Turbulence, Not Rupture: The Special Relationship Under Trump 2.0 (Part I)

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer headed to Washington a fortnight ago for his first official talks with re-elected President Donald Trump. For now, at least, their meeting has been interpreted as a PR victory in Downing Street: Starmer successfully charmed his mercurial host with lavish praise, a promise of increased defense spending, and an unprecedented invitation from King Charles III to come back for a second U.K. state visit. He even sounded like Trump when brandishing the invitation: “This has never happened before. It’s so incredible. It will be historic.”

Trump for his part seemed exceedingly pleased, offered plenty of smiles, and variously praised Starmer’s “beautiful accent”, his “beautiful, great” wife, and the prospect of a “very good” trade deal. So far, so good. But despite the bonhomie between the host and his guest, the meeting left many crucial questions unanswered: about Ukraine, NATO, the future of the Chagos Islands, trade, tariffs, and the limits of American patience with British infringements on free speech, in particular. On the most immediately pressing issue, the President was unmoved by Starmer’s appeal for a stronger U.S. commitment to “backstop”’ the security of Ukraine, beyond having U.S. workers there as part of a minerals deal. More broadly, the friendly mood music couldn’t obscure the fact that the two leaders are ideologically poles apart both domestically and in their views of the international order, in stark contrast to the relative harmony of past golden eras of the “special relationship”, like the Thatcher-Reagan crusade against socialism, and Tony Blair and Bill Clinton’s “third way” effort to redefine the world in the era of globalization. Despite the successful choreography of their “first date”, the Anglo-American relationship is resultantly likely to be on a tightrope over the next four years.

One should not exaggerate. The Brits will remain America’s most reliable partner of choice, and are seen as such by the American public, 43% of whom in a recent poll named the UK as America’s closest ally (no other European country broke 10%); the UK for its part will continue to depend primarily on the United States for its security. The special intelligence and nuclear relationships between the two countries, embedded in the Five Eyes agreement and the US–UK Mutual Defence Agreement respectively, will likely continue even if the US scales back its commitment to NATO. They will continue to enjoy the world’s single most lucrative bilateral investment relationship, as well as the cultural bonds of a shared language and heritage – the “fraternal relationship of English- speaking peoples”, as Churchill put it, which will be brought to the fore by the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II on May 8th, and the 250th anniversary of America’s independence from Britain in July 2026. Nor will it hurt that Donald Trump is the first president since Woodrow Wilson to have a British mother and has a well-known affinity for her birthplace, Scotland, where he owns a gold course. Vice-President JD Vance for his part takes pride in his Scots-Irish ancestry, while “First Buddy” Elon Musk has referenced a touching sympathy for the country from which most of his ancestors also came.

Nonetheless, Trump’s personal investment in the special relationship will be limited at best. As a transactionalist par excellence – and one who seems fairly indifferent to the idea of alliances in general – he will no doubt mostly measure Britain against pragmatic criteria: is it useful to him, and to his broader agenda? A number of things have happened over the past decade that have made it less so: one ironically being Brexit, which meant that Washington no longer had a reliable pro-American partner working within the European Union; another being a reduction in the overall footprint of the British armed forces even as their budget grew from 2% to 2.3% of GDP. The impression of weakness is likely to be compounded by Starmer’s terrible domestic opinion poll ratings and Britain’s anemic economic growth forecasts.

But perhaps the biggest problem for the Prime Minister is that Trump sees him – and the recently ousted Tories too, for that matter – as being on the wrong side of the great divide between nationalists and globalists, populists and elites, wokes and anti-wokes. Their governments are as such likely to disagree not just about the role of global institutions, trade with China, and the terms on which the Ukraine war should end, but also over matters of fundamental principle around borders, identity, censorship, and discrimination. And at the very foundation of the relationship, radical demographic change in both countries is corroding the ties of shared heritage and culture which have made it natural for centuries for Americans to look across the Atlantic to Europe in general, and to the British Isles in particular, as their home away from home: as Dame Karen Pierce, British Ambassador to Washington from 2020-25, put it recently before a House of Lords committee, “the demographic in both our countries is changing… I don’t think you’ll any longer find people with an automatic connection to Europe and the UK in the same way that you would have done say 25 years ago”. Nonetheless, for the time being the countries are still too tightly interwoven to risk total rupture, even though the policies and ideologies of their respective governments will be deeply and mutually politically and morally unpalatable in the years ahead. The upshot, almost certainly, will be diplomatic turbulence in a number of key areas. This extended article takes a look at half a dozen of the likeliest flashpoints.

Party Politics

Spats between Trump and Labour are long-standing and personal, even if Keir Starmer has been working hard of late to smooth things over.

During his first term, leading lights in the party went out of their way to express their loathing of the President. During the Conservative leadership election in 2019, Starmer tweeted that “[a]n endorsement from Donald Trump tells you everything you need to know about what is wrong with Boris Johnson’s politics and why he isn’t fit to be Prime Minister”. Sadiq Khan, the Labour Mayor of London, feuded extensively with him, declaring in an interview that “[h]e’s a racist. He’s a sexist. He’s a homophobe”. The most sustained anti-Trump invective came from the man who is now Britain’s foreign secretary, David Lammy, who denounced Trump as a “tyrant in a toupee”, “a racist KKK and Nazi sympathiser”, and in a tirade denouncing his first state visit, condemned him for his “shameful behavior on the international stage. We stand with the American people, but we absolutely say, ‘our democratic values are opposed to the misogyny, opposed to the racism, opposed to Steve Bannon and the horrible white supremacy he seems to stand for.’”

