Starmer has grasped what his predecessors would not – that Britain is better off in Europe than with the US
Sir Keir Starmer is announcing a pivot away from America and towards Europe in the most radical shift in British foreign policy for decades – re-setting the UK’s place in a world that will diminish America’s power.
There will be consternation in some quarters of the nation’s armed forces – particularly the Special Forces – but ending the junior partner status of Britain under the US puts an end to the fantasy of the Special Relationship.
The PM has grasped a barbed wire nettle many of his predecessors could not even see when he stands up at the Munich Security Conference to say: “There is no British security without Europe, and no European security without Britain. That is the lesson of history – and it is today’s reality too.”
He has insisted the US remains an indispensable ally. But he is now insisting that America is no longer the only ally and recognising that Washington is not even a reliable friend.
It has been a long time coming. But it has not always been the case.
Until the end of the Cold War, Britain and the US had a more equal partnership. It was underpinned by the Five Eyes intelligence sharing relationship with Canada, New Zealand, Australia, the US and UK, but London showed fierce independence.
The UK stayed out of the Vietnam War. The US gave little to no support to Britain’s re-capture of the Falkland islands from Argentina in 1982.
When the US led a multinational UN-sanctioned mission to end warlordism and mass starvation in Somalia in 1992, France, Turkey, Morocco, Pakistan and numerous other nations joined a mission of noble intent. But not Britain.
In those days it was recognised by a British defence attache in Washington, a major general, that the “special relationship is special to us but not to the Americans”.
“They’re polite and courtly and always seem to listen. Then they close the door behind us when we’ve gone and ignore what we said. It made us feel important but we mattered little to them,” he said before the UK joined the US in the ill-fated war in Iraq and the two decade fiasco of Afghanistan.
In taking Britain into the Iraq war, the UK became a sub-unit of the US military and in the decade of the so called war on terror that followed, that status was cemented by under-funding and over reliance on the equipment known as “enablers” – the satellite imagery, air transport and refuelling, and the logistics chains that the US leads the world in providing.
Then, last year, 80 years of assumptions about the UK’s future defences were upended by the Trump administration when the junior relationship was downgraded.
Writing on Substack this week, Tom Tugendhat, a Tory back bencher and former chair of the defence select committee (and former front-line intelligence officer) said: “British defence policy rested on four pillars. The assumption of automatic American support. The credibility of Nato as a guaranteed security provider. The stability of long-term defence planning. And the political consensus that defence could remain a secondary concern. Within the first fifty days of Donald Trump’s return to the White House, all four were effectively dismantled.”
Britain’s Special Air Service and the Special Boat Service, each (officially) comprising four squadrons of Tier 1 “operators” are the only units with which the UK and US are on parity. The Americans have about the same number of their most highly trained soldiers.
