A couple of weeks before Israel and the US bombed Iran, a group of lawyers and regional experts from the US war and State departments arrived at the British embassy in Washington DC. Donald Trump’s armada was amassing in the Persian Gulf. Negotiations with the Iranians in Geneva were proving fruitless. Inside the embassy, the Americans were told international law meant US warplanes could not take off from British bases in the initial moments of a war with Iran. But it was also suggested that if Iran retaliated, airbases would be made available, targeting would be coordinated, intelligence would be shared. In other words, British support was proposed in advance.
In the days after the war started, the cogs of the so-called special relationship began to turn. American warplanes began arriving at RAF Fairford in Gloucestershire and Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. The MoD worked with the US war department on targeting missile strikes on Iran. The Americans used Akrotiri, the British base in Cyprus, for refuelling and surveillance flights. The message transmitted from London to Washington was: please tell us, within the legal constraints, if there is anything else we can do to help.
Though that is not the story being told in Westminster. As Keir Starmer tries to hold on to power, he has pitched himself as the anti-Trump tribune. The flattery with which Starmer first tried to woo Trump has been cast aside. This approach was based on a misunderstanding of the Maga administration and the realities of the US-UK relationship. Lyrical letters cannot subdue Trump’s capriciousness. The British military is now less useful to the White House since our dependence on the US has allowed successive governments to emaciate British armed forces. Meanwhile, Trump has undermined organisations like the UN, creating pliable alternatives, such as the Board of Peace and the Shield of the Americas. One of Britain’s roles used to be to provide a multilateralist sheen to American aggression. In Trump’s world, that has been made redundant.
On 4 March, the PM told parliament that “hanging on to President Trump’s latest words is not the special relationship”. In return, the president called Starmer a “loser” and “no Churchill”, and said Britain was a “once great ally”. The principals, as civil servants call their bosses, were trading barbs. Politics and diplomacy were colliding, as was an old world of postwar ideals with a new one in which Trump uses the American military to choose foreign leaders, and a few moments in a room with him can undo years of careful diplomacy.
British foreign policy is now shaped by three overlapping forces: politicians in Westminster and Washington; communications between the British and American deep states; and, more startlingly, the global nationalist hard right. While Starmer tries to distance himself from this war in Westminster, the transatlantic deep state is working to repair trust between the two nations. At the same time, Nigel Farage and other opposition politicians flout procedure and act as independent emissaries to the White House.
The New Statesman has spoken to administration officials in Washington, sources in the Middle East, London and the Democratic Party, as well as Nigel Farage. What emerges from these conversations is a picture of the relationship that has long been deteriorating and has now been broken by a war that is spiralling out of control.
British officials talk about the special relationship as if it is a family heirloom. As the war began, protecting this antique meant smoothing the anger in the Trump administration at the UK government’s initial refusal to block the use of British bases. Why were the Americans angry when British support was only a day late? “If you look at the geography of Iran, it’s much easier to begin this operation from Diego Garcia and Fairford than it is from Kansas,” an official said.
After Starmer’s attack in parliament on Trump’s war, the soothing began. On the night of 3 March, the UK ambassador Christian Turner spoke on the phone with the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles. In No 10, the national security adviser, Jonathan Powell, and his deputies, Matt Collins and Barbara Woodward, steered Britain’s response. Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper had a “reasonable” conversation with Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The respective joint chiefs of staff spoke to each other as did the defence secretaries, John Healey and Pete Hegseth. Embassy staff were put on a rota system to maintain contact with London despite the five-hour time difference.
But the problem ran deeper than the US Air Force paying more for jet fuel after they had to fly from Kansas. The government’s legalistic approach, driven by Starmer and his Attorney General, Richard Hermer, defied Washington’s expectation that “the Brits” will support them without pause. In an age when the US’s leader no longer believes in international law, the UK is led by a man for whom international law forms the core of his politics. Starmer has not justified Britain’s response in terms of national interest; he is governing by legal opinion. This is alien in Trumpland.
“We are behaving as though we are in a pre-Trumpian world,” the former head of the Foreign Office, Simon McDonald, told me. “The American separation from Europe has been underway for a long time and has been given a huge shove by Trump,” he continued. In the medium term, he thinks Britain must “make a much bigger offer to Brussels”. But in the short term, “Everything is about the US. This is the unavoidable fact of the day.”
Part of what Starmer and his team did not understand when they left the White House last February was that the Maga movement believes Britain is a sinking nation, one overwhelmed by “third-world” immigration and vulnerable to woke institutions. Maga looks at the UK as a country that has become so powerless in the face of its internal malaise that it can no longer be a reliable ally. The Maga guru Steve Bannon told me that Britain is “not a post-Christian nation, [but] a pre-Islamic” one. When he mentions London on his talkshow it’s as a shorthand for an ethnically divided dystopia. “A Labour Party with 15 Muslim MPs would never let Starmer bomb a Muslim country,” he told me. (Labour has 19 Muslim MPs.)
Americans’ reverence for British culture was once as much a glue as joint military operations. The power of institutions that bound the UK and the US together, such as the Rhodes scholarship and the Council on Foreign Relations, has eroded in the 21st century. JFK once modelled himself on Queen Victoria’s Whig prime minister, Lord Melbourne. Today, even a moderate appreciation for British literature feels anachronistic among Washington’s current political milieu. London no longer captivates the Washington right-wing foreign policy elite in a way that it once did. “For a younger generation the Gulf is what London used to be,” one administration official told me.
