Donald Trump has told Britain to choose: support the USA’s seizure of Greenland, or face punitive tariffs. From February, he threatens, British goods will be hit with a 10 per cent levy, rising to 25 per cent by the summer. And as of this Tuesday (20 January), he has even derided Britain’s Chagos settlement – crafted to secure the US military base on Diego Garcia after an adverse International Court of Justice ruling – as “weakness”, and used it as propaganda for his Greenland grab. This is not diplomacy. It is the language of empire spoken in the tones of a racketeer.
There is a temptation to treat this as another eruption of Trumpian spectacle. But the point is not Trump’s personality. It is the structure he exposes. What he does in the open is what the United States has long done in practice: use access to its market, its currency, its intelligence networks and its military power to discipline friend and foe alike.
Consider the past fortnight alone: the bombing of Caracas and kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro; sabre-rattling towards states across the Americas; the threats to bomb Iran again. The US behaves not as a guarantor of stability but as a mobster state: it makes demands, offers “security”, and exacts a price. Trump invoices openly.
And now, Greenland. The claim that Nato is a partnership of equals collapses the moment the United States threatens its own allies for resisting a land-grab. European leaders can issue indignant statements. But the real question is why Britain remains tied to an alliance which sends us to war but vanishes the instant Washington wants to seize an island.
That is because Nato is not a neutral instrument. It is the military expression of US primacy. It always was. Its command structures, its procurement standards, its interoperability doctrine – these are not incidental features, but the means by which American power reproduces itself inside the defence apparatus of its so-called allies. Nato is a mechanism of vassalage.
Washington’s demands that its allies raise military spending are a boon to US weapons companies. The revenues of the world’s top arms firms now exceed $675 bn a year, dominated by US companies. The effect in Europe has been stark. European arms imports rose 155 per cent between 2020 and 2024, with almost two-thirds coming from the US.
Britain’s military spending follows the same pattern. Take the F-35 programme: a US-designed, US-controlled aircraft that Britain is committed to buying in the dozens, at enormous cost, despite “significant delays” and availability and mission capability “far below its targets”. A July 2025 National Audit Office report put the lifetime cost at £71 bn – rather than the Ministry of Defence’s original £18.76 bn estimate – and described the spend as a “disappointing return”.
This is what interoperability looks like in practice. A disproportionate share of Britain’s dramatically increasing defence spending does not circulate in British industry or communities. It crosses the Atlantic, underwriting US balance sheets and share prices.
Here, the fraud becomes domestic as well as geopolitical. Every extra billion poured into this system is a billion not spent on the things that actually make a society secure: homes, hospitals, transport, energy. While pensioners ration heat and nurses treat patients in hospital corridors, we are told our safety depends on feeding the US military-industrial complex. Some say Britain has to accept vassalage to protect us from Russia. But Ukraine itself is the warning. First used as a wedge in Washington’s contest with Russia, it is now being offered up by Trump for partition and plunder. A security order built around US power does not guarantee sovereignty; it treats other countries as expendable resource sites.
The cost is not only fiscal. It is paid in the loss of sovereignty. Britain hosts an extensive US military footprint: more than a dozen bases, at least 11,000 troops, and a network of listening stations. These are not ornamental facilities. They are nodes in Washington’s global architecture: intelligence, logistics, strike capability. Defence Secretary John Healey says the United States would not be allowed to use these bases to attack Greenland. The question is: could we even stop them?
Even the Trident nuclear programme – so often brandished as the last talisman of British great-power status – rests on US American infrastructure. The UK does not own its missiles; they are leased from the US and must return there for maintenance and replacement. The lifetime cost of this system has been estimated to exceed £200 bn. You can call this “operational independence” if you like. But the phrase is doing political work that the hardware likely cannot. There hasn’t been a successful test launch of Trident in over a decade.
And then there is foreign policy: the theatre in which the special relationship most reliably produces catastrophe. Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya. Today, Gaza stands as the moral nadir of the Western alliance: a genocide carried out by Israeli intent with US American money, British political support, and a globe-spanning supply chain. Yet this posture has never commanded popular consent. Large majorities opposed the Iraq war. Today, most Britons want arms sales to Israel halted. Our alignment persists not because it is democratic, but because it is enforced by elite consensus. Britain’s foreign policy is not the expression of public will; it is the habit of a governing class trained to treat Washington’s interests as the horizon of the possible.
If the relationship were a strategic bargain – obedience in exchange for prosperity – the arrangement would at least be intelligible. But Britain is not just militarily enmeshed; it is economically subordinate. By 2022, overseas investors owned 57.7 per cent of UK-listed shares, with US Americans by far the largest bloc. US capital does not merely buy firms. As Angus Hanton shows in Vassal State, it acquires the “plumbing” of British economic life: utilities, logistics, data centres, housing, healthcare. Rents and dividends flow outward while government acts as a concierge for US finance – courting asset managers like BlackRock to expand their stake in Britain’s infrastructure.
Even when the White House is occupied by someone more polished than Trump, “America First” persists – not as a slogan, but as the default setting of an imperial economy. It means US corporate interests first. In practice, it means that when the US wants something – bases, contracts, resources, silence in the face of atrocities – it will apply pressure until it gets it. And now, it means tariffs for insufficient enthusiasm about the annexation of Greenland.
So what should Britain do? Begin with honesty: the special relationship is over. It was never one of equals but a method by which Britain’s ruling class felt relevant by laundering US power with a clipped accent – and selling it to the public as shared values.
A new place in the world starts at home: security defined as dignity, resilience built through public investment. Internationally, Britain should pursue alliances of mutual respect, not vassalage. That means deepening cooperation with European and other subordinate allies willing to recover autonomy and reduce dependence on US systems and strengthening ties with major countries like Mexico, Brazil, Malaysia and South Africa on trade, industry and climate.
China should not be treated as a civilisational enemy at Washington’s behest – as some politicians untroubled by Britain’s role as a US outpost had been doing in the row over China’s new embassy. It is a partner in the central material project of the century: the green energy buildout – technology transfer, grids, mass transit, housing, industrial decarbonisation.
This is not an argument for replacing one hegemon with another. Britain should not be a vassal of Washington, Beijing, or anyone else. The prize is self-government. A Britain that can say: we decide how the wealth we create is used; our territory is not Airstrip One; our diplomacy is not for hire; our economy is not a bargain-bin for foreign capital. The tariff threat over Greenland is a gift, if we have the nerve to accept it: a clear, brutal signal that dependence is not security. It is a vulnerability – until the day the bill comes due. We should find a new place in the world before it does.
[Further reading: Europe must break from America]
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Subscribe here to commentVery interesting and well written article
Well, just so far. I note that the author says absolutely nothing about the UK’s defences. Like Corbyn, nothing serious here.
A lucid and cogently argued essay. It’s probably worth noting that any necessary change in policy is highly unlikely to happen under a Starmer government which has been captured by, and internalised the Israeli security state, meaning of course it is in lockstep with US foreign policy aims, notwithstanding Chagos and Starmer’performative bleating about Greenland. It remains to be seen whether things may change under a Reform government and there is always the hope that Trump in one of his numerous mental spasms may increase the scope of the US’s withdrawal from NATO, currently restricted to advisory forums