent peacemaking in Paris, the US withdrew from Europe.
A special relationship really did exist between 1941, when Winston Churchill managed – with a little help from the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor – to bring the US into the war against Adolf Hitler, and 1956, when the US humiliatingly stopped Britain and France from retaking the Suez canal. The UK and the US were not equals, but this was still a real power partnership, jointly shaping Europe, if not the world.
France and Britain drew sharply contrasting conclusions from their humiliation over Suez. France, under president Charles de Gaulle, built its own independent nuclear deterrent and had already identified the goal that the current French president, Emmanuel Macron, calls European strategic autonomy. Britain, after a brief period of angry alienation from Washington, doubled down on prioritising its relationship with the US. If we could no longer be a great power ourselves, we would be “Athens to America’s Rome”.
Unlike France, Britain built a nuclear deterrent that was and remains technologically dependent on the US, and always put Nato before European construction. In many ways, the British-American relationship did get closer: in intelligence and military cooperation, in academia and media, in finance and the economy (today the UK is the top destination of US direct investment, just ahead of the Netherlands). But at the same time, Britain’s political influence in Washington was steadily diminishing. It clung to it all the more.
The late British Labour politician Robin Cook reported in his memoirs how, in a crucial cabinet debate in the run-up to the Iraq war, then prime minister Tony Blair said: “I tell you that we must steer close to America. If we don’t, we will lose our influence to shape what they do.” But how much influence was there really?
Today, Blair’s former chief of staff Jonathan Powell sits at Starmer’s right hand in 10 Downing Street, trying to do the same with the Trumpians. “We have those relationships so we can have those difficult conversations,” says an anonymous Whitehall source. But the conversations are not difficult for Washington. They are for London, because it has so little clout left.
This trend has been exacerbated by two other developments. The first is the decline of Britain’s armed forces. American soldiers who spent years fighting alongside the British now tell me, with something more like pity than contempt: “You barely have an army any more.” In the current conflict, France got a naval ship to Cyprus before Britain did, although it was a British military base on Cyprus that was attacked by Iran. This weakness, too, finds its echo in popular culture. In the latest season of the Netflix political soap The Diplomat, the saturnine US vice-president (brilliantly played by Rufus Sewell) riffs off the children’s book The Little Engine That Could to describe Britain as “the little island that couldn’t”. Ouch.
The second is Brexit. It’s just blindingly obvious that the UK is less important to the US than it used to be because it’s no longer part of a larger bloc. In Blair’s time, for all the long-term waning of influence, Britain still had two relatively strong legs: the transatlantic one and, as a member of the EU, the European one. In 2016, in what we can today see even more clearly was an act of monumental stupidity, Britain chose to cut off its own European leg. Now Trump is cutting the American one.
Here’s the other reason for Britain’s peculiar, rather pathetic desperation. Unlike France or Germany, it doesn’t have another leg to stand on.
For anyone who loves this country, it’s painful to see how it has reduced itself to being an object of contempt – or at best, pity. Fortunately, there is a path back to self-respect and being respected. While keeping the best possible relations with the US, Britain can set a strategic course towards being a core part of a stronger Europe. This means helping to build up European defence, especially through the Europeanisation of Nato, and it means – as London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, has just usefully suggested – rejoining the EU. How this could be done, in a timeframe of five to 10 years, and whether it will be possible politically, on both sides of the Channel, are subjects for further columns. Watch this space.
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Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist
