Will the Western alliance survive a new Trump term?
Dan Hannan
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This is not the first time that Moscow has taken advantage of fighting in Gaza to pursue revanchist objectives in Europe. The 1956 Suez War, a war fought as much in Gaza as in Sinai, gave the Soviet Politburo an opportunity to crush the Hungarian rising.
The result was a defeat for the West and the worst crisis in Anglo-American relations of the 20th century. Soviet tanks occupied Hungary, thousands of dissidents were arrested, and hundreds were executed. Meanwhile, President Dwight D. Eisenhower insisted on a ceasefire in Egypt. British, French, and Israeli forces, which had been sweeping across the Sinai peninsula with little resistance, were ordered to halt.
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Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt’s strongman, became the anti-colonialist hero of the hour. He had nationalized the Suez Canal and then, or so it seemed to the world, defeated a coalition of imperialists and Zionists. Pro-Western governments were toppled across the region, as strains of Nasserism, Arab Socialism, and Baathism became ascendant. Ike, later in life, came to see his intervention as the single worst decision of his presidency.
France and Britain drew radically different lessons from the Suez debacle. The French concluded that the United States could not be trusted and determined to lead a European bloc. The EEC was founded the next year.
The British concluded that there had been a catastrophic breakdown in communications and that the success of the West depended on London and Washington never again drifting apart. The American alliance has been the foundation of British foreign policy ever since. The U.K. sent troops into Afghanistan and Iraq, not because it had been attacked, but because it saw the abomination of 9/11 as an assault on the Anglosphere as a whole.
All of which raises an awkward question, a question that has so far been little discussed in London. What if former President Donald Trump wins in November and reverses the assumptions on which British policy has rested these past seven decades? What if, for the first time, the leader of the free world turns out not to care about freedom?
We all know Trump by now. We know of his admiration for dictators and autocrats. We have heard his warm praise for Vladimir Putin. We saw how he behaved when he lost the 2020 election. We hear him using the rhetoric of every would-be tyrant: “For those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution. I am your retribution!”
The U.S.-U.K. relationship can survive unfriendly presidents. President Barack Obama had written a bestselling book about how dreadful the British Empire was. President Joe Biden has, in old age, taken up a form of aggressive Irish nationalism that almost no one in Ireland recognizes anymore. Yet neither seriously questioned the alliance between the two chief English-speaking democracies.
Trump is different. The problem is not that he is anti-British. Far from it. He describes himself as half-Scottish and was far more proactive in offering the U.K. a post-European Union trade deal than either his predecessor or his successor. No, the problem is that he does not seem to care about the world order that the Atlantic alliance exists to defend.
European critics occasionally portray British foreign policy as unconditional subordination to the U.S. Some British leftists make the same criticism. But British geostrategy is not driven by admiration for Duck Dynasty or Dunkin’. Rather, it rests on shared values. British and American leaders tend to react to similar challenges in similar ways because that is what their institutions have taught them. They are, for example, readier than most to stand up to authoritarian bullies to deploy force in defense of liberty.
What if that stops being true? What if Trump does not simply withdraw support from Ukraine but pulls out of NATO? Where would this leave Britain (and Canada and Australia), the military procurement, training, intelligence, and diplomacy of which are all built around the assumption of a U.S.-led Western alliance? Trump would revolutionize British foreign policy every bit as much as American. Can we be certain that the relationship between the two nations would endure?
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Britain and the U.S. have not come close to a conflict since 1896, over, oddly enough, the ridiculous Venezuela-Guyana border dispute that the Maduro dictatorship has decided to inflame again. The 128 years since have been the best our species have known, not least because the two Anglophone powers ensured that liberal capitalism triumphed over various authoritarian alternatives, including fascism, communism, and Islamic fundamentalism.
What will happen if the alliance sunders? If Suez, rather than being the bleak exception, becomes the norm? I suspect many of the people now decrying the Anglosphere hegemony will weep for it when it has passed.