As Queen Victoria's first Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, put it, “what all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the d….d fools said would happen has come to pass”.
Donald Trump has ended the order that has existed since 1945, and many of those looking on are in the position of Wile E. Coyote, when he has run beyond the cliff edge and suddenly realizes that gravity must take its course. The world has changed but refuses to notice.
When Donald Trump says “Make America Great Again”, it is what he means. He does not care about shouldering global responsibility, and he has reminded the British, among others, that America has alliances for its benefit, not friends.
This should be no surprise. The absurd hand-wringing sentimentality about the ‘special relationship’ has always been overdone. In both world wars, the American machine made enormous profits from the participants, especially the British.
F.D. Roosevelt made sure that we paid all that we could, both in gold and in the ending of our empire. Churchill managed the relationship with consummate skill, but was always the suppliant, while Roosevelt used American public opinion to squeeze the British lemon dry.
Even the sainted Ronald Reagan did not instinctively support the UK against Argentina over the Falklands in 1982, and invaded a country of which the Queen was head of state, Grenada, without so much as a by your leave. We were useful to the US during the war on terror, but that was us supporting them, not the other way round.
America has always, and rightly, put its own interests first, and for 80 years thought that the post-war order benefited it. It was instrumental in the development and funding of international bodies, including the United Nations and its subsidiary, the World Health Organisation.
In the Cold War, NATO was extremely important to the US. The old Soviet Union was a proselytising nation, it wanted to spread communism around the world by subversion or force. Its tentacles spread out even into the Americas, Cuba being the most famous example, and this was seen as a threat to the US. Keeping the USSR in check in Europe made it less likely to be able to advance in the Americas.
It is easily forgotten that Italy and France both flirted with communism, and America took the view that stopping this was to its own benefit and self-interest. Equally, the other NATO members took their own security seriously, recognizing a need to share the burden.
However, the peace dividend from 1989 onwards was spent on welfare and idleness. Now European forces, including the British, are etiolated, and only America has the ability to provide any guarantees, which it no longer wishes to pay for, and Trump has never wanted to fund, as a remarkable open letter to the American people from the 1980s revealed.
Listen to this episode with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Letters from an Englishman by Jacob Rees-Mogg to listen to this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.
