We do not have to make a choice between our alliance with the United States and closer relations with the European Union: that was the message of the Prime Minister’s traditional annual speech to the Lord Mayor’s Banquet at the Guildhall. Sir Keir Starmer called the supposed binary ‘plain wrong’, and prayed in aid some of his most illustrious predecessors.
I reject it utterly. Attlee did not choose between allies. Churchill did not choose. The national interest demands that we work with both.
He described the ‘special relationship’ with the United States in profound terms, written ‘in the ink of shared sacrifice… in Normandy, Flanders and around the world’, and reminded his audience that the two nations were intimately interconnected in economics and technology, in research and development and in defence and intelligence. He went on to blame the Conservative government for turning away from Europe and described his ‘reset’ of relations with the EU as ‘on any objective assessment… vital for our growth and security’.
In principle, it is hard to disagree with the Prime Minister. It often is. His staccato sentences presented an ideal as if it were a logical policy goal. The difficulty is that international alliances are like an open relationship: they only work if every party is wholeheartedly committed. Otherwise the inevitable doubts, resentments and power imbalances become a cancer which is always terminal.
Donald Trump despises the European Union. Recently he complained peevishly about its unfair trade policies with the United States:
They don’t take our cars, they don’t take our farm products, don’t take anything. You have a $312 billion deficit with the EU. You know, the EU is a mini – but not so mini – is a mini China.
Protectionism, for the incoming president, is a one-way street, something America does but not something done to America. Insofar as one can discern truth from hyperbole, Trump is, by contrast, instinctively well disposed towards the UK. Nominating financier and philanthropist Warren Stephens as the US ambassador to London, he described Britain as ‘one of America’s most cherished and beloved allies’.
This leaves the Prime Minister in a potentially difficult situation. Recently, Stephen Moore, a conservative economist and former close adviser to Donald Trump who co-authored an 2018 encomium entitled Trumponomics: Inside the America First Plan to Revive Our Economy, told the BBC that Britain faced exactly the dilemma Starmer rejects:
The UK really has to choose between the Europe economic model of more socialism and the US model, which is more based on a free enterprise system. I think the UK is kind of caught in the middle of these two forms.
Favouring the ‘American model of economic freedom’, he said, would make it more likely that Britain could conclude a free trade agreement with the United States.
Moore should not be taken as a straightforward proxy for the president-elect’s views. Nevertheless, there are several areas in which British policy varies sharply with Trump’s intentions and instincts: on free trade, relations with China, the future of Nato, support for Ukraine, climate change and the recent agreement with Mauritius over the Chagos islands. We can debate the significance of each of these, but we know that Donald Trump is not always open to a friendly agreement to differ.
Sir Keir Starmer sometimes seems to display a belief in the power of magical thinking, a conviction that if he can say something often and clearly enough, it will become a reality. But his depiction of an ideal diplomatic situation, in which Britain can be ‘hard-headed and patriotic’ and recognise that ‘the national interest demands that we work with both’ the US and the EU, is not an incantation which in itself has transformative power.
He and his ministers are fond of talking about tough decisions. In Britain’s international relations there will be a good number of these to take over the coming years. Of course we should seek to maintain close ties with Europe as well as an intimate alliance with the United States – the choice of the next British ambassador to Washington will be an important part of that effort. No one is realistically suggesting that we forswear any significant cooperation with one or other.
It is inevitable, however, that issues will arise on which we cannot please everyone. If Washington and Brussels engage in a war of protective tariffs, Britain will not be able to stay equidistant and benevolently neutral. On international climate change agreements, there is no meaningful common ground between America and the EU. On questions like those, we will have no choice but to lean towards one party or the other, which may not come without costs.
At least privately, the government will need to have an underlying sense of whether our interests align more closely with an insular, protectionist, mercurial but economically dynamic United States or a fractious, protectionist and economically sluggish EU which nevertheless represents about half of our international trade. At the moment, logic dictates the latter, but a free trade agreement with Washington would change the calculus significantly, and should be one of Starmer’s greatest priorities.
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