US tradition of respecting European leaders in danger of being squandered

Some readers will recall that last week I posed the question of what sort of an alliance the British government might think it had with United States after denying that country the use of the shared airbase at Diego Garcia in what was then the possible offensive against Iran to force the end of that country’s nuclear military programme and its subsidisation of the most odious terrorist groups in the Middle East. Obviously, the circumstances changed decisively, and the British have reversed their view on allowing US Air Force and Naval Air Force warplanes to use British airbases, including in Cyprus.

Reporting in Britain and Europe on American political news and especially anything to do with the Trump administration is so generally biased and unreliable that it may be useful to describe the current state of American public opinion about its British and European allies, as much as it can be deduced from apparently representative comment in the US political media. Prime Minister Starmer’s statement of qualified support for the American and Israeli action in Iran was almost universally seen as mealy-mouthed, late, quite inadequate, and not really an expression of support at all. That is a reasonable interpretation.

Although the BBC is reporting widespread anti-administration demonstrations in many American cities, American opinion is, as is usually the case when their armed forces are exchanging fire with the foreign enemy, supportive of the actions in Iran, tentative about the wisdom of going to war at this time. Americans are almost unanimously convinced of the wickedness of the Islamic Republic government. American opinion is also uninterested in what foreigners think of the US, and although the administration does wish for greater solidarity and a clearer and more reliable consensus in the Western Alliance, not five per cent of Americans would know who Keir Starmer is or care what he thinks about anything.

The blur of the seven failed prime ministers from both parties since Tony Blair just 19 years ago has substantively changed collective American opinion of the stability and relevance of the UK government. Americans were accustomed to the durability of Mr. Churchill, Harold Macmillan, Harold Wilson, Margaret Thatcher, and Tony Blair. The legacy of the Churchill Gloriana in the war years and the grand alliance with Roosevelt, and the significant revival of that spirit and efficient cooperation under President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher, and most Americans appreciated and valued the special relationship with the UK.

Whatever British and European opinion of the current American administration, and Trump certainly does not lack domestic critics, the British and Europeans should be aware of how close they are coming to being regarded in US strategic policy circles and broadly informed public opinion, as relevant only as a strategic territory that, as in 1940 and even 1917 and throughout the Cold War, the United States did not wish to have dominated by hostile powers. The long tradition through World War II, all of the Cold War and somewhat beyond, of taking the British government seriously on its merits and on the continuing strength and influence of the UK, and of respecting the governments of successive German chancellors and French leaders including Adenauer, Schmidt, and Kohl, and de Gaulle, Giscard d’Estaing, and Mitterrand, is in danger of being irretrievably squandered.

As Secretary of State Rubio explained at Munich two weeks ago, the United States is historically and sentimentally close to Europe and views the deterioration in relations between the two with unease and even distress. All of this can be put back together but not exclusively by the passage of the Trump Era at the end of his present term. There are signs from the present German Chancellor and certainly Prime Minister Meloni of Italy and some other European leaders, of a genuine desire to strengthen the European participation in the Western Alliance and restore better and closer relations with Washington.

For most of the Cold War and some of the subsequent years, the correlation of strength in the Western Alliance, while unequal, certainly included a healthy respect for the major Western European allies. They are now widely regarded as incapable of controlling their own borders, so over-socialised that they are economically inert and increasingly uncompetitive, of very marginal utility as allies, and that they allow militant minorities to undermine their democracy and respect for human rights, and that they are largely governed by irresolute nonentities. The small number of Americans who have an opinion of Starmer think he is completely intimidated by local Muslim radicals and he is taken less seriously than any British prime minister since Ramsay MacDonald, who was a decent man in terrible times propped up from 1931 to 1935 by the king (George V).

The US and Israel are obviously about to win a decisive victory over Iran and will do the world a great favour in dispensing with that ghastly regime. This is no time for British relativism about the competing merits of Iran and the United States.