“This is not Winston Churchill that we’re dealing with.”
That was Donald Trump’s assessment of Keir Starmer at an Oval Office press conference this week. The US president was “very disappointed” after the prime minister initially barred Washington from using the British-controlled Chagos Islands military base to launch the weekend’s strikes on Iran. It took the US “three or four days” to secure permission, Trump complained.
Starmer said he did approve a later, separate US request to use RAF bases for “specific and limited defensive” purposes, to target Iran’s missile facilities and rocket launchers to protect civilians from its retaliatory strikes. “We all remember the mistakes of Iraq,” he said. “And we have learned those lessons.”
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But “is this a blip with Trump in a fit of pique”, said The Times’ Washington editor Katy Balls, or is it “the latest sign of a more permanent splintering in relations?”
Officials in Washington and Westminster initially expressed surprise at how well Trump and Starmer “appeared to get on”. The pair don’t have much in common but still had “warm exchanges” – plus the UK “scored a trade deal before others”. But Starmer’s decision to deny the US request for UK help in Iranian strikes “marks a new, more fractious chapter in the so-called special relationship”. Trump “made clear that he sees relations as damaged”.
Clearly, Starmer is “no longer the Trump whisperer”, said The Independent’s political editor David Maddox. The “killer line” was Trump’s “almost wistful reflection that the relationship was ‘not what it was’”. Words like “disappointing” suggest “a certain regret”, rather than “his usual bombastic attack style”.
Trump’s tariffs on the UK and Starmer’s refusal to support his threats to Greenland had already “poisoned” the relationship. Then there’s the “collapse” of Starmer’s popularity. The administration is aware that Starmer’s days as PM “appear to be numbered”. The special relationship is over.
Rather than having broken down this week, the relationship was over the moment the US threatened its Nato allies for “resisting a land-grab” of Greenland, said James Schneider in The New Statesman. And good riddance: it was “never one of equals”; it was “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”.
What Trump does openly is what the US 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”.
Foreign policy is “the theatre in which the special relationship most reliably produces catastrophe”. Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, the US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza and now Iran: America's actions have “never commanded popular consent” in Britain.
Nevertheless, “reports of the death of the special relationship are greatly exaggerated”, said The i Paper’s chief political commentator Kitty Donaldson. Many times the two nations have “seemed on the brink of breaking off relations”, under Barack Obama and Joe Biden as well as Trump. Things might have gone “downhill” but the “underlying bedrock” of the “intertwined military and intelligence alliance” is unchanged.
Trump’s criticism is a “pattern of behaviour”, while his officials “crack on as usual behind the scenes”. Their British counterparts “eye-roll” at the claim that the special relationship is dead, said one source. The edifice is “far deeper than a spat”. We “partner more in defence and intelligence than ever before”. The UK and US are each other’s largest investors; each creates more than a million jobs in the other’s country, said Donaldson. As one British intelligence source put it: “It’s business as usual.”
What next?
Starmer is under pressure to “move leftwards” and many MPs and voters would “like a tougher line against Trump”, said Balls. In Trump’s camp, plenty of people would be “all too happy” to egg the president on in taking a “more aggressive approach with the UK”. Some are “already frustrated with the UK’s pivot closer to Europe”.
But there’s a personal aspect too. One insider describes an “ancestral yearning for the UK” in Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance and the Maga movement more widely. Trump is invested partly because of his Scottish mother and “love of the monarchy”; he’s excited for the King’s visit to the US in April.
Starmer is “well aware of the scars Labour carries from Iraq, and the reluctance of voters to join another war in the Middle East”, said Donaldson. But there’s simply no “withdrawing from the special relationship, whatever temporary spat is taking place”.
