President Donald Trump leads the most Anglophile administration since that of President John F. Kennedy. Yet he is dealing with a British government that, paradoxically, is anything but Anglophile. That makes for a complicated relationship.
Vice President JD Vance is spending his vacation in the Cotswolds, one of a cohort of MAGA-aligned politicians, business leaders, and commentators to have descended on those thatched, honey-colored villages this summer.
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Tory members of Parliament and conservative commentators have been paying court to the vice president in his rented 18th-century Gloucestershire manor and all report the same thing. He is, they say, a man who feels deeply for Britain, who regards it as the cradle of American values, and who is commensurately anguished to see its retreat from its ancient liberties.
A State Department report published during his vacation made headlines in the United Kingdom. It found an alarming rise in antisemitic incidents and cases of people being charged for posting offensive content online. It caused quite a stir. The British are not used to being monitored for human rights abuses like so many Venezuelans or Iraqis. Yet, at the same time, most Brits recognize that there has indeed been an erosion of free speech, usually in the name of elevating the sensitivities, real or imagined, of racial and religious minorities.
“The American,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote, “is the Englishman left to himself”. Not for the first time, we see that British political culture has survived better in the New World than in the Old. Lacking a First Amendment, Britain is sinking into an illiberalism that would have been unimaginable in either country a century ago. The land of Lilburne and Locke, Wycliffe and Wilkes, Milton and Mill — and that’s just the Johns — has embraced unofficial blasphemy laws, this time designed to protect the trinity of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Where does this leave a U.S. administration that, like all its predecessors, even during the Obama presidency, looks to the U.K. as its chief political and diplomatic ally? Trump goes out of his way to be nice about British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Vance seems to have a genuine affection for the slow-witted foreign secretary, David Lammy. But nothing can disguise the gap in values between the two governments.
On the chief foreign policy issues of the day, namely the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, the two English-speaking powers could hardly be further apart. With Trump set to have an unprecedented second state visit to his mother’s country next month, is there anything to agree on?
The only option left, implausible as it might sound, is commerce. True, Trump has consistently opined that “trade is bad”. Yet, during his first term, he set out to secure an ambitious trade deal with post-EU Britain and seemed genuinely miffed when President Joe Biden canceled the talks. Much of the preliminary work had already been done, and my sense is that the president would like to crown his state visit with some kind of deal.
Even here, though, the American administration is more pro-Britain than the British one. Starmer has, to be fair, been ready to face down the reflexive anti-Americanism of his party’s far Left. But he has been less brave when it comes to diverging from EU standards, which is the only way to make beneficial trade deals. In particular, the British prime minister, who for years tried to overturn the Brexit referendum, refuses to move away from even the most unscientific and protectionist EU food regulations, thereby keeping his country as an artificial captive market for European exporters. And that is before we come to the commercial implications of Britain’s online restrictions on U.S. tech giants.
AMERICA IS DEVELOPING A FREE SPEECH PROBLEM
Again and again, we have been the Rhett and Scarlett of international relations, our timing always awry. Former Prime Minister David Cameron, an old-school Atlanticist, was paired with former President Barack Obama, who saw Britain through the lens of 1950s anticolonialism. When Trump came to power in 2016, he found himself opposite the pathologically indecisive Prime Minister Theresa May, who could not make up her mind whether she wanted an independent trade policy at all. When the Manhattan-born Boris Johnson replaced her, he went full tilt for a closer alliance, but COVID-19 interrupted, and then Biden came in, determined to advance Irish and EU interests at Britain’s expense. By the time Trump came back, he was dealing with Starmer.
Perhaps, next time, the cycles will align, Vance will find himself dealing with some kind of Conservative-Reform UK government, and the Atlantic alliance that made the 20th century the freest and happiest in human history will be restored. We can only hope.