Goodbye EU, hello AU? It’s been evident for a few months now that Donald Trump’s second administration will be more geostrategically ambitious than his first. Yesterday, in another extraordinary press conference in Mar-a-Lago, we got a glimpse of what Trump and his advisers are thinking for the planet in 2025 and beyond.
Trump reiterated his desire to annex Canada and Greenland. He declared that the Gulf of Mexico should be called the Gulf of America, said the United States should take back control of the Panama Canal, and told Hamas ‘all hell will break loose’ if its Israeli hostages are not returned before his inauguration.
Earlier, as if to underscore the Greenland point, Donald Trump Jr flew on Trump Force One with some of his buddies to Nuuk to spread the Make America Great Again message to the frozen north. Like lads on stag do, the adventurous boys even wore ‘Trump Force One’ bomber jackets, as Jr told Greenland’s residents ‘we’re going to treat you well.’
Where does Britain fit into Trump’s new world order? It’s clear that Elon Musk, in his semi-official role as First Buddy to the most powerful politician in the world, is conducting his own somewhat quixotic campaign on X to absorb the United Kingdom more fully into America’s orbit. Yesterday he asked, impishly yet earnestly, if America should liberate the United Kingdom from its ‘tyrannical government’. Later, in response to Trump’s remarks, Lord Hannan, the Brexiteer adviser to the British Board of Trade, suggested on X that ‘we bring together the five great Anglosphere democracies (America, Canada, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand) in a diplomatic, military and economic union, including unhindered free trade, free movement of labour and an institutionalised military alliance.’ Musk replied: ‘Good idea.’
An Anglo Union (the AU), then? If this all sounds bonkers – billionaires playing a futuristic version of the boardgame Risk through world politics – that’s precisely the point. But Trump is about to be once again the leader of what used to be called the free world, so it’s worth taking him seriously, and even literally, for once.
For more than a decade, analysts have been talking about America’s Pacific tilt – the turning of its strategic focus towards China. Team Trump, it seems, has bigger plans, including a scheme to answer China’s rise by creating a US equivalent of Beijing’s ‘Belt and Road’ initiative through the North Atlantic. That’s why Trump is so exercised about Britain’s disastrous decision to shut down our exploration of North Sea oil. He called it a ‘very big mistake’ on his own social platform Truth Social Trump last week.
Trump doesn’t want to disband Nato, as many have said. He wants to make the North Atlantic alliance stronger for the 21st century, which is why yesterday he repeated his demand that Nato members spend 5 per cent of their budgets on defence.
He sees the European Union’s economic power receding, and appears intent on refashioning and reorienting Western power for a new age.
It’s unlikely that Hannan’s Atlanticist fantasy will be realised any time soon. Britain has a Labour government, which is innately suspicious of all American-led global projects, let alone Donald Trump’s. Then again, everything about the ascent of the Make America Great Again movement is improbable. Quite a lot of British people, despairing as we are of our own government, will be wondering if now might be the time to open our minds to the Trump 2.0 global agenda.
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