Since this calamitous Iran war began, there’s been endless talk in Britain about our ‘special relationship’ (often capitalised) with the United States. People who declare this relationship to be important are almost always those who also believe that, come what may in the war, we British should stand shoulder to shoulder with Donald Trump. Those, on the other hand, who think we should distance ourselves from him, tend to disparage the special relationship as unimportant.
This column therefore breaks new ground. I think the special relationship is very important. But I don’t believe we should stand shoulder to shoulder with this president. Our special relationship is with America. Mr Trump is not America. There is an America with which we should stay very close and with which our relationship is longstanding and precious. Trump represents everything that’s inimical – and corrosive – to that America.
I love the United States. I spent two years there at Yale. It’s a great country with great people. I loved the energy, the openness, the spirit of liberty and opportunity that, to me, America seemed to represent. I responded to what I believed our two nations especially shared: an iron-clad respect for the rule of law, for constitutionality and for freedom under the law.
So I want us British, sometimes jaded, sometimes tired, sometimes flagging in our confidence in the future of the West, to be able to look up to that beacon of western (and European) values, and feel a special kinship with the country that has carried the flag for the Free World. And I want Americans to see us as a nation particularly attached to our English-speaking cousins, and for them to feel a reciprocal attachment. The old world and the new, bound together by kinship, language and shared values.
Trump is a world away from all this. In less than four years he will be gone from the White House. He will not be mourned. The majority of Americans will cheer his departure. At home and abroad his second presidency will be widely seen as a disaster for western democracy, his country’s good name and the American ideal. Trump will be judged for having taken the United States into an incomprehensible war, on a personal whim, without proper forward planning and without any clear idea of what could be called victory, having been suckered by a manipulative Israeli prime minister into an engagement that suits Israel well enough – to smash up a hostile country and leave chaos in its wake – but should have no place in America’s strategy in the region.
In retrospect almost everyone will see what many are already beginning to see: a nasty, grasping and narcissistic old man with the attention span of a gnat, whose mental powers are failing and who had no idea what he was doing.
They will see that, far from being ‘strong’, Trump was weak. Strength in a statesman does not reside in braggadocio, in randomly lashing out and in fickleness. Strength resides in consistency of purpose, generosity of spirit, and the moral and mental capacity to hold to a course. Bullies are rarely strong and are typically easily bullied themselves. Trump’s dancing attendance on monsters like Vladimir Putin and twisters like Benjamin Netanyahu bears witness to that truth.
People will see, too, that his fetishising of trade tariffs did not bring the boost to the pay-packets of working people, as he had promised, and his voodoo economics was just that. They will rue his vindictive attempts to shin-kick those who declined to cooperate with him, by abusing presidential powers. And by then, the stories of his personal greed, already current, will be widely acknowledged.
Trump will not be universally despised. There may remain a hardcore of the MAGA movement who will stick to the last with their imagined hero. But this President will go down, if not in flames, then in an upswelling of disappointment and disgust among the electorate.
This President will go down, if not in flames, then in an upswelling of disappointment and disgust
Is this what we British want a special relationship with? When this capering idiot departs at last from the Oval Office, will those who preferred to keep a polite distance from his idiocies be branded as having betrayed the special relationship?
I am not naive about the United States. As with every quasi-imperial power, there have been many blemishes to its record. I know very well that the State Department doctrine that the whole hemisphere is their backyard has led to some disgraceful interventions in Central and South America, and the Caribbean; that the Vietnam war was a well-intentioned blunder; and that the less said about Iraq the better. I know how long it took for the civil rights movement to prevail, and how in some corners racism lingers.
There is undoubtedly a cruel and careless streak in the American psyche, and Trump did not come to us out of a vacuum – he enjoyed enthusiastic support from a slice of the population who know exactly what he is, and approve. And perhaps he represents a corner, more generally, of the American mind. I recognise a sliver of truth (and so would most Americans) in the mid-20th–century columnist H.L. Mencken’s prescience: ‘As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents more and more closely the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.’
But not a crackpot.
I see another America. I think of Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin, the Roosevelts, Woodrow Wilson, JFK, Bobby Kennedy, even (for all his cynicism) LBJ. I think of the America that houses the United Nations; mourned the death of Martin Luther King; shouldered the Marshall Plan after the second world war; and has been an inspiration worldwide to those who yearn for freedom. The America of the City on the Hill.
It is with this America that we should value our special relationship, and this America that, when the ghastly spasm that is Donald Trump is ended, we will honour again.
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