It was tricky, in the White House’s East Room last February, to work out whether Keir Starmer’s strangled grin owed its strange composition more to naivety or hubris. So many heads of state – the leaders of Ukraine, South Africa and others – had left that building humiliated. But the Prime Minister’s team sauntered out, elated at the diplomatic coup they thought they had pulled off. The special relationship had survived the populists’ return to the White House, they thought. Their letter from the King worked a charm. US support for Ukraine was safe for the foreseeable. Job well done.
The confidence with which Starmer thought flattery could assuage the imperial politics emerging right in front of him was surreal. He dismissed Trumpian anger over the alleged suppression of free speech in the UK and Europe as if the Americans were too crass to know what they were talking about. “We’ve had free speech for a very, very long time in the United Kingdom,” Starmer complacently said in the Oval Office. You’d think his insistence that no relationship mattered more than the US one would reveal its cracks to him.
Over the past year, UK foreign policy has ignored two facts. The first is that Donald Trump and his administration are no longer synonymous: many of the president’s staffers are more extreme than he is. No 10 seemed to confuse the cheery expression on Trump’s face as he was driven around in a golden carriage at Windsor Castle last September with a general sympathy in the US government for Britain. Whatever the president might say, a cadre of his officials looks at the UK and Europe with disdain. As Vance said last year, “In Britain, and across Europe, free speech, I fear, is in retreat.” The second: the administration is more sincere about its intentions than the stream of falsehoods coming out of the Oval Office suggests.
“If you don’t know, now you know,” said the US secretary of state Marco Rubio after the administration effectively colonised Venezuela at the start of January. The attack should alert the British diplomatic establishment to the dangers that come with a careless trust in the special relationship. Instead, the UK is confused about the forces buffeting it around: it gestures towards Europe one minute before crawling back to the US the next. A leading human rights lawyer heads the British government at a time when Trump has buried the rules-based order. Starmer does not know how to navigate the nationalist currents coming out of the White House because he does not understand them.
Trump’s appetite for exercising US military power is increasing. Missiles have struck Iran, Nigeria and boats in the Caribbean. Then the National Security Strategy (NSS) was published in November. It claimed the Western hemisphere as an American fiefdom, and lamented the “civilisational erasure” taking place in Europe. Why was a supposedly America First government so concerned about “erasure” in a relatively powerless continent? The former EU high representative for foreign affairs, Josep Borrell, wrote that Trump “wants a white Europe divided into nations, subordinate to his demands”. But that was only half right. The Maga administration looks at the UK with agonised affection. Just as the US tries to resuscitate its Anglo-Saxon heritage, restrict immigration from “third-world countries”, and purge wokeness from its institutions, America imagines Britain being overrun with immigrants and their allies on the right being suppressed. If you understand US nationhood as an ethnic project, as many in its administration do, then the destruction of the ancestral homeland through mass migration is a psychological trauma Maga is not willing to endure.
“Why are the English passive?” asked the Maga infotainer Charles Haywood on X last January, when the grooming gang crimes in Britain resurfaced on the platform. “In any Western country in history, what has been done to the British by their rulers and their pet migrants would result in the mass levying of private justice: the overthrow of the British government, the permanent neutering of the elites, and a long list of actions not discussable on X.” Haywood sounds like an extremist. But this is a normal view of Britain in Trump’s Washington. “I’d like to conquer the UK and turn it into a vassal of the US,” added the Maga podcaster Tim Pool a few months later. When Tucker Carlson visited Russia he was impressed by the supermarkets in Moscow. When he visited Britain, he used a few thousand words in the Spectator to compare the English to native American tribes: defeated people on the verge of extinction.
The people actually running the US government – Trump has delegated much of his power to his cabinet, staffers and family, while he names monuments after himself and shuttles to and from the golf course – see the impotence and torpor in Britain as a moral outrage as well as a strategic problem. In other words, mass migration into Europe is a national security issue because the US’s very identity is under threat. In December, JD Vance said that in 15 years’ time there was a real chance that “Islamist-adjacent” politicians could gain control over Britain’s nuclear arsenal. “That is very much a very direct threat to the United States of America,” he told UnHerd.
