So long to the ‘special relationship’ – Trump and Vance will be disastrous for Britain

Donald Trump’s decision to pick his critic-turned-champion JD Vance as his vice-presidential nominee should raise alarm bells in Westminster. With values and objectives now at odds, the special relationship faces a rocky future, writes Sean O’Grady

Donald Trump, with his ear bandaged after the recent assassination attempt, stands with his vice-presidential pick JD Vance (AP)

In times such as these it’s difficult to remain an optimist. The assassination attempt on Donald Trump should remind us just how unstable America has become in recent years.

After all that happened during his first administration and during the January 6 insurrection, the fact that Trump appears to be on his way to an almost biblical resurrection should trouble anyone who still believes America is a beacon of freedom and democracy.

The US, via Nato, is the one essential guarantor of European security, which – for the avoidance of doubt – very much includes the UK. And we know that Trump has no great ideological commitment to Nato – for him, it’s pure transaction and a question of money. Trump is a natural isolationist, someone who sees no reason why the US should get involved in Europe’s wars, either directly or in wasting taxpayers’ dollars on them.

For the junior partner in the transatlantic special relationship, things look especially bleak with the prospective return of Trump, and now, the emergence of his future vice-president, JD Vance.

Vance is one of the hardest anti-Ukraine hardliners, and, even more than Trump, would cut a deal with Vladimir Putin in the morning to end what Vance believes is an unwinnable war.

Nor, sadly, is Vance a great fan of contemporary Britain. At the recent National Conservatism Conference in Washington, a free-for-all for rightist extremism, Vance openly declared: “I have to beat up on the UK – just one additional thing. I was talking with a friend recently and we were talking about, you know, one of the big dangers in the world, of course, is nuclear proliferation, though, of course, the Biden administration doesn’t care about it. And I was talking about, you know, what is the first truly Islamist country that will get a nuclear weapon, and we were like, maybe it’s Iran, you know, maybe Pakistan already kind of counts, and then we sort of finally decided maybe it’s actually the UK, since Labour just took over.”

No wonder Labour politicians and British diplomats have been working so hard to ingratiate themselves with what may well be, in a matter of months, the new American government, an eventuality many didn’t think they’d have to deal with – because they thought neither they nor Trump would get back into power so quickly.

In particular, David Lammy, the foreign secretary, has to live down some particularly intemperate words spoken about Trump – words that have been quite widely quoted in the aftermath of the attempt on Trump’s life. When he was shadow foreign secretary in 2018, under Jeremy Corbyn, Lammy declared: “Trump is not only a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathising sociopath. He is also a profound threat to the international order that has been the foundation of Western progress for so long … It is because I cherish and champion those values that this Friday, I will march with London against Donald Trump.”

Well, Lammy was right then and right now, but he will at some point, maybe as a side order at some great state banquet, have to eat those words with the most grace and elegance he can muster.

His inconvenient anti-Trump sentiments may have been behind the election campaign gossip about him not being appointed the actual foreign secretary by Keir Starmer, but he’s obviously survived. Indeed, it is said that he has made strenuous efforts to get on side with JD Vance, even going so far as to have praised Vance’s 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy. Starmer also did the right thing in making a call to Trump after the shooting, the kind of gesture that he will appreciate. If Trump does get back into the White House, he may expect an early invitation to a full state visit to the UK – the very thing Lammy marched against in protest when Trump turned up to meet the Queen and Theresa May six years ago. Times change.

Certainly, Hillbilly Lammy and Starmer are going to have their work cut out, and the reason is that Britain’s interests are now divergent from those of a Trump-led America. Of course, it doesn’t help that the likes of Suella Braverman are going around telling their Republican allies – including Trump and Vance – that Britain is some sort of woke, socialist, globalist, crime-ridden hellhole falling under Islamist control.

But the even bigger problem is that Trump and Vance are opposed to virtually everything the UK wants and needs from the special relationship. We need a free trade deal with the US; Trump is committed to a blanket 10 per cent protectionist tariff – and wouldn’t give us a deal even when Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage really needed it to show Brexit was a success.

Britain wants to win the war against Putin in Ukraine; Trump isn’t interested and Vance thinks defeat is inevitable. Nato and the Atlantic Alliance has been the foundation for British national security since 1949; for the Trumpists it’s just rich Europeans taking America for a ride. Lammy and Starmer want a two-state solution and to stop the killing in Gaza; the last Trump administration and any future one will be defiantly pro-Benjamin Netanyahu, not just pro-Israel. Trump’s foreign policy obsession is China, not Russia.

So it is depressing. The only hope is that the ambitious and highly pragmatic Vance (who once compared Trump to Adolf Hitler) will change his views when in full possession of the facts and the intelligence briefings. The Damascene conversion of the Republican House speaker Mike Johnson to the Ukrainian cause after such exposure to the reality of Russian intentions is one encouraging precedent – though Trump himself seems so infatuated with Putin as to be beyond persuasion.

Maybe – at some point – some atrocity or breach of faith will eventually force Trump and Vance to reassess their relationship with their Atlantic allies, just as America had to eventually abandon isolationism in 1917 and 1941. If not, then no amount of smooth personal diplomacy, goodwill visits and lavish royal hospitality will be enough to save the special relationship from going through another of its rockier patches. Meanwhile, Buckingham Palace should be getting the silver plate polished for them hillbillies.