26 May 2025 - 3:30pm
Another day, another intervention in European domestic politics from the Trump administration. At the start of the year, Elon Musk was furiously boosting the resurgence of the grooming gangs cover-up story. Then, at the Munich Security Conference, J.D. Vance scolded the assembled bigwigs for their countries’ growing hostility to free expression. Now the White House has trained its guns across the Atlantic once again, with the news that the State Department is monitoring the Lucy Connolly case.
This has provoked a certain amount of harrumphing from centrists and the Left, although there is an element of humbug in such objections. Barack Obama notoriously expressed his opposition to Brexit only two months before the referendum, and supporters of Labour’s Chagos deal have been happy to point to apparent US support for the deal. Personally, I find it quite entertaining and satisfying to have the European ruling class discomfited by direct public rebukes to their increasingly authoritarian habits.
In the long run, however, it is questionable whether we really want the Anglo-American relationship to function in this way, with the authorities in the imperial centre attempting to impose their will on the provinces. However congenial I might find the current finger-wagging from Washington D.C., the wheel of fortune will turn again soon. It is far from inconceivable that in four years’ time the Democrats will have regained power Over There, and will be attempting to undermine a reforming Right-wing government at Westminster.
It would be much better for Britain to break away from a servile attitude to the Americans, and to establish a more business-like relationship of something like equals, where the guiding principle of action is the British national interest, properly understood. In practice this might mean asking some very searching questions about, say, whether British service personnel should be sent halfway round the world to die for Taiwan.
At the moment, of course, there are significant obstacles to such a grown-up and hard-headed approach. Perhaps the most obvious and pressing of these obstacles is that our ruling classes seem almost allergic to asserting and acting in the British national interest. As we have seen with the Chagos deal, and with recent negotiations with the EU and India, our leaders and their civil servants look elsewhere for their moral legitimacy, to the airy abstractions of international law and the alleged rules-based order. The agreement with Mauritius over Chagos explicitly invokes British colonial history as a reason for abandoning sovereign territory. Former Cabinet Secretary Gus O’Donnell, who was the most powerful civil servant in Britain from 2005-2011, explicitly stated that he believed his job was to “maximise global welfare, not national welfare”.
An additional problem is our anaemic economic situation. If you want to be a self-confident and respected nation, you need to be a prosperous one, whereas British growth has basically stalled for almost two decades now. We simply cannot afford, for example, the kind of capable armed forces that would enable us to develop a credible and independent foreign policy. Our relative lack of world-class home-grown businesses, and the slow but steady loss of human capital caused by sclerosis and over-taxation, similarly inhibit our ability to impose ourselves on the world stage on our own terms.
Whether American hegemony is really ending or not, the British lion needs to step out from the shadow of the bald eagle.