“Japan, say, has a clear constituency politically in the US,” they continued. “Heck, even El Salvador does because [President Nayib] Bukele has created a brand. India may be divisive but it resonates. What is the UK’s constituency?” They said the US will continue to engage with Britain, but in a manner akin to how Germany and France are treated.
Starmer, then, isn’t seen as integral. The perception is that he has been custom-built as the antithesis of a Trumpian era: procedural, uncharismatic and lacking political nous. Maga can sniff this out. When I asked Bannon about the UK government’s distinction between offensive and defensive strikes he said, “That’s diplomatic bullshit. Fuck you. You’re either an ally or you’re not. Fuck you. The special relationship is over.”
Some British officials still think they only need to preserve the relationship long enough for the Trumpian era to pass. “It’s not impossible that in 2028 there’s a government that says, ‘We’re glad you didn’t join this,’” one said. But that is to misunderstand the ambivalence, and occasional hostility, among Democrats as well. I once attended a dinner party in Georgetown with foreign policy types and mentioned the British position on the Middle East, causing one guest to mutter: “Colonialists.” In her book 107 Days, Kamala Harris, who has Indian heritage, recounts how she and Joe Biden, who has Irish heritage, bonded over jibes about British colonialism. Matt Duss, who was Bernie Sanders’ foreign policy adviser and went to last month’s Munich Security Conference with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, gave no credit to Starmer for his supposedly independent position. “An insult to empty suits,” was how he described Starmer to me.
If the Democrats don’t offer a restored special relationship, then parts of the British right believe in another path to fix things: put Farage in No 10. Farage is the UK politician most connected to the Maga White House. He was recently at the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach, Florida, for a closed-door economic conference. He told me that his planned dinner at Mar-a-Lago the night before was cancelled after Trump had to pay respect to the dead American soldiers whose bodies had been returned from the Middle East. Farage would have tried to reassure the president that Britain would look different under Reform.
Farage has aligned himself with the president’s war in Iran. What has changed since he opposed the Iraq War and the 2011 strikes on Libya? “Iran’s a genuine threat to the world,” he told me. But what about the Chinese Communist Party or Vladimir Putin? “Iran potentially poses a bigger danger than Putin poses to us,” he replied. “I do feel this is different.”
“If the result of this is that it stops Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, it would have been worth it.” He said “we really don’t know what’s going to happen” but given Israeli and American intelligence and planning, he was “reasonably optimistic”. Farage said he was seeing members of the administration while in Palm Beach. His message to them was to “stick firm” on Diego Garcia and that Reform would have a “very different approach” to defence. In return, his White House contacts tell him that in “military terms, their respect for us is now down to just special forces – there’s nothing else left”.
To his critics, Farage is betraying his country in his pursuit of a friendship with Trump by lobbying against the government’s position. “I believe what I’m doing here is not against the national interest,” Farage said. He said he told Starmer “to his face” that “I know a lot of this administration, I am on text exchanges with cabinet members [and] if you need my help in any way at all, I will do it. I will do it under the radar. Nobody will ever know.” Farage said he privately wrote to Starmer in September offering his help but did not receive a reply.
His relationship with Trump makes Reform vulnerable to the accusation it has long made of others – that they are prioritising foreigners. Polls show the war is unpopular in the UK, as is Trump. But Farage keeps going back to Mar-a-Lago. Trump has an allure he cannot resist.
In this respect, Farage is less radical than many believe, because to break with America would be to break with the status quo. Few want to question Britain’s dependence on the US military or its economic domination through US private equity firms. The special relationship is a seductive idea. America tells its fawning allies that what they have is unique. Pro-Israel politicians in Congress praise the US-Israeli “special relationship”; when the shah visited the White House in 1979, President Jimmy Carter reassured him of the US-Iranian “special relationship”. British PMs have long seen these words as the antidote to British decline, the key to influence beyond these islands. That myth is slowly dying.
On 9 March, Starmer and Trump spoke to each other for the first time since their spat erupted. The readout was written in the polite language of diplomacy. The deep state will of course keep sharing intelligence, while para-official diplomats such as Tony Blair and Farage will continue to lobby the Trumpian court. But the relationship will not be as amicable as it once was. The lurch is towards the UK’s alienation. This year has so far shown the wrath with which Trump’s America treats other countries, whether through its designs on Greenland or plucking Nicolás Maduro from Caracas. The usual order of things will not return.
The war in Iran proves this. Trump is fighting a regime for which, as one source from the region put it, “survival is victory”. Overwhelming military force cannot control how the conflict spills across the region, not least when the Israelis and Americans have conflicting war aims. It will also affect Britain. The spike in oil prices could be politically fatal for Starmer, throwing his government into an emergency posture over how to protect a restive population from rising energy bills. In that scenario, the public’s resentment towards Trump and the US will only grow. A day’s delay in opening up British bases was enough for Maga to look at the government with fresh disdain. For both sides of the Atlantic, the war has exposed a truth that cuts at the heart of the “special relationship”: that Britain is an impotent ally and America a dangerous and unstable one.
[Further reading: When did the British right get so unpatriotic?]
Content from our partners
Related
This article appears in the 11 Mar 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The Great British Crisis
Join the debate
Subscribe here to commentThe so called special relationship only ever existed in the pathetic small minds of British politicians desperate to hang on to the illusion that we were somehow still a major player on the world stage after the fall of the British Empire. The Americans have been laughing at us for years. Hopefully that illusion has now been shattered by the Trump administration. Time to move on, gain a bit of self respect and become a lot more self sufficient economically and militarily.
Excellent and insightful piece, thank you.