On his visit to the US, King Charles III spoke in glowing terms about America’s “landmark anniversary year”. The mood was celebratory all around, which I find baffling.
In 1776, 250 years ago, the American colonies declared their independence from the Crown, thereby depriving the British Empire of its most valuable possession. The loss no longer rankles – let bygones be bygones and all that. But there is something incongruous about the head of the British Commonwealth feeling upbeat about that anniversary.
That’s like the President of France congratulating our PM on 18 June, the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo.
Or Erdogan inviting the Polish president to join him in celebrating 12 September, the day in 1683 when the Polish king Jan Sobieski thrashed the Turks at Vienna to stop Muslim expansion into Europe (which modern European governments are trying to renew).
Or – geographically closer to His Majesty’s present location – a US president waving the Union Jack on 24 August. On that day in 1814 British soldiers burned the White House, the Capitol, the War and State Department, and the Treasury Building.
I understand the demands of diplomatic protocol, but hailing the anniversary of Britain’s defeat is going a bit too far. Come to think of it, one could say the same about the whole royal visit.
Starmer and his merry men are using the king as a parley sent out to negotiate Britain’s surrender terms… sorry, I mean to patch up the special relationship. Please, Mr President, don’t help Argentina to invade the Falklands. Please don’t remove your nuclear umbrella under which Britain feels so comfortable because her own is leaking. Please don’t slap any new tariffs on us.
That special relationship is more or less a fiction. The two countries did find themselves on the same side in the two World Wars, but during the ‘40s one could be justified in thinking that the special relationship the US enjoyed was with the Soviet Union, not the United Kingdom.
The massive Lend-Lease assistance that enabled Stalin to win the war was offered free of charge, out of the goodness of FDR’s heart. Well into the ‘60s, one could still see war-time American jeeps rolling all over the Russian countryside and watch Dakotas crisscrossing the sky.
By contrast, even though Britain fought the Nazis on her own until Pearl Harbor, she had to pay for FDR’s generosity in cash, or rather gold. The country’s gold reserves were totally depleted, but even that wasn’t enough.
On 7 December, 1940, Churchill wrote to Roosevelt, pleading that the brutally unsentimental terms on which American aid was being proffered would consign Britain to a position in which “after the victory was won with our blood and sweat, and civilisation saved, and the time gained for the United States to be fully armed against all eventualities, we should stand stripped to the bone. Such a course would not be in the moral or economic interests of either of our countries.”
Roosevelt acknowledged receipt and promptly collected Britain’s last £50 million in gold – in part repayment. It was only in 2007 that Britain finally finished paying off her wartime debts to the US. Some special relationship.
Reagan and Thatcher did in fact enjoy a cordial bond. However, when in 1982 the Royal Navy set sail for the South Atlantic to repel Argentina’s invasion of the Falklands, Reagan initially refused to offer any assistance, not even with intelligence data. It was only when Defence Secretary Caspar Weinberger went out on a limb and provided such information on his own initiative that Reagan remembered that the relationship was supposed to be special.
Now we are on the subject of the Falklands, the other day Trump threatened to assist Argentina’s repeat performance by way of punishing Britain’s refusal to fight in Iran. That threat alone ought to have sufficed to cancel the royal visit – as a belated attempt to teach the Donald to think before speaking.
At the moment, US foreign policy is based on Trump’s personal feelings about his foreign counterparts. They are all expected to offer their labiogluteal tributes to Trump’s epic vanity, and whoever does so most avidly pushes his country to the front of the supplicant queue.
Since Milei seems to like Trump for real, he is conspicuously better at that oscular activity than Starmer, who plays along only under duress. Hence Trump is ready to join forces with Britain’s enemy, which is what Argentina was in 1982 and can become again.
If there is anything special Trump and many other Americans see in Britain, it’s her monarchy. Political affinity is only a small part of it: not only is Britain a republican monarchy, but the US is a monarchic republic. The president enjoys more executive power than a British prime minister – and infinitely more than any British monarch since the century before the American Revolution.
But the principal attraction of our royalty to Trump and many other Americans is cultural, akin to Rome feeling the cultural magnetism of Greece. Royal weddings, coronations and other displays of ceremonial pomp draw record TV audiences in the US, probably because they appeal to a latent longing for whatever it was Britain used to stand for.
Trump clearly fancies himself as an absolute monarch, and one can just see him trying on an ermine stole and a glittering crown, one hopes only in his mind. The royal visit is Starmer’s cynical attempt to get back on Trump’s good side by exploiting such sentiments.
I doubt this will work. Once that touring Ye Olde England show departs, it will be business as usual: deal or no deal. Many Americans may genuinely like Britain, but few American presidents ever do, and Trump less than most.
King Charles can talk about “reconciliation and renewal” all he wants, but he won’t make a dent in Trump’s essentially anti-British, and generally anti-European, policy. “They need us more than we need them,” Trump keeps saying, which isn’t just crass but also wrong.
America can’t maintain her global status, the sine qua non of MAGA aspirations, without her European allies, especially Britain. The lonely life of an hermetic autarky may keep America reasonably wealthy, but not ‘great’ as Trump and other imperial politicians have always understood the term.
The loss of physical European presence will mean the loss of global influence, reducing the US to strictly a regional status. This may not be such a bad thing in the abstract, but it’s unacceptable within the concrete realities of America’s whole history.
By playing to the MAGA galleries, Trump goes against these realities, and our royalty shouldn’t pander to such exploits. I’m sure King Charles knows this, but he isn’t acting as a free agent. He is there to bolster Starmer’s forlorn hopes of keeping his job, which is a lowly task for Charles the Third, by the Grace of God King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
P.S. Mulling over the possibility of Angie Rayner at 10 Downing Street, I miss Starmer already. I’ll take Marxism Lite over Full Strength any day.
P.P.S. All military experts say Britain wouldn’t be able to defend the Falklands should Argentina invade again, with Trump’s blessing.
I agree: anything even remotely resembling the South Atlantic Operation is clearly beyond us. But that doesn’t mean we have no other options. One such would be to the threat of hitting Buenos Aires with a nuclear ICBM. That sort of thing is known to work as a deterrent.