21-05-2025
America is looking at Britain with a mixture of bewilderment and dismay
Keir Starmer, like most socialists, wants to have his cake and eat it too. He believes that Britain can be a vassal state to the European Union while also playing the role of America's closest friend and ally. It can't.
Starmer is both delusional and incredibly short-sighted. He thinks he is Machiavelli and Metternich rolled into one. In truth he looks more like a circus clown, way out of his depth representing Britain on the world stage.
The Prime Minister's emphatic surrender to Brussels will cause immense damage to the US/UK Special Relationship. It will be viewed in Washington as a stunning act of self-harm by the British Government, and a move that could very well forestall a trade deal with the United States. US officials will undoubtedly be shaking their heads this week, wondering why a nation that once held sway over a quarter of the world's surface is taking a knee before a sinking European Union that treats it with sneering contempt.
Labour's move to bring the UK back into 'dynamic alignment' with Brussels on food safety and animal welfare will mean that once again EU directives and legislation will trump British rules, with the European Court of Justice having the final say. This is just the tip of the iceberg, and will undoubtedly lead to the encroachment of EU law into many other areas of British sovereignty as well. That alone will make the completion of a trade deal incredibly difficult. The US is proposing a trade agreement with the British people, not with faceless bureaucrats sitting in the increasingly irrelevant capital of Belgium.
Starmer's announcement also moves Britain into closer realignment with the EU on defence and security issues, with British troops potentially taking part in EU military missions. The end result of this sheer folly will be the sidelining of the United States, the weakening of Nato unity, and the strengthening of Moscow, which would dearly love to see the British military submerged into a useless paper tiger EU army.
Starmer's EU deal should and will be strongly condemned on both sides of the Atlantic by all who believe in the principles of sovereignty and self-determination. I am in no doubt that President Trump will view Starmer's kowtowing to the EU as an inexplicable humiliation for the British people, but also as a slap in the face for the United States at a time when the new US administration has championed the partnership with the United Kingdom.
As I have noted before, Donald Trump is America's first Eurosceptic president. He views the European Union and the European Project which birthed it as a menace to the United States and a monument to virulent anti-Americanism as well as big government. The US President has already declared his view that the EU was 'formed in order to screw the United States,' and regards it is a mafia-style protectionist racket that operates unfairly against US exporters.
In sharp contrast, Trump has just gone out of his way to place Britain at the very head of the queue for a trade agreement with the world's largest economy, and Starmer has just knifed him in the back with a reckless act designed to curry favour with the European Commission.
President Trump has already been incredibly generous in his treatment of Keir Starmer, whom many American conservatives rightly view with deep suspicion. This is despite the fact that, ideologically, the Trump administration and the Starmer government are worlds apart.
The alarms have already been ringing in Washington over Starmer's disastrous proposed handover of the Chagos Islands to Chinese ally Mauritius, threatening the long-term future of the vital Anglo-American military base of Diego Garcia. I have not spoken to a single US official who thinks the Chagos deal is good for America.
And back in February Vice President JD Vance launched the verbal equivalent of a cruise missile strike against the Labour Government at the Munich Security Conference over the serious assault on freedom of speech in the UK. In addition it has not been forgotten in the White House that nearly 100 Labour officials actively campaigned for Kamala Harris in key swing states in 2024, in an act of direct interference in a US presidential race.
Above all, in the context of US transatlantic policy, Brexit remains hugely popular with the Trump Administration and the American Right. President Trump is the biggest supporter of Brexit on the world stage today, and views the British referendum victory in 2016 as a forerunner to his own against all odds presidential win that year. Keir Starmer and his Left-wing government, however, look hell-bent on trashing the hard-won freedoms backed by 17.4 million Britons who voted to leave the EU nearly a decade ago.
Starmer's shameful actions will go down in history as an emphatic betrayal of the democratic will of the British people, as well as an incredibly dangerous snub to the powerful alliance between the United States and Great Britain, who have for the last 85 years acted as the beating heart of the free world.
Nile Gardiner is the Director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom at The Heritage Foundation in Washington, DC
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