Viewed from the US side of the Atlantic, in recent years British politics has been a bewildering blur. First, there was the confounding decision in 2016 to pull out of the EU without a plan for how to do so. Then there was the rotating cast of characters who shuffled in and out of Downing Street, with five British prime ministers in seven years. There was Boris Johnson with his air of how-did-I-get-here dishevelment. And who could forget Liz Truss, forever remembered in Washington as the head of state who failed to outlast a lettuce, but not before she had managed to tank the pound and threaten the stability of the entire British financial system. In short, it has looked as though the Brits – who once prided themselves 0n being the sensible ones in global politics – have needed to get their act together.
By projecting a sense of stability and competence at the Nato leaders’ summit in Washington on 9-11 July, the new British Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, and Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, will have hoped to restore some of that lost credibility. Lammy has already been working on this, publishing a well-received essay in Foreign Affairs this spring, which argued for a new approach to foreign policy grounded in “progressive realism”, as well as Uber-ing his way around Washington, sometimes accompanied by the New Statesman’s Jason Cowley, to make his pitch. He has earned a reputation here as a committed transatlanticist, invoking his personal history as the first black Briton to attend Harvard Law School and now the first British foreign secretary descended from the slave trade.
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