Understanding the stakes for Maga allows us to interpret the NSS as an interventionist document. Don’t expect the US Marines to land in the Outer Hebrides any time soon, but it’s clear the White House will use its leverage to force Britain to protect what it sees as its civilisational heritage. In November, the State Department instructed its diplomats in Europe to lobby against pro-migration policies. Starmer’s careless assertion that free speech is safe in Britain becomes a matter of foreign policy when the Trump administration vehemently disagrees. US officials considered offering political asylum to Lucy Connolly after she was imprisoned in the UK for tweeting: “Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels [of asylum seekers]… for all I care.” This is reminiscent of America offering a haven to persecuted eastern Europeans during the Cold War.
Over Christmas, the State Department sanctioned the British anti-misinformation campaigner Imran Ahmed, who is close to Starmer’s chief of staff, Morgan McSweeney. This effective deportation notice received little pushback from Downing Street. I hear that if the UK government does not comply with US requests over the Online Safety Act, which the administration argues is censoring American tech companies, then there is a chance that Ofcom officials might be next. These threats are sold to Americans as free speech protections, but they are also designed to force the British government to change course. Starmer might have to accept that protecting free speech has become an issue of national security.
The White House assumes as fact, and celebrates as strategy, that the world is divided between big powers ruling over geographical spheres of influence. The UK is viewed as part of US civilisation. American interventions across the Atlantic are, of course, nothing new. Everything from Nato and the Marshall Plan to Barack Obama’s warning in 2016 that Britain should not leave the EU and the Biden White House taking the lead in Ukraine. Dean Acheson, a secretary of state under Truman, wrote in his memoir that European integration was key to promoting European strength, thereby freeing the US to run the rest of its empire.
Today, the objective is essentially the same. But the means have changed. The White House thinks European integration, and the elite class behind it, are the cause of European weakness, not a source of strength. The Trump administration thinks that having nationalists in power is a safer bet for European security than the status quo. The NSS calls for “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations”.
Maga thinks the UK establishment is suppressing the true will of the British people. We saw the extreme version of this view in real time on X, where Maga works out its political theory. The influencer Mike Cernovich posted after the Venezuela attack that he wished “they had black bagged” Starmer instead of Nicolás Maduro. It’s a line relished by Britain’s nationalist right. Tommy Robinson posted that he “would now love America & president trump [sic] to free us from our tyrannical dictator Keir Starmer”. Again, don’t expect a Delta Force unit to rappel down on to the roof of No 10. But this is the intellectual atmosphere in which Trump’s officials come up with their ideas.
The Prime Minister is left with a conundrum. Starmer has always been Trump’s antithesis: lawyerly, obsessed with process and allergic to political theatre. He entered office at a time when the order he spent his life building was being torn down. He must now answer the question: what is the UK’s role in the world Trump is forging?
He has three broad options. The first is to continue kowtowing to the White House in the hope that technological investment and protection for Ukraine compensate for the ongoing humiliation. The second approach would be to ally with Germany and France in order to project their own civilisational power in areas such as eastern Europe and North Africa. The third, in the hermetic tradition of Enoch Powell, would be to recognise how fanciful global influence is in an era of British decline, and that the only sensible course of action is inward retrenchment.
After the Venezuela raid, Starmer said he wanted to align more closely with the European single market. Yet his government refused to condemn the assault on Caracas. A tighter economic relationship with Europe is no substitute for independence from Washington. After the tortures of Brexit, there is little to suggest the UK finally understands and accepts that the EU is a vehicle for a federal European state, let alone come to terms with what a British role in that project might look like. It is a policy of half-measures and hedged bets.
In the meantime, Starmer will continue to stumble through the new world that Trump has made, certain that the special relationship must stay intact but unwilling to accept that its terms have fundamentally changed.
[Further reading: Maduro won’t satisfy Trump’s hungry ego]
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This article appears in the 07 Jan 2026 issue of the New Statesman, What Trump wants
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