Woody Johnson, Trump’s ambassador to Britain in his first term, described Lammy’s outburst as “not a wise comment”, but granted “there’s always a way to recover if you want”. Instead, Starmer appears to have had a briefing saying Harris would win last year’s presidential election and added to the bad blood during the campaign. A LinkedIn post from a Labour staffer inviting volunteers to go over to campaign for Harris became the center of a firestorm, with Elon Musk criticizing it on X and encouraging the ire of prominent Republicans. Trump’s campaign even filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission against the Labour Party, accusing it of “blatant foreign interference” and arguing the request for volunteers created a “reasonable inference that the Labour Party has made … illegal foreign national contributions”.

Worse than Labour staffers pointlessly knocking on doors for Harris in the swing states was Starmer’s decision to dispatch several of his top aides – including Matthew Doyle, now Downing Street director of communications, and Morgan McSweeney, Labour’s campaign strategist and now the PM’s chief of staff – to brief the Harris team at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Not that it did her much good. In September, they were followed by Deborah Mattinson, a pollster for New Labour under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown who served as Starmer’s director of strategy until election day. She reportedly told the Harris campaign “to put the ‘hope and change stuff’ to one side” and urged “relentlessly pushing this message that she’s a prosecutor who has put criminals behind bars”. That didn’t help her much either, but it added to the impression of partisan  interference by Labour against the Republican campaign.

Since Trump’s victory, the Labour top team have been making efforts to repair the damage, with Lammy telling the BBC that he’d warmed to the president-elect in a face-to-face meeting last year, finding him a “good host, very funny, very friendly, very warm about the U.K”. They duly pulled out all the stops to get Starmer invited to the White House for their recent meeting, and were relieved at how it went. But nobody was fooled that President and Prime Minister were on the same page.

Indeed, ideologically, the distance between the two on most issues looks almost unbridgeable. Trump, as we know, favored Brexit: the Labour Party in the majority voted Remain. Labour under human rights lawyer Sir Keir is internationalist and legalist to the point of unilateral multilateralism (following the rule book even if few others do), whereas Trump believes in putting America first and the world and international law second. Like the Democrats, Labour favors more government, with Chancellor Rachel Reeves going out of her way to embrace Bidenomics under the last administration; Trump obviously favors less. In Opposition, now Net Zero Secretary Ed Miliband stated that he aspired to “match the ambition of President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act” and that he was drawing on advice from the architects of the American plan; Trump by contrast has quit the Paris Climate Agreement and wants to gut the IRA. Labour is unwilling to deport most illegal immigrants on human rights grounds; the Trump Administration is using the military to secure the border and has strong-armed foreign countries into taking their illegals back. And whereas the Trump administration is moving to aggressively dismantle the discriminatory DEI industry in America, Labour is entrenching it further; it recently threatened to punish universities if they fail to champion “diversity” under a funding plan that will predictably intensify racial discrimination against white British applicants, and plans a Race Equality Act that will bring US-style disparate impact dogma to Britain just as America under Trump is moving away from it.

Nor are things obviously better on the Tory side, where the long hangover of the disastrous Conservative era means there is very little appetite to help out the un-conservative Conservative Party. In office from 2010-24, the Tories quadrupled net immigration, imposed the highest tax and debt burden since World War 2, created more public sector DEI posts than any other country on a per capita basis, and inflicted the highest energy costs in the Western world. Trump’s advisers seem to have genuine contempt and anger for what this did to Britain, especially regarding mass immigration and multiculturalism, and for the future they’ve set up the country. As one fairly representative source told The Spectator, “There’s obviously a special relationship and we would love to keep that, but if the UK turns into Pakistan then that’s less interesting”. The party now has a new leader, Kemi Badenoch, but her credibility in MAGA world is limited by her own involvement in the last government. She is also on record declaring herself “not a Trump fan” and seemed to sneer that Trump was “interesting company” in Parliament last year, while her longtime mentor and current Spectator editor Michael Gove publicly endorsed Kamala Harris as a “lesser evil”. One Trump team source told The Independent: “Trump has zero interest in meeting her [Ms Badenoch].”

This estrangement of the erstwhile sister parties will probably not work to Starmer’s advantage, however. If anything, it has allowed Nigel Farage to position his Reform UK party, with some success, as the “real” opposition in Britain, and Elon Musk’s growing interest in Reform represents an opportunity for Farage to further his standing. Although Musk has expressed doubts about whether Farage can carry off victory by himself, he has important allies and cheerleaders, not least the 47th president of the United States himself as well as influential MAGA operatives like former Farage aide Raheem Kassam and Steve Bannon.

There have been musings among such figures about “regime change” in the UK and how to get a Trump-style prime minister into Downing Street, perhaps even by “crashing the British economy” in order to cause a crisis which would force the government out. Such fanciful discussions seem to lack an understanding of the British parliamentary system and the fact that Starmer has a huge majority for the next five years. Still, Trump Worlders particularly interested in the future of the UK are looking at how to encourage Reform and the Tories to get together, in the belief that would be a winning ticket and put Britain on a better trajectory. Judging by polls that currently show Reform in first place or narrowly second behind Labour, with the Tories trailing in third, this is a strategically plausible approach. If realized it would mean a combined right-wing vote share in the UK of almost 50%, which if brought together under the leadership of Reform (or perhaps a new, more Reform-friendly Tory leader like Robert Jenrick) would reset British politics in a MAGA-friendly direction. It is bound, however, to create tensions with Britain’s establishment parties in the meantime.